Freud - Complete Works (282 page)

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1603

   Thus suggestion is not certain as
a matter of course of defeating the illness as soon as hypnosis
(even deep hypnosis) has been achieved. A further battle has to be
fought, and its outcome is very often uncertain. A single hypnotic
treatment will accordingly effect nothing against severe
disturbances of mental origin. If, however, hypnosis is repeated,
it loses some of the miraculous effect which the patient may
perhaps have anticipated. A succession of hypnoses may eventually
bring about by degrees the influence over the illness which was
lacking at first, till in the end a satisfactory result is
achieved. But a hypnotic treatment such as this may be just as
tedious and wearisome as a treatment of any other kind.

   There is yet another way in which
the relative weakness of suggestion is betrayed as compared with
the illnesses it has to combat. It is true that suggestion can
bring about a cessation of the symptoms of an illness - but only
for a short time. At the end of this time they return and have to
be repelled once again by renewed hypnosis and suggestion. If this
course of events is repeated often enough, it usually exhausts the
patience both of the patient and the physician and ends in the
abandonment of hypnotic treatment. These, too, are the cases in
which the patient becomes dependent on the physician and a kind of
addiction to hypnosis is established.

Psychical (Or Mental) Treatment

1604

   It is a good thing for patients
to be aware of these weaknesses in hypnotic therapy and of the
possibilities of disappointment in its use. The curative power of
hypnotic suggestion is something real and it needs no exaggerated
recommendation. On the other hand, it is not surprising that
physicians, to whom hypnotic mental treatment promised so much more
than it could give, are indefatigable in their search for other
procedures, which would make possible a deeper, or at least a less
unpredictable, influence on a patient’s mind. It may safely
be anticipated that systematic modern mental treatment, which is a
quite recent revival of ancient therapeutic methods, will provide
physicians with far more powerful weapons for the fight against
illness. A deeper insight into the processes of mental life, the
beginnings of which are based precisely on hypnotic experience,
will point out the ways and means to this end.

1605

PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTERS ON THE STAGE

(1942 [1905 or 1906])

1606

Intentionally left blank

1607

PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTERS ON THE STAGE

If, as has been assumed since the time of
Aristotle, the purpose of drama is to arouse ‘terror and
pity’ and so ‘to purge the emotions’, we can
describe that purpose in rather more detail by saying that it is a
question of opening up sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our
emotional life, just as, in the case of intellectual activity,
joking or fun open up similar sources, many of which that activity
had made inaccessible. In this connection the prime factor is
unquestionably the process of getting rid of one’s own
emotions by ‘blowing off steam’; and the consequent
enjoyment corresponds on the one hand to the relief produced by a
thorough discharge and on the other hand, no doubt, to an
accompanying sexual excitation; for the latter, as we may suppose,
appears as a by-product whenever an affect is aroused, and gives
people the sense, which they so much desire, of a raising of the
potential of their psychical state. Being present as an interested
spectator at a spectacle or play does for adults what play does for
children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-up
people do are in that way gratified. The spectator is a person who
experiences too little, who feels that he is a ‘poor wretch
to whom nothing of importance can happen’, who has long been
obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in
his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel and to
act and to arrange things according to his desires - in short, to
be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by
allowing him
to identify himself
with a hero. They spare him
something, too. For the spectator knows quite well that actual
heroic conduct such as this would be impossible for him without
pains and sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out
the enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that he has only
one
life
and that he might perhaps perish even in a
single
such
struggle against adversity. Accordingly, his enjoyment is based on
an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the
certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is
acting and suffering on the stage, and, secondly, that after all it
is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal
security. In these circumstances he can allow himself to enjoy
being a ‘great man’, to give way without a qualm to
such suppressed impulses as a craving for freedom in religious,
political, social and sexual matters, and to ‘blow off
steam’ in every direction in the various grand scenes that
form part of the life represented on the stage.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1608

   Several other forms of creative
writing, however, are equally subject to these same preconditions
for enjoyment. Lyric poetry serves the purpose, more than anything,
of giving vent to intense feelings of many sorts - just as was at
one time the case with dancing. Epic poetry aims chiefly at making
it possible to feel the enjoyment of a great heroic character in
his hour of triumph. But drama seeks to explore emotional
possibilities more deeply and to give an enjoyable shape even to
forebodings of misfortune; for this reason it depicts the hero in
his struggles, or rather (with masochistic satisfaction) in defeat.
This relation to suffering and misfortune might be taken as
characteristic of drama, whether, as happens in serious plays, it
is only
concern
that is aroused, and afterwards allayed, or
whether, as happens in tragedies, the suffering is actually
realized. The fact that drama originated out of sacrificial rites
(cf. the goat and the scapegoat) in the cult of the gods cannot be
unrelated to this meaning of drama. It appeases, as it were, a
rising rebellion against the divine regulation of the universe,
which is responsible for the existence of suffering. Heroes are
first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine;
and pleasure is derived, as it seems, from the affliction of a
weaker being in the face of divine might - a pleasure due to
masochistic satisfaction as well as to direct enjoyment of a
character whose greatness is insisted upon in spite of everything.
Here we have a mood like that of Prometheus, but alloyed with a
paltry readiness to let oneself be soothed for the moment by a
temporary satisfaction.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1609

   Suffering of every kind is thus
the subject-matter of drama, and from this suffering it promises to
give the audience pleasure. Thus we arrive at a first precondition
of this form of art: that it should not cause suffering to the
audience, that it should know how to compensate, by means of the
possible satisfactions involved, for the sympathetic suffering
which is aroused. (Modern writers have particularly often failed to
obey this rule.) But the suffering represented is soon restricted
to
mental
suffering; for no one wants
physical
suffering who knows how quickly all mental enjoyment is brought to
an end by the changes in somatic feeling that physical suffering
brings about. If we are sick we have one wish only: to be well
again and to be quit of our present state. We call for the doctor
and medicine, and for the removal of the inhibition on the play of
phantasy which has pampered us into deriving enjoyment even from
our own sufferings. If a spectator puts himself in the place of
someone who is physically ill he finds himself without any capacity
for enjoyment or psychical activity. Consequently a person who is
physically ill can only figure on the stage as a piece of stage
property and not as a hero, unless, indeed, some peculiar physical
aspects of his illness make psychical activity possible - such, for
instance, as the sick man’s forlorn state in the
Philoctetes
or the hopelessness of the sufferers in the
class of plays that centre round consumptives.

   People are acquainted with mental
suffering principally in connection with the circumstances in which
it is acquired; accordingly, dramas dealing with it require some
event out of which the illness shall arise and they open with an
exposition of this event. It is only an apparent exception that
some plays, such as the
Ajax
and the
Philoctetes
,
introduce the mental illness as already fully established; for in
Greek tragedies, owing to the familiarity of the material, the
curtain rises, as one might say, in the middle of the play. It is
easy to give an exhaustive account of the preconditions governing
an event of the kind that is here in question. It must be an event
involving conflict and it must include an effort of will together
with resistance. This precondition found its first and grandest
fulfilment in a struggle against divinity. I have already said that
a tragedy of this kind is one of rebellion, in which the dramatist
and the audience take the side of the rebel. The less belief there
comes to be in divinity, the more important becomes the
human
regulation of affairs; and it is this which, with
increasing insight, comes to be held responsible for suffering.
Thus the hero’s next struggle is against human society, and
here we have the class of
social
tragedies. Yet another
fulfilment of the necessary precondition is to be found in a
struggle between individual men. Such are tragedies of
character
, which exhibit all the excitement of an
‘
agon
’, and which are best played out between
outstanding characters who have freed themselves from the bond of
human institutions - which, in fact, must have
two
heroes.
Fusions between these two last classes, with a hero struggling
against institutions embodied in powerful characters, are of course
admissible without question. Pure tragedies of character lack the
rebellious source of enjoyment, but this emerges once again no less
forcibly in social dramas (in Ibsen for instance) than it did in
the historical plays of the Greek classical tragedians.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1610

   Thus
religious
drama,
social
drama and drama of
character
differ
essentially in the terrain on which the action that leads to the
suffering is fought out. And we can now follow the course of drama
on to yet another terrain, where it becomes
psychological
drama. Here the struggle that causes the suffering is fought out in
the hero’s mind itself - a struggle between different
impulses, and one which must have its end in the extinction, not of
the hero, but of one of his impulses; it must end, that is to say,
in a renunciation. Combinations of any kind between this
precondition and the earlier types are, of course, possible; thus
institutions, for instance, can themselves be the cause of internal
conflicts. And this is where we have tragedies of love; for the
suppression of love by social culture, by human conventions, or the
struggle between ‘love and duty’, which is so familiar
to us in opera, are the starting-point of almost endless varieties
of situations of conflict: just as endless, in fact, as the erotic
day-dreams of men.

   But the series of possibilities
grows wider; and psychological drama turns into psychopathological
drama when the source of the suffering in which we take part and
from which we are meant to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict
between two almost equally conscious impulses but between a
conscious impulse and a repressed one. Here the precondition of
enjoyment is that the spectator should himself be a neurotic, for
it is only such people who can derive pleasure instead of simple
aversion from the revelation and the more or less conscious
recognition of a repressed impulse. In anyone who is
not
neurotic this recognition will meet only with aversion and will
call up a readiness to repeat the act of repression which has
earlier been successfully brought to bear on the impulse: for in
such people a single expenditure of repression has been enough to
hold the repressed impulse completely in check. But in neurotics
the repression is on the brink of failing; it is unstable and needs
a constant renewal of expenditure, and this expenditure is spared
if recognition of the impulse is brought about. Thus it is only in
neurotics that a struggle can occur of a kind which can be made the
subject of a drama; but even in them the dramatist will provoke not
merely an
enjoyment
of the liberation but a
resistance
to it as well.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1611

   The first of these modern dramas
is
Hamlet
. It has as its subject the way in which a man who
has so far been normal becomes neurotic owing to the peculiar
nature of the task by which he is faced, a man, that is, in whom an
impulse that has hitherto been successfully suppressed endeavours
to make its way into action.
Hamlet
is distinguished by
three characteristics which seem important in connection with our
present discussion. (1) The hero is not psychopathic, but only
becomes
psychopathic in the course of the action of the
play. (2) The repressed impulse is one of those which are similarly
repressed in all of us, and the repression of which is part and
parcel of the foundations of our personal evolution. It is this
repression which is shaken up by the situation in the play. As a
result of these two characteristics it is easy for us to recognize
ourselves in the hero: we are susceptible to the same conflict as
he is, since ‘a person who does not lose his reason under
certain conditions can have no reason to lose’. (3) It
appears as a necessary precondition of this form of art that the
impulse that is struggling into consciousness, however clearly it
is recognizable, is never given a definite name; so that in the
spectator too the process is carried through with his attention
averted, and he is in the grip of his emotions instead of taking
stock of what is happening. A certain amount of resistance is no
doubt saved in this way, just as, in an analytic treatment, we find
derivatives of the repressed material reaching consciousness, owing
to a lower resistance, while the repressed material itself is
unable to do so. After all, the conflict in
Hamlet
is so
effectively concealed that it was left to me to unearth it.

Psychopathic Characters On The Stage

1612

   It may be in consequence of
disregarding these three preconditions that so many other
psychopathic characters are as unserviceable on the stage as they
are in real life. For the victim of a neurosis is someone into
whose conflict we can gain no insight if we first meet it in a
fully established state. But,
per contra
, if we recognize
the conflict, we forget that he is a sick man, just as, if he
himself recognizes it, he ceases to be ill. It would seem to be the
dramatist’s business to induce the same illness in
us
;
and this can best be achieved if we are made to follow the
development of the illness along with the sufferer. This will be
especially necessary where the repression does not already exist in
us but has first to be set up; and this represents a step further
than
Hamlet
in the use of neurosis on the stage. If we are
faced by an unfamiliar and fully established neurosis, we shall be
inclined to send for the doctor (just as we do in real life) and
pronounce the character inadmissible to the stage.