Beyond the Pleasure Principle (12 page)

A condition consequent upon severe mechanical shock, train crashes, and other life-threatening accidents has long since been identified and described – a condition that has come to be known as ‘traumatic neurosis’. The terrible war that has only just ended
⁷
gave rise to a great many such disorders, and did at least put an end to the temptation to attribute them to organic impairment of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force.
⁸
The clinical picture presented by traumatic neurosis is not unlike that of hysteria in its plethora of similar motor symptoms, but generally goes well beyond it in the very marked signs of subjective suffering that it displays – not unlike those in hypochondria or melancholia – and in the clear evidence it affords of a far more comprehensive and generalized enfeeblement and attrition of the individual's psychic capabilities. As yet, no one has managed to attain to a full understanding of either the neuroses of war or the traumatic neuroses of peacetime. In the case of the war neuroses, it seemed on the one hand illuminating, yet simultaneously baffling, that the selfsame clinical picture occasionally arose
without
the involvement of any raw mechanical force. In the case of ordinary traumatic neurosis, two features stand out very clearly, and have proved a useful starting point for further thought: first, the fact that the key causative element appeared to lie in the surprise factor, the
fright
experienced by the victim; and second, the fact that if any physical wound or injury was suffered at the same time, this generally inhibited the development of the neurosis. The words ‘fright’, ‘dread’ and ‘fear’ are wrongly used as interchangeable synonyms, for they can be easily differentiated from each other in their relationship to danger.
⁹
‘Fear’ represents
a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, and preparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the danger may well be unknown. ‘Dread’ requires a specific object of which we are afraid. ‘Fright’, however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender a traumatic neurosis; there is an element within fear that protects us against fright, and hence also against fright-induced neurosis. We shall return to this proposition later on.

The study of dreams may be regarded as the most reliable approach route for those seeking to understand the deep-level processes of the psyche. Now it is a distinctive feature of the dream-life of patients with traumatic neurosis that it repeatedly takes them back to the situation of their original misadventure, from which they awake with a renewed sense of fright. People have shown far too little surprise at this phenomenon. The fact that the traumatic experience repeatedly forces itself on the patient even during sleep is assumed to be proof indeed of just how deep an impression it made. The patient is assumed to be, so to speak, psychically fixated
¹⁰
on the trauma. Such fixations on the experience that first triggered the illness have long been familiar to us in the context of hysteria. Breuer and Freud expressed the view in 1893 that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. In the case of war neuroses, too, observers such as Ferenczi and Simmel have been able to explain various motor symptoms as arising from a fixation on the moment of trauma.

On the other hand, however, I am not aware that those suffering from traumatic neurosis are very much preoccupied in their
waking
life with memories of their misadventure. Perhaps, rather, they are at pains
not
to think of it. To take it for granted that night-time dreams automatically thrust them back into the situation that provoked their illness would be to misunderstand the nature of dreams. It would be rather more in the nature of dreams to conjure up pictures from the time when the patient was healthy, or else pictures of the return to health that is hoped for in the future. If the dreams
of those with accident-induced neurosis are not to make us start doubting the wish-fulfilling tendency of dreams in general, then we might have recourse to the explanation that in this disorder the dream-function, like so much else, is thrown into disarray and distracted from its proper purposes; or we might have to turn our minds to the mysterious
masochistic
tendencies of the ego.
¹¹

I should now like to suggest that we leave the dark and dismal topic of traumatic neurosis and study the workings of the psychic apparatus by reference to one of its earliest forms of
normal
activity. I mean the play of children.

The various theories of children's play have only recently been collated and psychoanalytically evaluated by S[igmund] Pfeifer in
Imago
(vol. V, no. 4), and I would refer readers to this paper. These theories seek to divine the motive forces behind children's play, but they do so without paying sufficient attention to the
economic
perspective: the concern of the individual to gain pleasure. Without wishing to embrace the whole gamut of these phenomena, I took advantage of an opportunity that happened to present itself to me in order to elucidate a game played by a one-and-a-half-year-old boy, the first that he had ever invented for himself. It was more than a fleeting observation, as I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for several weeks, and it was quite some time before the puzzling and constantly repeated behaviour of the child yielded up its meaning to me.

The child was by no means precocious in his intellectual development; at one and a half he spoke only a few intelligible words, and in addition had a small repertoire of expressive sounds comprehensible to those around him. But he had a good rapport with his parents and the family's one maid, and was praised for being a ‘good boy’. He didn't disturb his parents during the night; he conscientiously heeded injunctions not to touch certain things and not to enter certain rooms; above all, he never cried when his mother left him for hours at a time, even though he was fondly attached to her, she having not only fed him herself, but also cared for him and looked after him without any outside help. However, this good little boy
had the sometimes irritating habit of flinging all the small objects he could get hold of far away from himself into a remote corner of the room, under a bed, etc., so that gathering up his toys was often no easy task. While doing this he beamed with an expression of interest and gratification, and uttered a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’ sound, which in the unanimous opinion of both his mother and myself as observer was not simply an exclamation but stood for
fort
(‘gone’). I eventually realized that this was probably a game, and that the child was using all his toys for the sole purpose of playing ‘gone’ with them. Then one day I made an observation that confirmed my interpretation. The child had a wooden reel with some string tied around it. It never crossed his mind to drag it along the floor behind him, for instance, in other words to play toy cars with it; instead, keeping hold of the string, he very skilfully threw the reel over the edge of his curtained cot so that it disappeared inside, all the while making his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’ sound, then used the string to pull the reel out of the cot again, but this time greeting its reappearance with a joyful
Da!
(‘Here!’). That, then, was the entire game – disappearing and coming back – only the first act of which one normally got to see; and this first act was tirelessly repeated on its own, even though the greater pleasure undoubtedly attached to the second.
¹²

The interpretation of the game readily presented itself. It was associated with the child's immense cultural achievement in successfully abnegating his drives (that is, abnegating the gratification thereof) by allowing his mother to go away without his making a great fuss. He compensated for it, so to speak, by
himself
re-enacting this same disappearance–reappearance scenario with whatever objects fell to hand. So far as the affective evaluation of this game is concerned, it is of course immaterial whether the child invented it himself or adopted it in response to a cue from someone else. What interests us is a different point altogether. The going away of the mother cannot possibly have been pleasant for the child, nor even a matter of indifference. How then does his repetition of this painful experience in his play fit in with the pleasure principle? One might wish to reply that the mother's departure would need to be reenacted in the game as the precondition of her happy return, and
that this latter event was its real purpose. Such a view would be contradicted by the evident fact that Act One, the departure, was played as a game all on its own, indeed vastly more often than the full performance with its happy conclusion.

The analysis of a single case such as this cannot resolve the issue with any certainty; but the impression gained by an unprejudiced observer is that the child had a different motive in turning the experience into a game. The experience affected him, but his own role in it was passive, and he therefore gave himself an active one by repeating it as a game, even though it had been unpleasurable. This endeavour could be attributed to an instinctive urge to assert control that operates quite independently of whether or not the memory as such was pleasurable. But we can also try another interpretation. The act of flinging away the object to make it ‘gone’ may be the gratification of an impulse on the child's part – which in the ordinary way of things remains suppressed – to take revenge on his mother for having gone away from him; and it may thus be a defiant statement meaning ‘Alright, go away! I don't need you; I'm sending you away myself!’ This same child whose game I had observed when he was one and a half had the habit a year later of flinging down any toy that had made him cross and saying ‘Go in war!’ At the time he had been told that his absent father was away in the war, and he didn't miss his father in the least, instead giving out the clearest indications that he did not want his exclusive possession of his mother to be disrupted.
¹³
We know from other children, too, that they are capable of expressing similar hostile impulses by flinging away objects in place of people.
¹⁴
One accordingly begins to have one's doubts as to whether the urge to psychically process powerful experiences, to achieve full control over them, is capable of manifesting itself on a primary level, independently of the pleasure principle. After all, in the case discussed here the child may well only have been able to repeat an unpleasant experience in his play because the repetition was associated with a different but direct gain in pleasure.

Even if we proceed further with our examination of children's play, this does not resolve our uncertainty as to which of the two
postulates to adopt. It is plainly the case that children repeat everything in their play that has made a powerful impression on them, and that in so doing they abreact the intensity of the experience and make themselves so to speak master of the situation. On the other hand, however, it is equally clear that all their play is influenced by the one wish that is dominant at that particular age: the wish to be grown up, and to be able to do the things that grown-ups do. It is also an observable fact that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always render it unusable for play purposes. If a doctor examines a child's throat or performs some minor operation on him, we can be quite sure that this frightening experience will become the content of his next game – but the gain in pleasure from a different source is plain to see. Exchanging his passive role in the actual experience for an active role within the game, he inflicts on his playmate whatever nasty things were inflicted on him, and thus takes his revenge by proxy.

One thing that
does
emerge from this discussion is that there is no need to posit a specific imitative drive as the motive force behind children's play. We might also bear in mind that the form of play and imitation practised by adults, which in contradistinction to that of children is directed at an audience, does not spare its spectators the most painful of experiences, for instance in the performance of tragedies, and yet may none the less be regarded by them as something supremely enjoyable. This encourages us in the conviction that even under the dominion of the pleasure principle there are ways and means enough for turning what is essentially unpleasurable into something to be remembered and to be processed in the psyche. Some economically oriented aesthetic theory may wish to concern itself with these cases and situations where unpleasure leads ultimately to a gain in pleasure; for our particular purposes, however, they are of no value at all, for they presuppose both the existence and the dominion of the pleasure principle, and offer no evidence for the prevalence of tendencies
beyond
the pleasure principle; tendencies, that is, that are arguably more primal than the pleasure principle, and quite independent of it.

Twenty-five years of intensive work have meant that the immediate aims of psychoanalytic practice are completely different today from what they were at the beginning. At first, the analysing physician could hope to do no more than construe the unconscious of which the patient himself was quite unaware, put the various elements together into a coherent picture, and communicate this to the patient at the appropriate time. Psychoanalysis was above all an art of interpretation. As the therapeutic need was not met by this process, the next task that immediately arose was to compel the patient to confirm the analyst's interpretation on the basis of his own memory. In this enterprise the emphasis lay chiefly on the patient's resistances. The art at this juncture was to uncover these resistances as rapidly as possible, make them clear to the patient, and then induce him to relinquish them by bringing one's influence to bear on a directly human level (this being the point where suggestion
¹⁵
plays its part, operating in the form of ‘transference’).