Freud - Complete Works (343 page)

   These seem to be the most
important of the typical sexual theories that children produce
spontaneously in early childhood, under the sole influence of the
components of the sexual instinct. I know that I have not succeeded
in making my material complete or in establishing an unbroken
connection between it and the rest of infantile life. But I may add
one or two supplementary observations, whose absence would
otherwise be noticed by any well-informed person. Thus, for
instance, there is the significant theory that a baby is got by a
kiss - a theory which obviously betrays the predominance of the
erotogenic zone of the mouth. In my experience this theory is
exclusively feminine and is sometimes found to be pathogenic in
girls whose sexual researches have been subjected to exceedingly
strong inhibitions in childhood. Again, through an accidental
observation, one of my women patients happened upon the theory of
the ‘couvade’, which, as is well known, is a general
custom among some races and is probably intended to contradict the
doubts as to paternity which can never be entirely overcome. A
rather eccentric uncle of this patient’s stayed at home for
days after the birth of his child and received visitors in his
dressing-gown, from which she concluded that both parents took part
in the birth of their children and had to go to bed.

  
¹
The games that are most significant for
subsequent neuroses are playing at ‘doctor’ and at
‘father and mother’.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1977

   In about their tenth or eleventh
year, children get to hear about sexual matters. A child who has
grown up in a comparatively uninhibited social atmosphere, or who
has found better opportunities for observation, tells other
children what he knows, because this makes him feel mature and
superior. What children learn in this way is mostly correct - that
is, the existence of the vagina and its purpose is revealed to
them; but otherwise the explanations they get from one another are
not infrequently mixed with false ideas and burdened with remains
of the older infantile sexual theories. They are scarcely ever
complete or sufficient to solve the primordial problem. Just as
formerly it was ignorance of the vagina which prevented the whole
process from being understood, so now is it ignorance of the semen.
The child cannot guess that another substance besides urine is
excreted from the male sexual organ, and occasionally an
‘innocent’ girl on her wedding night is still indignant
at her husband ‘urinating into her’. This information
acquired in the years of pre-puberty is followed by a new access of
sexual researches by the child. But the theories which he now
produces no longer have the typical and original stamp which was
characteristic of the primary theories of early childhood as long
as the infantile sexual components could find expression in
theories in an uninhibited and unmodified fashion. The
child’s later intellectual efforts at solving the puzzles of
sex have not seemed to me worth collecting, nor can they have much
claim to a pathogenic significance. Their multiplicity is of course
mainly dependent on the nature of the enlightenment which a child
receives; but their significance consists rather in the fact that
they re-awaken the traces, which have since become unconscious, of
his first period of sexual interest; so that it is not infrequent
for masturbatory sexual activity and some degree of emotional
detachment from his parents to be linked up with them. Hence the
condemnatory judgement of teachers that enlightenment of such a
kind at this age ‘corrupts’ children.

On The Sexual Theories Of Children

1978

   Let me give a few examples to
show what elements often enter into these late speculations by
children about sexual life. A girl had heard from her schoolmates
that the husband gives his wife an egg, which she hatches out in
her body. A boy, who had also heard of the egg, identified it with
the testicle, which [in German] is vulgarly called by the same word
[
Ei
]; and he racked his brains to make out how the contents
of the scrotum could be constantly renewed. The information given
seldom goes far enough to prevent important uncertainties about
sexual events. Thus a girl may arrive at an expectation that
intercourse occurs on one occasion only, but that it lasts a very
long time - twenty-four hours - and that all the successive babies
come from this single occasion. One would suppose that this child
had got her knowledge of the reproductive process from certain
insects; but it turned out that this was not so and that the theory
emerged as a spontaneous creation. Other girls are ignorant of the
period of gestation, the life in the womb, and assume that the baby
appears immediately after the first night of intercourse. Marcel
Prevost has turned this girlhood mistake into an amusing story in
one of his ‘
Lettres de femmes
’. These later
sexual researches of children, or of adolescents who have been
retarded at the stage of childhood, offer an almost inexhaustible
theme and one which is perhaps not uninteresting in general; 
but it is more remote from my present interest. I must only lay
stress on the fact that in this field children produce many
incorrect ideas in order to contradict older and better knowledge
which has become unconscious and is repressed.

   The way in which children react
to the information they are given also has its significance. In
some, sexual repression has gone so far that they will not listen
to anything; and these succeed in remaining ignorant even in later
life -
apparently
ignorant, at least - until, in the
psycho-analysis of neurotics, the knowledge that originated in
early childhood comes to light. I also know of two boys between ten
and thirteen years old who, though it is true that they listened to
the sexual information, rejected it with the words: ‘
Your
father and other people may do something like that, but
I know for certain
my
father never would.’ But however
widely children’s later reactions to the satisfaction of
their sexual curiosity may vary, we may assume that in the first
years of childhood their attitude was absolutely uniform, and we
may feel certain that at that time all of them tried most eagerly
to discover what it was that their parents did with each other so
as to produce babies.

1979

SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON HYSTERICAL ATTACKS

(1909)

1980

Intentionally left blank

1981

SOME GENERAL REMARKS ON HYSTERICAL ATTACKS

A

When one carries out the psycho-analysis of a
hysterical woman patient whose complaint is manifested in attacks,
one soon becomes convinced that these attacks are nothing else but
phantasies translated into the motor sphere, projected on to
motility and portrayed in pantomime. It is true that the phantasies
are unconscious; but apart from this they are of the same nature as
the phantasies which can be observed directly in day-dreams or
which can be elicited by interpretation from dreams at night. Often
a dream takes the place of an attack, and still more often it
explains it, since the same phantasy finds a different expression
in a dream and in an attack. We might expect then that by observing
an attack we should be able to get to know the phantasy represented
in it; but this is seldom possible. As a rule, owing to the
influence of the censorship, the pantomimic portrayal of the
phantasy has undergone distortions which are completely analogous
to the hallucinatory distortions of a dream, so that both of them
have, in the first resort, become unintelligible to the
subject’s own consciousness as well as to the
observer’s comprehension. A hysterical attack, therefore,
needs to be subjected to the same interpretative revision as we
employ for night-dreams. But not only are the forces from which the
distortion proceeds and the purpose of the distortion the same as
those we have come to know through the interpretation of dreams;
the technique employed in the distortion is the same too.

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks

1982

   (1) The attack becomes
unintelligible through the fact that it represents several
phantasies in the same material simultaneously - that is to say
through
condensation
. The elements common to the two (or
more) phantasies constitute the nucleus of the representation, as
they do in dreams. The phantasies which are thus made to coincide
are often of quite a different nature. They may, for instance,
be a recent wish and the re-activation of an infantile
impression. The same innervations are in that case made to serve
both purposes, often in a most ingenious way. Hysterical patients
who make a very extensive use of condensation may find a single
form of attack sufficient; others express their numerous pathogenic
phantasies by a multiplication of the forms of attack.

   (2) The attack becomes obscured
through the fact that the patient attempts to carry out the
activities of both the figures who appear in the phantasy, that is
to say, through
multiple identification
. Compare, for
instance, the example I mentioned in my paper on ‘Hysterical
Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908
a
),
in which the patient tore off her dress with one hand (as the man)
while she pressed it to her body with the other (as the woman).

   (3) A particularly extensive
distortion is effected by an
antagonistic inversion of the
innervations
. This is analogous to the transformation of an
element into its opposite, which commonly happens in the
dream-work. For instance, an embrace may be represented in the
attack by drawing back the arms convulsively till the hands meet
over the spinal column. It is possible that the well-known
arc
de cercle
which occurs during attacks in major hysteria is
nothing else than an energetic repudiation like this, through
antagonistic innervation, of a posture of the body that is suitable
for sexual intercourse.

   (4) Scarcely less confusing and
misleading is a
reversal of the chronological order
within
the phantasy that is portrayed, which once more has its complete
counterpart in a number of dreams which begin with the end of the
action and end with its beginning. Supposing, for instance, that a
hysterical woman has a phantasy of seduction in which she is
sitting reading in a park with her skirt slightly lifted so that
her foot is visible; a gentleman approaches and speaks to her; they
then go somewhere and make love to one another. This phantasy is
acted out in the attack by her beginning with the convulsive stage,
which corresponds to the coitus, by her then getting up, going into
another room, sitting down and reading and presently answering an
imaginary remark addressed to her.

   The two last-mentioned forms of
distortion give us some idea of the intensity of the resistances
which the repressed material must take into account even when it
breaks through in a hysterical attack.

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks

1983

B

   The onset of hysterical attacks
follows laws that are easily understandable. Since the repressed
complex consists of a libidinal cathexis and an ideational content
(the phantasy), the attack can be evoked (1)
associatively
,
when the content of the complex (if sufficiently cathected) is
touched on by something connected with it in conscious life; (2)
organically
, when, for internal somatic reasons and as a
result of psychical influences from outside, the libidinal cathexis
rises above a certain degree; (3) in the service of the
primary
purpose
- as an expression of a ‘flight into
illness’, when reality becomes distressing or frightening -
that is, as a
consolation
; (4) in the service of the
secondary purposes
, with which the illness allies itself, as
soon as, by producing an attack, the patient can achieve an aim
that is useful to him. In the last case the attack is directed at
particular individuals; it can be put off till they are present,
and it gives an impression of being consciously simulated.

C

   Investigation of the childhood
history of hysterical patients shows that the hysterical attack is
designed to take the place of an
auto-erotic
satisfaction
previously practised and since given up. In a great number of cases
this satisfaction (masturbation by contact or by pressure of the
thighs, or, again, by movements of the tongue, and so on) recurs
during the attack itself, while the subject’s consciousness
is deflected. Moreover, the onset of an attack that is due to an
increase of libido and is in the service of the primary purpose -
as a consolation - exactly repeats the conditions under which, at
the earlier time, the patient had intentionally sought this
auto-erotic satisfaction. The anamnesis of the patient shows the
following stages: (
a
) auto-erotic satisfaction, without
ideational content; (
b
) the same satisfaction, connected
with a phantasy which leads to the act of satisfaction; (
c
)
renunciation of the act, with retention of the phantasy; (
d
)
repression of the phantasy, which then comes into effect as a
hysterical attack, either in an unchanged form, or in a modified
one and adapted to new environmental impressions. Furthermore,
(
e
) the phantasy may even reinstate the act of satisfaction
belonging to it which had ostensibly been given up. This is a
typical cycle of infantile sexual activity: repression, failure of
repression, and return of the repressed.

Some General Remarks On Hysterical Attacks

1984

   The involuntary passing of urine
is certainly not to be regarded as incompatible with the diagnosis
of a hysterical attack; it is merely repeating the infantile form
of a violent pollution. Moreover, biting the tongue may also be met
with in undoubted cases of hysteria. It is no more inconsistent
with hysteria than it is with love-making. It occurs more readily
in attacks if the patient’s attention had been drawn by the
doctor’s questions to the difficulties of making a
differential diagnosis. Self-injury may occur in hysterical attacks
(more frequently in the case of men) where it repeats an accident
in childhood - as, for instance, the result of a romp.

   The loss of consciousness, the
‘
absence
’¹, in a hysterical attack is
derived from the fleeting but unmistakable lapse of consciousness
which is observable at the climax of every intense sexual
satisfaction, including auto-erotic ones. This course of
development can be traced with most certainty where hysterical
absences
arise from the onset of pollutions in young people
of the female sex. The so-called ‘hypnoid states’ -
absences
during day-dreaming -, which are so common in
hysterical subjects, show the same origin. The mechanism of these
absences
is comparatively simple. All the subject’s
attention is concentrated to begin with on the course of the
process of satisfaction; with the occurrence of the satisfaction,
the whole of this cathexis of attention is suddenly removed, so
that there ensues a momentary void in her consciousness. This gap
in consciousness, which might be termed a
physiological
one,
is then widened in the service of repression, till it can swallow
up everything that the repressing agency rejects.

D

   What points the way for the motor
discharge of the repressed libido in a hysterical attack is the
reflex mechanism of the act of coition - a mechanism which is ready
to hand in everybody, including women, and which we see coming into
manifest operation when an unrestrained surrender is made to sexual
activity. Already in ancient times coition was described as a
‘minor epilepsy’. We might alter this and say that a
convulsive hysterical attack is an equivalent of coition. The
analogy with an epileptic fit helps us little, since its genesis is
even less understood than that of hysterical attacks.

   Speaking as a whole, hysterical
attacks, like hysteria in general, revive a piece of sexual
activity in women which existed during their childhood and at that
time revealed an essentially masculine character. It can often be
observed that girls who have shown a boyish nature and inclinations
up to the years before puberty are precisely those who become
hysterical from puberty onwards. In a whole number of cases the
hysterical neurosis merely represents an excessive accentuation of
the typical wave of repression which, by doing away with her
masculine sexuality, allows the woman to emerge.²

  
¹
[The French term.]

  
²
Cf. my
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
(1905
d
).