Understandably my suspicions fell first on the English governess, whose presence in the house had coincided with the change in the boy. He had retained two cover-memories relating to her, which in themselves were incomprehensible. Once, as she was walking ahead of them, she said to the children following behind: ‘Look at my little tail!’ On another occasion her hat blew away when they were out on a trip, to the great satisfaction of brother and sister. These pointed towards the castration complex and might allow us to reconstruct, say, a threat made by her against the boy, contributing significantly to the development of abnormal behaviour. It is not in the least dangerous to put such reconstructions [Konstruktionen] to the analysand: they do no harm to the analysis if they are erroneous and in any case one does not give voice to them if there is not some prospect of coming closer to the truth in the process. The immediate effect of putting forward these ideas was the appearance of dreams that it was not possible to interpret completely but which always seemed to play around with the same content. The subject of the dreams, as far as one could tell, was aggressive action on the boy’s part towards his sister or the governess, which resulted in energetic rebuke and punishment. As if he had tried…after a bath…to expose his sister’s nakedness…to tear off layers of clothing…or her veil…and the like. It was not possible, however, to arrive by means of interpretation at any definite content, and, once we had formed the impression that the same material was being processed in these dreams in ever-changing ways, it was clear how we were to understand what were apparently involuntary memories [Reminiszenzen]. It could only be a question of fantasies that the dreamer had once entertained about his childhood, probably during puberty, and which had now emerged again in a form so difficult to recognize.
We learnt what they meant in one fell swoop when the patient suddenly recalled the fact that his sister had seduced him ‘when he was still very little, when they were living on the first estate’ into sexual pursuits. First came the memory that on the lavatory, which the children often used together, she had issued the invitation: ‘Shall we show each other our bottoms?’ and had then suited the action to the word. Later we arrived at the more essential elements of the seduction and all the accompanying details of time and locality. It was in the spring, at a time when the father was away from home; the children were playing on the floor in one room while their mother was working in the next room. His sister had reached for his penis and played with it, saying incomprehensible things about Nanja all the while, as if by way of explanation. She said that Nanja did this all the time with everyone, the gardener, for example, she would turn him upside down and then take hold of his genitals.
This made it possible to understand the fantasies we had guessed at earlier. They were intended to erase the memory of an event which later offended the patient’s sense of masculine pride, achieving this goal by replacing historical truth with its wished-for opposite. According to these fantasies he had not taken the passive role towards his sister, but on the contrary had been aggressive, had wanted to see his sister without her clothes on, had been rejected and punished, and had thus fallen into the rage recounted so insistently by domestic tradition. It was also expedient to weave the governess into this story, since his mother and his grandmother attributed most of the blame to her, after all, for his bouts of rage. His fantasies thus corresponded exactly to the creation of sagas, by means of which a nation which later becomes great and proud seeks to conceal the insignificance and misadventure of its origins.
In reality the governess could have played only the most remote part in the seduction and its consequences. The scenes with his sister took place in the spring of that same year in which the English governess arrived to take the parents’ place during the midsummer months. The boy’s hostility to the governess in fact came about in a different way. By calumniating the children’s nurse and saying she was a witch the governess was following in his sister’s footsteps, since it was she who had first told him those dreadful things about their nurse, and this gave him the opportunity to express the repugnance that, as we shall learn, he had come to feel for his sister after she had seduced him.
That his sister had seduced him was certainly no fantasy, however. Its credibility was strengthened by a piece of information he received in later, more mature years and had never forgotten. In a conversation about his sister, a cousin, more than a decade older, had told him that he could remember very well what a forward, sensual little thing she had been. As a child of four or five she had once sat down on his lap and unfastened his trousers to take hold of his penis.
I shall interrupt the story of my patient’s childhood for a moment in order to speak of this sister, her development, her subsequent fate and the influence she had over him. She was two years older and always ahead of him. Boisterous and tomboyish as a child, she underwent a dazzling intellectual development distinguished by an acute and realistic understanding; she favoured the natural sciences as an avenue of study yet at the same time produced poems of which their father had a very high opinion. She was intellectually far superior to her numerous early suitors and used to make fun of them. In her early twenties, however, she grew morose, complained that she was not pretty enough and withdrew from all social contact. Sent away on a tour in the company of an older lady, a friend of the family, she told the most improbable stories on her return of how her companion had ill-treated her, yet her inward attention remained obviously fixed on the woman who had allegedly tormented her. On a second journey, which took place soon afterwards, she poisoned herself and died a long way from home. Her state of mind probably corresponded to the onset of dementia praecox. Her case was among those testifying to a considerable inherited tendency to neuropathic affliction in the family, but it was by no means the only one. An uncle on the father’s side, who lived for many years as an eccentric, died with every indication of having suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive neurosis; among the more distant relatives a considerable number have been and are afflicted by more minor nervous disorders.
In childhood our patient saw his sister – leaving aside for a moment the matter of the seduction – as an uncomfortable rival for their parents’ approval and found the superiority that she so ruthlessly demonstrated highly oppressive. He particularly envied her the respect that their father demonstrated for her mental capabilities and her intellectual achievements, while he, inhibited intellectually since the episode of obsessive-compulsive neurosis, had to accept being held in lesser regard. From the age of thirteen onwards his relationship with his sister began to improve; similar intellectual aptitudes and shared opposition to their parents brought them so close that they were on the best and friendliest of terms. In the turbulent sexual agitation of puberty he ventured to approach her with a view to physical intimacy. When she rejected him with as much determination as skill he immediately turned from her to a young peasant girl, a servant in the house who bore the same name as his sister. In doing so he took a decisive step as far as his choice of heterosexual object was concerned, for all the girls he later fell in love with, often with the clearest signs of compulsion, were also servant girls, whose education and intelligence necessarily lagged far behind his own. We cannot deny that if all these objects of his love were substitutes for the sister who had refused him, then a tendency to demean his sister, to neutralize the intellectual superiority which had once so oppressed him, played a crucial part in his choice of object.
Alfred Adler subordinates everything, including the individual’s sexual attitudes, to motives of this kind, arising from the will to power and the drive to assert oneself [Behauptungstrieb]. Without for a moment wishing to deny the validity of such motives of power and prerogative, I have never been convinced that they are able to support the dominant, exclusive role he attributes to them. If I had not seen the analysis of my patient through to the end, my observation of this case would have obliged me to modify my prejudice in the direction of Adler’s theories. The concluding stages of the analysis provided unexpected new material, however, from which it became evident that these power motives (in this case, the tendency to demean) had only governed the patient’s choice of object in the sense that they had contributed to it, rationalized it, while the real, more profoundly determining element allowed me to hold fast to my earlier convictions.1
When news of his sister’s death reached him, our patient told me that he felt barely a trace of pain. He forced himself into an outward show of mourning and was able coolly to rejoice in the fact that he was now the sole heir to the family fortunes. He had already been suffering from his more recent illness for some years when this occurred. I must admit, however, that this one statement made me hesitate in my diagnostic judgement of the case for some considerable time. True, it was to be supposed that his pain at the loss of the most beloved member of his family would be inhibited in its expression by continued jealousy towards her and the intrusion of his now unconsciously felt incestuous love, but I needed to find some kind of substitute for the outburst of pain that had failed to take place. I eventually found one in another expression of strong feeling, which had remained incomprehensible to him. A few months after his sister’s death he had himself made a journey to the region where she had died; there he sought out the grave of a great poet whom at that time he idealized, and shed hot tears over the grave. He himself was perplexed by his reaction, for he knew that more than two generations had passed since the death of the poet he so admired. He understood what had happened only when he remembered that their father used to compare his dead sister’s poems to those of the great poet. An error in his narrative had given me another indication as to the true meaning of this homage apparently paid to the poet, which I was able to draw his attention to at this point. He had repeatedly told me earlier that his sister had shot herself and then been obliged to correct himself, since she had taken poison. The poet, however, had been shot, in a duel.
I shall now take up the brother’s story again, and for a while I must describe what actually took place. It turned out that at the time when his sister set about seducing him the boy was 31⁄4 years old. It happened, as I have said, in the spring of that same year in which his parents found him so radically changed on their return home in the autumn. It seems obvious, then, to assume that there was some connection between this transformation and the awakening of sexual activity that had taken place in the intervening period.
How did the boy react to his older sister’s enticements? The answer is that he rejected her, but he rejected the person, not the thing. His sister was not acceptable to him as a sexual object, probably because rivalry for their parents’ love had already determined his relationship with her as a hostile one. He avoided her and her advances soon ceased. In her place, however, he sought to win for himself another, more beloved person, and the things his sister herself had said, invoking Nanja as her model, guided his choice towards Nanja. He thus began to play with his penis in front of Nanja, something that must be taken, as in so many other cases where children do not conceal masturbation, as an attempt at seduction. Nanja disappointed him, telling him with a serious expression that that was a naughty thing to do. Children who did that would get a ‘wound’ there.
We can trace the effect of this remark, which was to all intents and purposes a threat, in various directions. His attachment to Nanja became less strong. He could have been angry with her; later, when the tantrums began, it became clear that she had indeed enraged him. Yet it was characteristic of him that initially he would stubbornly defend against anything new, whatever libido position he was having to give up. When the governess took the stage and insulted Nanja, driving her out of the room and trying to destroy her authority, he in fact exaggerated his love for the person under threat and behaved negatively and defiantly towards the attacking governess. Nevertheless he began secretly to look for another sexual object. The seduction had given him the passive sexual objective of having his genitals touched; we shall learn in due course the person with whom he hoped to achieve this and the paths that led to his choice.
It is entirely in accordance with our expectations to learn that his sexual inquiries began with his first experiences of genital arousal and that he soon came up against the problem of castration. At this time he had the opportunity to watch two girls urinate, his sister and her friend. He was bright enough to have been able to grasp the true state of affairs from this alone but instead behaved in the same way as we know other male children to behave. He rejected the idea that he was seeing confirmation here of the wound with which Nanja had threatened him, and explained it to himself as the girls’ ‘front bottom’. This decision did not mark the end of the subject of castration, however; he found new indications of it in everything he heard. Once, when sticks of barley sugar were handed out to the children, the governess, who was inclined to lurid fantasies, declared that they were chopped-up pieces of snake. This caused him to remember that his father had once come upon a snake when out for a walk and had chopped it into pieces with his walking-stick. He had been told the story (from Reineke Fuchs [Reynard the Fox]) where the wolf tried to catch fish in winter and used his tail as bait, whereupon his tail froze in the ice and broke off. He learnt the different names used for horses depending on the intactness of their sex. He was thus preoccupied with the thought of castration without believing in it or being frightened by it. Other problems relating to sexuality were posed by the fairytales with which he became acquainted at this time. In ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Seven Little Kids’ children were pulled out of the body of the wolf. Was the wolf female, then, or could men also carry children in their bodies? At this time he had not yet decided on the answer to that question. He had no fear of wolves as yet, incidentally, at the time of these investigations.
One remark made by our patient will clear the way to an understanding of the change in character that manifested itself during his parents’ absence and that was distantly connected with his sister’s seduction. He relates that soon after Nanja had rejected and threatened him he gave up masturbation. The sexual life directed by the genital zone, which was beginning to stir, had succumbed to external inhibition, and this influence had flung it back into an earlier phase of pre-genital organization. As a result of the suppression of masturbation, the boy’s sexual life became anal-sadistic in character. He became irritable and took pleasure in tormenting animals and people, using this to achieve satisfaction. The principal object of torment was his beloved Nanja, whom he knew how to torture until she burst into tears. In this way he took his revenge for the rejection he had received at her hands, and at the same time satisfied his sexual desires in a form corresponding to this regressive phase. He started to be cruel to tiny creatures, catching flies so that he could pull off their wings, stamping on beetles; in his imagination he also enjoyed beating large animals, horses. These were entirely active, sadistic pursuits; we shall hear something of his anal impulses during this period in another context.
It is valuable to learn that fantasies of a quite different kind, contemporaneous with these, also surfaced in the patient’s memory, the content of which was that boys were being punished and beaten, beaten in particular on the penis; and we can easily guess for whom these anonymous objects served as whipping-boys by looking at other fantasies, which took the form of the heir-apparent being locked in a narrow room and beaten. He himself was obviously the heir-apparent; in his imagination his sadism was turned against himself, veering into masochism. The detail of the sexual organ itself taking its punishment allows us to conclude that a sense of guilt, directed at his masturbation, was already at work in this transformation.
In analysis there could be no doubt that these passive aspirations [Strebungen] emerged at the same time as, or very soon after, the active, sadistic ones.2 This is in keeping with an uncommonly distinct, intense and persistent ambivalence on the part of the patient, expressing itself here for the first time in the symmetrical development of contradictory pairs of partial drives. This behaviour was in future to remain as characteristic of him as the further trait that none of the libido positions which he achieved was ever in fact fully superseded by a later one. Each would exist alongside all the others, allowing him to vacillate unceasingly in a way that proved incompatible with the acquisition of a fixed character.
The boy’s masochistic tendencies bring us to another point, which I have not mentioned up until now because it can only be firmly established through analysis of the subsequent phase of development. I have already mentioned the fact that, after Nanja rejected him, he broke away from her and focused his libidinal expectations on a different sexual object. This person was his father, then absent from home. He was guided towards this choice, no doubt, by the coincidence of various factors, including chance ones such as his memory of the dismembered snake; above all, however, he was renewing his first, original choice of object, which had been made, in accordance with the narcissism of the small child, by way of identification. We have already heard that his father had been a much-admired example to him, and that when asked what he wanted to be he used to answer: ‘A gentleman like my father.’ The object of identification in his active current [Strömung] now became the sexual object of a passive current in the anal-sadistic phase. We gain the impression that his sister’s seduction of him had forced him into a passive role and given him a passive sexual objective. Under the continuing influence of this experience, he followed a path from sister to Nanja to father, from the passive attitude towards a woman to the same towards a man, and yet in doing so he was able to connect up with an earlier, spontaneous stage of development. The father was once again his object, identification having been succeeded by object-choice, as is appropriate at a higher stage of development; transformation of an active attitude into a passive one was both outcome and sign of the seduction that had taken place in the intervening period. Taking an active attitude towards the excessively powerful figure of the father during the sadistic phase would of course have been much less feasible. On his father’s return, in late summer or autumn, his tantrums and furious scenes were put to a different use. They had served an active, sadistic purpose towards Nanja; now, towards his father, their purpose was masochistic. By parading his difficult behaviour he wanted to compel his father to punish and beat him and in this way gain from him the masochistic sexual satisfaction he desired. His screaming fits were nothing other than attempts at seduction. In accordance with the motivation behind masochism, he would also have found satisfaction for his sense of guilt in being punished. One memory had stored up a recollection for him of how, during one such exhibition of difficult behaviour, his screaming gets louder as soon as his father comes in; yet his father does not beat him but attempts to calm him down by throwing the cushions from the bed up in the air and catching them again.
I do not know how many times, in the face of a child’s inexplicable naughtiness, parents and mentors would have occasion to recall this typical connection. The child who is behaving so wildly makes a confession, intending to provoke punishment. In being punished the child is seeking both the appeasement of its sense of guilt and the satisfaction of its masochistic sexual aspirations.
We owe the further clarification of this case to a memory, which came to the patient with great certainty, that the symptoms of anxiety had only joined the other signs of character change once a certain incident had occurred. Before then there had been no anxiety; immediately after this occurrence he found himself tormented by anxiety. We can state with certainty that the point at which this transformation took place was just before his fourth birthday. Thanks to this clue, the period of childhood with which we are particularly concerned can be divided into two phases, a first phase of difficult behaviour and perversity which lasted from his seduction at the age of 31⁄4 until his fourth birthday, and a longer, subsequent phase dominated by the signs of neurosis. The incident that permits us to draw the dividing line was no external trauma, however, but a dream, from which he awoke beset with anxiety.
1. See below, p. 292.
2. By passive aspirations I mean those with a passive sexual objective, but what I have in mind is not a transformation of the drives but a transformation of their objective.