I do not know whether my readers will have succeeded in forming a clear picture of the genesis and development of my patient’s state of illness from the report of the analysis given above. Indeed, I fear that this will not be the case. However, whereas I never normally boast of my own narrative skills, on this occasion I should like to plead mitigating circumstances. To initiate the reader into a description of such early phases and such profound strata of a patient’s inner life is a problem which has never before been tackled, and it is better to solve it badly than to take to one’s heels, particularly since losing heart presents certain dangers in itself. Better, then, to make a bold show of not having been put off by consciousness of one’s own deficiencies.
The case itself was not a particularly auspicious one. The very thing that made it possible to gain such a wealth of information about the patient’s childhood, the fact that we could study the child through the medium of the adult, was bought at the price of the most dreadful fragmentation of the analysis and a corresponding incompleteness in my account of it. Aspects of personality, a national character which is alien to our own, made it difficult to empathize with him. The contrast between the patient’s charming and responsive personality, his sharp intelligence and refined way of thinking, and his complete lack of restraint at the level of the drives made it necessary to spend an excessively long time on the work of preparation and education, thus rendering any kind of overview more difficult. Though it may have posed the hardest descriptive problems, however, the patient himself cannot be held responsible for the nature of the case. In adult psychology we have happily succeeded in separating the processes of the inner life into conscious and unconscious, and describing both in clear language. As far as the child is concerned, however, this distinction almost gives way. We are often at a loss to decide what we would describe as conscious, and what unconscious. Processes that have become dominant and that, given their later behaviour, we must treat in the same way as conscious ones, were nevertheless not conscious in the child. We can easily understand why this is so: consciousness in the child has not yet developed its full range of characteristics and is not yet entirely capable of being converted into language-pictures. The way in which we are regularly guilty of confusing the phenomenon of something appearing in consciousness in the form of a perception, and something belonging to an accepted psychic system that we ought to call by some conventional name but for which we also use the term consciousness (System Cs), such confusion is harmless in the psychological description of an adult, but misleading in the case of a small child. To introduce the concept of the ‘pre-conscious’ does not help much here, for there is no reason why the child’s pre-consciousness should be congruent with the adult’s. We must therefore be content with having clearly recognized the obscurity which confronts us.
A case such as the one described here could obviously create an opportunity to embark on a discussion of all the results and problems of psychoanalysis. It would be an endless undertaking, and one quite without justification. We have to tell ourselves that we cannot discover everything, cannot decide everything on the basis of a single case and that we must be content to use it for what it can show us most clearly. The task of explanation in psychoanalysis is in any case narrowly circumscribed. What we need to explain are conspicuous symptom formations, by revealing how they have come about; what we are not to explain, only describe, are the psychic mechanisms and drive processes that we encounter in doing so. Formulation of new general statements on the basis of what we have learned about these last-named aspects requires numerous cases of this kind, analysed accurately and in depth. They are not easy to come by, for each individual case requires years of work. Thus progress in these areas will only take place very slowly. There is an obvious temptation, of course, to content oneself with ‘scratching the psychic surface’ of a number of individuals and replacing neglected effort with speculation advanced under the patronage of some philosophical school of thought or other. There are also practical necessities that can be urged in favour of such a procedure, but the necessities of scholarship cannot be satisfied by any surrogate.
I want to attempt to sketch out a synthesis, an overall view of my patient’s sexual development, beginning with the earliest indications. The first thing we hear about him is of a loss of pleasure in eating that I would interpret on the basis of other experiences, but nevertheless with circumspection, as the outcome of an occurrence in the sexual sphere. I had thus to consider the first recognizable mode of sexual organization to be the so-called cannibal or oral mode of organization, in which the scene is dominated by the original dependence of sexual excitement on the drive to eat. We cannot expect to find any direct expression of this phase, but may find some indications in the appearance of disorders. The impairment of the drive to eat – which may of course have other causes as well – draws our attention to the fact that the organism has not succeeded in controlling sexual excitement. The sexual objective in this phase could only be cannibalism, eating; in our patient’s case this comes to the fore as a result of regression from a higher level, in his fear of being gobbled up by the wolf. We had to translate this fear as that of being taken in coitus by the father. It is well known that at a much later stage, in girls going through puberty or slightly older, we encounter a neurosis that expresses the rejection of sexuality through anorexia; a connection may be drawn with the oral phase of sexuality. We encounter the erotic objective of the oral mode of organization once again at the height of paroxysms of love (‘I love you so much I could eat you’) and in affectionate contact with small children, in which the adult himself behaves in an infantile fashion. Elsewhere I have expressed the suspicion that our patient’s father himself inclined to ‘affectionate scolding’, and when playing at wolves or dogs with the little boy had threatened in jest to gobble him up (p. 230). The patient only provided confirmation of this view through his striking behaviour in the transference. Whenever he retreated from difficulties in the therapy and sought refuge in transference, he would threaten to gobble me up, and later to subject me to every possible form of ill-treatment, all of which was merely a way of expressing his affection.
His linguistic usage has been permanently coloured in certain ways by this oral phase of sexuality: he refers to ‘luscious’ love-objects, describes his beloved as ‘sweet’. We recall that as a child our patient only wanted sweet things to eat. When they occur in dreams sweeties and bonbons generally stand for caresses and sexual satisfaction.
It appears that there is also an anxiety that belongs in this phase (where there is a disorder, of course), which manifests itself in the form of generalized anxiety and may adhere to anything that is suggested to the child as appropriate. In our patient’s case it was used to teach him to overcome his reluctance to eat, to overcompensate for it, indeed. We are led to the possible source of his eating disorder when we recall – basing ourselves on the assumption we have discussed in such detail – that his observation of coitus, which was belatedly to cast so many ripples, took place at the age of 18 months, certainly before the period at which he experienced eating difficulties. We may perhaps assume that it speeded up the processes of sexual maturity, so that it also took effect directly, if inconspicuously.
I know, of course, that we can also explain the symptoms manifested during this period, his fear of the wolf, his eating disorder, in a different, more straightforward way that takes no account of sexuality or of a pre-genital stage of sexual organization. Anyone who likes to ignore the signs of neurosis and the logical connections between phenomena will prefer this other explanation, and I shall not be able to prevent him from doing so. It is difficult to find out anything compelling about these initial stages of sexuality other than by taking the roundabout routes I have indicated.
The scene with Gruscha (at the age of 21⁄2) shows our young patient embarking on a development that merits recognition as a normal one, except perhaps that it is somewhat premature: identification with the father, eroticism of the bladder as a substitute for virility. It too is very strongly influenced by the primal scene. Up until now we have interpreted the identification with the father as a narcissistic one, but bearing in mind the content of the primal scene we cannot deny that it already corresponds to the stage of genital organization. The male genitals have begun to play their part and will continue to do so under the influence of his sister’s seduction.
We gain the impression, however, that the seduction not only encourages this development but also, to a greater extent, disrupts and diverts it. It results in a passive sexual objective that is fundamentally irreconcilable with the action of the male genitals. The first external impediment, Nanja’s suggestion of castration, leads to the breakdown (at the age of 31⁄2) of the still precarious mode of genital organization, and regression to the previous stage of anal-sadistic organization, which he might perhaps otherwise have passed through with only the same slight symptoms as those found in other children.
It is easy to recognize that the anal-sadistic mode of organization is a continuation of the oral one. The violent muscular activity towards its object by which it is characterized falls into place as an act preparatory to eating, but eating is no longer present as a sexual objective. The preparatory act becomes an objective in its own right. What is new about it in comparison with the previous stage is the fact that the receptive, passive organ has now been separated off from the oral zone, and developed in the anal zone instead. Biological parallels suggest themselves, as does the interpretation of pre-genital human modes of organization as the residue of arrangements that have been permanently retained in many classes of animal. Equally characteristic of this stage is the way in which the exploratory drive constitutes itself from its component elements.
Anal eroticism is not conspicuously in evidence. Under the influence of sadism faeces have exchanged their affectionate meaning for an aggressive one. A feeling of guilt, which indicates, moreover, that developments are taking place in areas other than the sexual sphere, plays its part in the transformation of sadism into masochism.
The seduction continues to exert an influence, in that it maintains the passivity of the sexual objective. It now transforms sadism to a great extent into its passive counterpart, masochism. It is doubtful whether we can put the boy’s characteristic passivity entirely down to the seduction, for his reaction to the observation of coitus at the age of 18 months was already predominantly a passive one. The sexual excitement that he felt in observation was expressed in a bowel movement, in which we must admittedly recognize an active element. Sadism, which finds active expression in tormenting small creatures, continues to exist alongside the masochism that dominates his sexual aspirations and is expressed in his fantasies. From the time of the seduction onwards his sexual curiosity has been stirred, and is essentially directed towards two problems, namely where babies come from and whether loss of the genitals is possible; it becomes bound up with the expression of his drives. It is this that focuses his sadistic tendencies on those tiny creatures, which he sees as representing tiny children.
Our description has taken us almost up to his fourth birthday, at which point the dream causes the observation of coitus at the age of 18 months to come belatedly into effect. We can neither completely grasp nor adequately describe the processes that are now set in motion. The activation of that image, which thanks to advances in his intellectual development can now be understood, has the effect of a newly occurring event, but is also like a fresh trauma, an alien intrusion analogous to the seduction. The genital mode of organization, which had been suspended, is resumed at a stroke, but the progress made in the dream cannot be maintained. Rather, a process that can only be compared to a kind of repression causes him to reject this new knowledge and replace it with a phobia.
Thus the anal-sadistic mode of organization continues in existence, even during the animal phobia phase that now begins, but with some manifestations of anxiety mixed in. The child still pursues both sadistic and masochistic activities, while reacting fearfully against one component; the reversal of sadism into its opposite probably fares somewhat better.
We can see from the analysis of the anxiety dream that repression follows immediately after the knowledge of castration. The new knowledge is rejected because to accept it would cost the boy his penis. More careful consideration reveals something like the following: what has been repressed is the homosexual attitude in the genital sense, which had been formed under the influence of the new knowledge. This attitude remains preserved in the unconscious, however, constituted as a deeper, closed-off stratum. The driving force behind this repression appears to be the narcissistic masculinity of the genitals that comes into conflict with the passivity of the homosexual objective, a conflict for which the ground was laid long before. Repression is thus one of the outcomes of masculinity.
This might lead us into the temptation to revise one small aspect of psychoanalytic theory. It seems patently obvious, after all, that repression and the formation of neuroses proceed from the conflict between masculine and feminine aspirations, that is, from bisexuality. But such a view has its shortcomings. Of these two conflicting sexual impulses one is acceptable to the I [ichgerecht], the other offends against narcissistic interests and thus falls prey to repression. In this case, too, it is the I [Ich] who sets repression in motion in favour of one of the two sexual aspirations. In other cases, such a conflict between masculinity and femininity does not exist; there is a single sexual aspiration present, which sues for acceptance but runs counter to certain powers of the I and is therefore banished. Far more frequent than conflicts within sexuality itself are those conflicts that arise between sexuality and the moral inclinations of the I. There is an absence of moral conflict of this kind in our case. To emphasize bisexuality as the motivation for repression would be too restrictive, whereas conflict between the I and the sexual aspirations (the libido) covers all eventualities.
Against the theory of ‘masculine protest’ as developed by Adler, it must be objected that repression by no means always upholds masculinity against femininity; in many whole categories of cases it is masculinity that is obliged to accept repression by the I.
A more balanced evaluation of the process of repression in our particular case, incidentally, would challenge whether narcissistic masculinity is significant as the only motivating factor. The homosexual attitude that comes into being in the course of the dream is so powerful that the little boy’s I fails to control it and fends it off through the process of repression. To achieve this end the I enlists the help of the narcissistic masculinity of the genitals that is in opposition to the homosexual attitude. Simply in order to avoid any misunderstanding let me state that all narcissistic impulses work out from the I and remain in the I’s domain, while repression is directed towards those objects carrying a libidinal charge.
Let us now turn from the process of repression, a notion we have perhaps not succeeded in mastering entirely, to the boy’s state when he awakened from the dream. If it had indeed been masculinity that had triumphed over homosexuality (femininity) during the dream process we should now find an active sexual aspiration, already explicitly masculine in character, to be the dominant one. There is no question of this, however: the essential nature of the mode of sexual organization is unchanged, the anal-sadistic phase still continues in existence and remains dominant. The triumph of masculinity can only be seen in the fact that the boy reacts fearfully to the passive sexual objectives of the dominant mode of organization (which are masochistic, but not feminine). There is no triumphant masculine sexual impulse present, but only a passive one, and an unwillingness to accept it.
I can imagine the difficulties that this sharp distinction between the active/masculine and passive/feminine will cause the reader, a distinction that is unfamiliar but essential to our purpose, and so I shall not hesitate to repeat myself. We can describe the state of affairs after the dream, then, as follows: the patient’s sexual aspirations have been split, the genital mode of organization having been achieved in the unconscious and a highly intensive homosexuality constituted; above this (virtually at the level of consciousness) the earlier sadistic and predominantly masochistic sexual current continues to exist, while the I has altered its position, by and large, towards sexuality, anxiously rejecting the dominant masochistic objectives just as it reacted towards the deeper homosexual ones with the formation of a phobia. Thus the outcome of the dream was not so much the victory of a masculine current as reaction against a feminine, passive one. We would do violence to the facts if we ascribed masculine characteristics to this reaction. For the I does not have sexual aspirations, only an interest in self-protection and the preservation of its narcissism.
Let us now look closely at the phobia. It came into existence at the level of genital organization and demonstrates the relatively simple mechanism of an anxiety-hysteria. The I protects itself from something it judges to be excessively dangerous, that is, homosexual satisfaction, by developing anxiety. However, the process of repression leaves a trace that we cannot miss. The object to which the dreaded sexual objective has become attached must find representation in conscious thought by means of another. It is not fear of the father that comes to consciousness, but fear of the wolf. Once it has been formed, the phobia is not restricted to a single content. Some considerable time later the wolf is replaced by a lion. Sadistic impulses towards tiny creatures compete with a phobic response towards them, inasmuch as they represent the boy’s rivals, the babies whose arrival is still possible. The genesis of the butterfly phobia is particularly interesting. It is like a repetition of the mechanism that generated the wolf phobia in the dream. A chance stimulus activates an old experience, the scene with Gruscha, whose castration threat belatedly comes into effect, whereas at the time it appeared to have left no impression.1
We can say that the fear that goes into the formation of these phobias is fear of castration. This statement in no way contradicts the view that the fear arises from the repression of homosexual libido. Both modes of expression refer to the same process, in which the I withdraws libido from the homosexual wish-impulse, which is converted into free-floating anxiety and then allows itself to be bound up in phobias. It is merely that the first mode of expression also indicates the motive that drives the I to act in this way.
Looking more carefully, we then find that the random choice of a single phobia does not represent the full extent of this first episode of illness (not counting the eating disorder) in our patient, but that it must be understood as a genuine case of hysteria, comprising both anxiety symptoms and conversion phenomena. An element of the homosexual impulse is retained by the organ involved, for henceforward, and in later years too, the bowel behaves like an organ that has been hysterically affected. The unconscious, repressed homosexuality withdraws into the bowel. It was this particular bit of hysteria that served us so well when it came to resolving the patient’s later illness.
Now we should steel ourselves to tackle the still more complicated circumstances of the obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Let us examine the situation once again: a dominant masochistic sexual current and a repressed homosexual one, opposed to an I that is caught up in hysterical refusal; what processes could transform this state into one of obsessive-compulsive neurosis?
The transformation is not the spontaneous result of internal developments, but arises from an external, alien influence. Its visible outcome is that the boy’s relationship to his father, still very much to the fore, and expressed up until then through the wolf phobia, now finds expression in compulsive piety. I cannot let this opportunity pass without pointing out that the process that our patient undergoes provides unambiguous confirmation of a claim I put forward in Totem and Taboo concerning the relationship of the totemic animal to the deity.2 There I concluded that the idea of God does not develop out of the totem but arises independently from common roots to supersede it. The totem is the first father-substitute, the god a later one in which the father regains human form. We find the same thing in our patient’s case. He goes through the stage of the totemic father-substitute, as represented by the wolf phobia, which is then broken off and, after a new relationship has been forged between the boy and his father, is replaced by a phase of religious piety.
The influence behind this transformation is his acquaintance with religious doctrine and sacred history, arranged by his mother. The result is exactly the one that education aspires to. The sadomasochistic mode of sexual organization draws gradually to a close, the wolf phobia quickly disappears and in the place of his frightened rejection of sexuality we find a higher form of sexual suppression. Piety becomes the dominant power in the child’s life. These efforts of will are not achieved without a struggle, however: its signs are the appearance of blasphemous thoughts and its consequence the onset of a compulsive exaggeration of religious ritual.
Leaving aside these pathological phenomena, we can say that, in this case, religion has achieved everything it is employed to do in the education of the individual. It has curbed his sexual aspirations by offering sublimation and a safe anchor, and undermined his family relationships, thus preventing the isolation that threatens him by giving him access to the wider human community. The unruly, apprehensive child has become socially conscious, civilized and educable.
The principal driving force behind the religious influence was his identification with the figure of Christ, which readily suggested itself given the coincidence of his date of birth. The excessive love for his father that had made repression necessary could finally be channelled into an ideal sublimation. It was possible as Christ to love the father, now called God, with an intensity that he had striven in vain to vent on his own earthly father. The ways in which this love could be attested were clearly indicated by religion and no guilt adhered to them, whereas there was no way of separating guilt from the erotic aspirations of the individual. While the patient’s deepest sexual current, already laid down as unconscious homosexuality, could still be drained off in this way, his more superficial masochistic aspirations lost very little in finding a sublimation without parallel in the passion of Christ, who had allowed himself to be mistreated and sacrificed on behalf of the divine father and to his greater glory. And so religion did its work in this boy who had gone off the rails, through the mixture of satisfaction, sublimation, diversion from sensual processes to purely spiritual ones, and the opening up of social relationships which it offers the believer.
His initial reluctance to accept religion was derived from three different sources. First, it was simply his way to ward off anything new: we have already seen a number of examples of this. Once he had taken up a given libido position he would defend it every time against the new one he was to occupy, fearful of what he would lose in giving it up and mistrusting the likelihood of finding a fully satisfactory substitute. This is an important and fundamental psychological particularity, which I put forward in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as the capacity to become fixed. Referring to it as psychic ‘lassitude’, Jung sees it as the principal cause of all neurotic failure. I believe he is wrong to do so, for it is more far-reaching than this and has a significant part to play even in the lives of those untouched by neurosis. The fluidity or viscosity of libidinal energy charges, and of other types as well, is a particular characteristic found in many normal individuals and not even in all those of a neurotic disposition, and up until now no connection has been made between it and anything else, as if it were a prime number which cannot be divided any further. We know only one thing: the mobility of psychic charges is a property which dwindles noticeably with age. This provides us with one of the indicators for the limits of psychoanalytic influence. There are people, however, whose psychic plasticity is maintained far beyond the usual limits of age and others who lose it very early on. If these are neurotic individuals then we discover to our discomfort that in their case, under what are apparently the same conditions, it is impossible to reverse changes that can readily be controlled in others. In examining conversion in psychic processes we must therefore give consideration to the concept of an entropy, which is in proportional opposition to the undoing of what has already taken place.
A second target was provided by the fact that there is no single, clear relationship to God the Father underlying religious doctrine, on the contrary it is shot through with signs of the ambivalent attitude that prevailed at its inception. His own highly developed ambivalence enabled him to sniff this out and use it as a starting-point for the penetrating criticism that so astonished us in a four-year-old child. Most significant of all, however, was undoubtedly a third factor to which we may ascribe the pathological effects of his battle against religion. The current of energy pressing him towards manhood, for which religion was to provide a form of sublimation, was no longer free, as part of it had been separated off by the process of repression and thus eluded sublimation, remaining bound to its original sexual objective. On the strength of their connection the repressed part strove either to break through to the sublimated part or else to drag it down to its own level. Those first brooding thoughts circling around the person of Christ already contained the question as to whether this sublime son could also fulfil the sexual relationship to his father that the patient had retained in his unconscious. Repudiation of this endeavour resulted only in the emergence of apparently blasphemous compulsive thoughts in which physical tenderness for God continued to assert itself in a form intended to demean Him. A violent struggle [Abwehrkampf] to parry these compromise formations led inevitably to compulsive exaggeration of all those activities in which piety and the pure love of God found expression through the prescribed channels. The victory eventually fell to religion, but the way in which it was rooted in the drives proved incomparably stronger than the durability of what was produced by sublimation. As soon as life provided a new father-substitute whose influence was directed against religion, it was dropped and replaced by other things. We should also bear in mind the interesting complication that piety came about under the influence of women (mother and nurse) whereas masculine influence liberated him from it.
The fact that obsessive-compulsive neurosis came about at the anal-sadistic stage of sexual organization on the whole confirms the views presented elsewhere in ‘Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose’ [‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’] (1913). However, the pre-existence of a powerful state of hysteria makes the case more obscure in that respect. I shall conclude my survey of our patient’s sexual development by highlighting the transformations it underwent in later life. In puberty the strongly sensual male current that we refer to as normal made its appearance, its sexual objective that of the genital mode of organization, and its vicissitudes fill up the time until his later episode of illness. It was directly connected with the Gruscha scene and derived from it the character of a compulsive infatuation, coming and going like an attack; it also had to struggle with the inhibitions created by the residue of the infantile neurosis. Violent breakthrough to the female meant that he finally won his full masculinity; from now on he held fast to this sexual object, but its possession brought him little joy, for a strong and now completely unconscious inclination towards the male, the sum of all the energies generated in earlier phases, was constantly drawing him away from a female object, obliging him to exaggerate his dependence on women in the interstices. His complaint in therapy was that he could not endure being with women, and all our work was directed towards the task of uncovering his unconscious relationship to the male. We could say, in a formulaic way, that the hallmark of his childhood was vacillation between the active and the passive, that of puberty the struggle for manhood and that of the period following his illness, the fight for the object of male aspirations. The cause of his illness does not come into any of the categories of ‘neurotic illness’ that I might refer to collectively as special cases of ‘refusal’ [Versagung]3 and so draws our attention to a gap in this series. He broke down when an organic infection of the genitals re-awakened his fear of castration, damaged his narcissism and forced him to put away any expectation that Fate had a personal preference for him. The cause of his illness was thus a narcissistic ‘refusal’. His excessively strong narcissism was in complete accord with the other indications of inhibited sexual development: with the fact that his choice of heterosexuality, however energetic, was the focus for so few of his psychic aspirations, and also that the homosexual attitude, which is so much closer to narcissism, asserted its unconscious power over him with such tenacity. In the face of such disorders, psychoanalytic therapy obviously cannot bring about an instantaneous change of direction nor parity with normal development; it can only remove obstacles and clear the paths so that life’s influences can opt for better directions in which to push through the individual’s development.
Let me list those peculiarities of his psyche that were uncovered in psychoanalytic therapy but on which it was not possible to throw further light nor exert any direct influence: the tenacity with which his energies became fixed, as already discussed, the extraordinary extent to which his tendency to ambivalence had been developed, and, a third feature of what we might term an archaic constitution, his ability to maintain a wide variety of violently conflicting libidinal charges, all potentially functioning alongside one another. His constant wavering between them, which for a long time seemed to exclude the possibility of settlement and progress, dominated the profile of his later illness, which we have touched on only briefly here. There is no doubt that this was a character trait of the unconscious, carried over into processes that had become conscious; it was only apparent, however, in the results of emotional [affektiv] impulses, whereas in matters of pure logic he demonstrated particular skill in detecting contradictions and inconsistencies. The impression left by his inner life was rather like that of the ancient Egyptian religion, which is inconceivable to us because it conserves all the developmental stages alongside the end-products, keeping the oldest deities and what they signified as well as the most recent, spreading them out two-dimensionally where other developing cultures create a three-dimensional image.
This concludes what I wished to say about this case. Only two of the numerous problems to which it gives rise seem to me to deserve particular emphasis. The first concerns those phylogenetically transmitted patterns that, like philosophical ‘categories’, enable us to accommodate our impressions of life. I should like to suggest that they are the precipitates of human cultural history. The Oedipus complex, a complete account of the child’s relationship to his parents, is one example, indeed the best-known. When experiences cannot be fitted into this hereditary schema, they are reworked in the imagination, work that it would undoubtedly be profitable to examine in detail. For it is precisely these cases that are best suited to demonstrate the independent existence of the schema. We are often in a position to note how the schema takes precedence over individual experience, as for example in our case when the father becomes the castrator who threatens childhood sexuality, despite the fact that the Oedipus complex is reversed in every other respect. Another effect of this is seen when the children’s nurse takes the place of the mother or the two become merged. The way in which experience contradicts the schema supplies the conflicts of infancy with a wealth of material.
The second problem is not far removed from the first, but its significance is far greater. If we consider the way in which the four-year-old child responds to the reactivated primal scene4 – indeed, we have only to think of the far simpler reactions of the 18-month-old child to the original experience – it is difficult to dismiss the notion that some kind of knowledge that resists definition, a sort of preparation for understanding, is at work in the child.5 What this might consist in defies the imagination; the only analogy available to us is the excellent analogy with the largely instinctive knowledge found in animals.
If human beings were also in possession of instinctive knowledge of this kind, it would hardly be surprising if it were directed in particular towards the processes of sexuality, although it cannot possibly be restricted to these alone. This instinctive knowledge would form the core of the unconscious, a primitive intellectual activity later dethroned by human reason when this is acquired and overlaid by it, but often, perhaps always, retaining the strength to drag higher inner processes down to its own level. Repression would be the return to this instinctive stage; in this way man would pay for his splendid new acquisition with the capacity for neurosis, while the possibility of neurosis would testify to the existence of the earlier, preliminary stage, instinctive in nature. The significance of early childhood traumas would then lie in the fact that they supply this unconscious part of the psyche with material that prevents it from being sapped by the subsequent process of development.
I know that similar thoughts have been expressed in various quarters, emphasizing the hereditary, phylogenetically acquired factor in the individual’s inner life; indeed, I think we are all too ready to make room for them in our psychoanalytic evaluations. It seems to me that they are only admissible when psychoanalysis correctly observes the prescribed stages, and only starts looking for traces of what has been inherited once it has penetrated the layers of what has been acquired by the individual.6
(1918 [1914])
1. As I have already mentioned, the Gruscha scene was a spontaneous feat of memory on my patient’s part, to which reconstruction or suggestion on the part of the doctor made no contribution; the gaps in this memory were filled in by analysis in what we can only call an impeccable manner, if we set any store by working methods in analysis. A rationalistic explanation of this phobia could only say that there is nothing unusual in the fact that a child with a predisposition to anxiety might one day suffer an attack of anxiety even on seeing a yellow-striped butterfly, probably as a result of an inherited tendency to anxiety. (Cf. Stanley Hall, ‘A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear’, 1914). Ignorant of the cause, it might then look for a childhood event to which this fear might be connected, and then use the chance similarity of names and the recurrence of the stripes to construct the fantasy of an amorous adventure with the nursery-maid, still dimly remembered. If, however, in later life those secondary details of an occurrence that was harmless in itself, the floor-cleaning, the pail and the broom, show that they have the power to determine an individual’s object-choice, to permanent and compulsive effect, then the butterfly phobia acquires incomprehensible significance. The facts of the case become at least as remarkable as those asserted in my interpretation, and any gain made from a rationalistic interpretation of the scene simply melts away. The Gruscha scene is thus of particular value to us, since we can use it to prepare the ground for our judgement in the matter of the primal scene, where the situation is less secure.
2. Totem und Tabu [Totem and Taboo].
3. ‘Über neurotische Erkrankungstypen’ [‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’] (1912).
4. We may overlook the fact that this response could only be put into words two decades later, for all the effects which we attribute to this scene had already been expressed in childhood, and long before the analysis, in the form of symptoms, compulsions, etc. In this respect it is a matter of no importance whether we regard it as a primal scene or as a primal fantasy.
5. Once again I must emphasize that these reflections would be irrelevant if the dream and the neurosis had not themselves taken place in childhood.
6. [Addition 1923:] Here, once again, the events mentioned in this case history, in chronological order:
Born on Christmas Day.
18 months: malaria. Observes parents engaging in coitus, or intimacy between them into which he later introduced a fantasy of coitus.
Shortly before the age of 21⁄2: scene with Gruscha.
21⁄2: cover-memory of parents’ departure with sister. This shows him alone with Nanja, thus denying the presence of Gruscha and his sister.
Before the age of 31⁄4: his mother complains to the doctor.
31⁄4: beginning of his sister’s attempts to seduce him; soon after this, threat of castration by Nanja.
31⁄2: English governess, onset of character change.
4: wolf dream, origin of phobia.
41⁄2: influence of biblical history. Compulsive symptoms appear.
Shortly before the age of 5: hallucinates loss of finger.
5: the family leaves the first estate.
After the age of 6: visits sick father.
| 8 | |
Final outbreaks of obsessive-compulsive neurosis. |
| 10 |
My account makes it easy to guess that my patient was a Russian. I discharged him, believing him to be cured, a few weeks before the unexpected outbreak of the Great War and only saw him again after the vicissitudes of war had given the Central Powers access to southern Russia. He then came back to Vienna and told me that immediately after leaving treatment he had found himself endeavouring to break free from the influence of his physician. A few months of work enabled us to deal with an element of the transference that had not yet been mastered, and since then the patient, deprived by the war of his home, his fortune and all his family relations, had felt normal and conducted himself impeccably. Perhaps the very misery he felt had contributed to the stability of his recovery by providing some satisfaction for his sense of guilt.