Freud - Complete Works (371 page)

  
¹
It must therefore be admitted that in an
obsessional neurosis there are two kinds of knowledge, and it is
just as reasonable to hold that the patient ‘knows’ his
traumas as that he does
not
‘know’ them. For he
knows them in that he has not forgotten them, and he does not know
them in that he is unaware of their significance. It is often the
same in ordinary life. The waiters who used to serve Schopenhauer
at his regular restaurant ‘knew’ him in a certain
sense, at a time when, apart from that, he was not known either in
Frankfurt or outside it; but they did not ‘know’ him in
the sense in which we speak to-day of ‘knowing’
Schopenhauer.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2155

   For this reason it not uncommonly
happens that obsessional neurotics, who are troubled with
self-reproaches but have connected their affects with the wrong
causes, will also tell the physician the true causes, without any
suspicion that their self-reproaches have simply become detached
from them. In relating such an incident they will sometimes add
with astonishment or even with an air of pride: ‘But I think
nothing of that.’ This happened in the first case of
obsessional neurosis which gave me an insight many years ago into
the nature of the malady. The patient, who was a government
official, was troubled by innumerable scruples. He was the man
whose compulsive act in connection with the branch in the park at
Schönbrunn I have already described. I was struck by the fact
that the florin notes with which he paid his consultation fees were
invariably clean and smooth. (This was before we had a silver
coinage in Austria.) I once remarked to him that one could always
tell a government official by the brand-new florins that he drew
from the State treasury, and he then informed me that his florins
were by no means new, but that he had them ironed out at home. It
was a matter of conscience with him, he explained, not to hand any
one dirty paper florins; for they harboured all sorts of dangerous
bacteria and might do some harm to the recipient. At that time I
already had a vague suspicion of the connection between neuroses
and sexual life, so on another occasion I ventured to ask the
patient how he stood in regard to that matter. ‘Oh,
that’s quite all right,’ he answered airily,
‘I’m not at all badly off in that respect. I play the
part of a dear old uncle in a number of respectable families, and
now and then I make use of my position to invite some young girl to
go out with me for a day’s excursion in the country. Then I
arrange that we shall miss the train home and be obliged to spend
the night out of town. I always engage two rooms - I do things most
handsomely; but when the girl has gone to bed I go in to her and
masturbate her with my fingers.’ - ‘But aren’t
you afraid of doing her some harm, fiddling about in her genitals
with your dirty hand?’ - At this he flared up: ‘Harm?
Why, what harm should it do her? It hasn’t done a single one
of them any harm yet, and they’ve all of them enjoyed it.
Some of them are married now, and it hasn’t done them any
harm at all.’ - He took my remonstrance in very bad part, and
never appeared again. But I could only account for the contrast
between his fastidiousness with the paper florins and his
unscrupulousness in abusing the girls entrusted to him by supposing
that the self-reproachful affect had become
displaced
. The
aim of this displacement was obvious enough: if his self-reproaches
had been allowed to remain where they belonged he would have had to
abandon a form of sexual gratification to which he was probably
impelled by some powerful infantile determinants. The displacement
therefore ensured his deriving a considerable advantage from his
illness.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2156

   But I must now return to a more
detailed examination of the precipitating cause of our present
patient’s illness. His mother was brought up in a wealthy
family with which she was distantly connected. This family carried
on a large industrial concern. His father, at the time of his
marriage, had been taken into the business, and had thus by his
marriage made himself a fairly comfortable position. The patient
had learnt from some chaff exchanged between his parents (whose
marriage was an extremely happy one) that his father, some time
before making his mother’s acquaintance, had made advances to
a pretty but penniless girl of humble birth. So much by way of
introduction. After his father’s death the patient’s
mother told him one day that she had been discussing his future
with her rich relations, and that one of her cousins had declared
himself ready to let him marry one of his daughters when his
education was completed; a business connection with the firm would
offer him a brilliant opening in his profession. This family plan
stirred up in him a conflict as to whether he should remain
faithful to the lady he loved in spite of her poverty, or whether
he should follow in his father’s footsteps and marry the
lovely, rich, and well-connected girl who had been assigned to him.
And he resolved this conflict, which was in fact one between his
love and the persisting influence of his father’s wishes, by
falling ill; or, to put it more correctly, by falling ill he
avoided the task of resolving it in real life.¹

  
¹
It is worth emphasizing that his flight
into illness was made possible by his identifying himself with his
father. The identification enabled his affects to regress on to the
residue of his childhood.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2157

   The proof that this view was
correct lies in the fact that the chief result of his illness was
an obstinate incapacity for work, which allowed him to postpone the
completion of his education for years. But the results of such an
illness are never unintentional; what appears to be the
consequence
of the illness is in reality the
cause
or
motive
of falling ill.

   As was to be expected, the
patient did not, to begin with, accept my elucidation of the
matter. He could not imagine, he said, that the plan of marriage
could have had any such effects: it had not made the slightest
impression on him at the time. But in the further course of
treatment he was forcibly brought to believe in the truth of my
suspicion, and in a most singular manner. With the help of a
transference phantasy, he experienced, as though it were new and
belonged to the present, the very episode from the past which he
had forgotten, or which had only passed though his mind
unconsciously. There came an obscure and difficult period in the
treatment; eventually it turned out that he had once met a young
girl on the stairs in my house and had on the spot promoted her
into being my daughter. She had pleased him, and he pictured to
himself that the only reason I was so kind and incredibly patient
with him was that I wanted to have him for a son-in-law. At the
same time he raised the wealth and position of my family to a level
which agreed with the model he had in mind. But his undying love
for his lady fought against the temptation. After we had gone
though a series of the severest resistances and bitterest
vituperations on his part, he could no longer remain blind to the
overwhelming effect of the perfect analogy between the transference
phantasy and the actual state of affairs in the past. I will repeat
one of the dreams which he had at this period, so as to give an
example of his manner of treating the subject. He dreamt that
he
saw my daughter in front of him; she had two patches of dung
instead of eyes
. No one who understands the language of dreams
will find much difficulty in translating this one: it declared that
he was marrying my daughter not for her ‘beaux
yeux
’
but for her money
.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2158

(G)  THE FATHER COMPLEX AND THE
SOLUTION OF THE RAT IDEA

   From the precipitating cause of
the patient’s illness in his adult years there was a thread
leading back to his childhood. He had found himself in a situation
similar to that in which, as he knew or suspected, his father had
been before
his
marriage; and he had thus been able to
identify himself with his father. But his dead father was involved
in his recent attack in yet another way. The conflict at the root
of his illness was in essentials a struggle between the persisting
influence of his father’s wishes and his own amatory
predilections. If we take into consideration what the patient
reported in the course of the first hours of his treatment, we
shall not be able to avoid a suspicion that this struggle was a
very ancient one and had arisen as far back as in his
childhood.

   By all accounts our
patient’s father was a most excellent may. Before his
marriage he had been a non-commissioned officer, and, as relics of
that period of his life, he had retained a straightforward
soldierly manner and a
penchant
for using downright
language. Apart from those virtues which are celebrated upon every
tombstone, he was distinguished by a hearty sense of humour and a
kindly tolerance towards his fellow-men. That he could be hasty and
violent was certainly not inconsistent with his other qualities,
but was rather a necessary complement to them; but it occasionally
brought down the most severe castigations upon the children, while
they were young and naughty. When they grew up, however, he
differed from other fathers in not attempting to exalt himself into
a sacrosanct authority, but in sharing with them a knowledge of the
little failures and misfortunes of his life with good-natured
candour. His son was certainly not exaggerating when he declared
that they had lived together like the best of friends, except upon
a single point (
p. 2145
). And it must no
doubt have been in connection with that very point that thoughts
about his father’s death had occupied his mind when he was a
small boy with unusual and undue intensity (
p. 2133
), and that those thoughts made
their appearance in the wording of the obsessional ideas of his
childhood; and it can only have been in that same connection that
he was able to wish for his father’s death, in order that a
certain little girl’s sympathy might be aroused and that she
might behave more kindly towards him (
p. 2144
).

   There can be no question that
there was something in the sphere of sexuality that stood between
the father and son, and that the father had come into some sort of
opposition to the son’s prematurely developed erotic life.
Several years after his father’s death, the first time he
experienced the pleasurable sensations of copulation, an idea
sprang into his mind: ‘This is glorious! One might murder
one’s father for this!’ This was at once an echo and an
elucidation of the obsessional ideas of his childhood. Moreover,
his father, shortly before his death, had directly opposed what
later became our patient’s dominating passion. He had noticed
that his son was always in the lady’s company, and had
advised him to keep away from her, saying that it was imprudent of
him and that he would only make a fool of himself.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2159

   To this unimpeachable body of
evidence we shall be able to add fresh material, if we turn to the
history of the masturbatory side of our patient’s sexual
activities. There is a conflict between the opinions of doctors and
patients on this subject which has not hitherto been properly
appreciated. The patients are unanimous in their belief that
masturbation, by which they mean masturbation
during
puberty
, is the root and origin of all their troubles. The
doctors are, upon the whole, unable to decide what line to take;
but, influenced by the knowledge that not only neurotics but most
normal people pass through a period of masturbation during their
puberty, the majority of them are inclined to dismiss the
patients’ assertions as gross exaggerations. In my opinion
the patients are once again nearer to a correct view than the
doctors; for the patients have some glimmering notion of the truth,
while the doctors are in danger of overlooking an essential point.
The thesis propounded by the patients certainly does not correspond
to the facts in the sense in which they themselves construe it,
namely, that masturbation during puberty (which may almost be
described as a typical occurrence) is responsible for all neurotic
disturbances. Their thesis requires interpretation. The
masturbation of puberty is in fact no more than a revival of the
masturbation of infancy, a subject which has hitherto invariably
been neglected. Infantile masturbation reaches a kind of climax, as
a rule, between the ages of three and four or five; and it is the
clearest expression of a child’s sexual constitution, in
which the aetiology of subsequent neuroses must be sought. In this
disguised way, therefore, the patients are putting the blame for
their illnesses upon their infantile sexuality; and they are
perfectly right in doing so. On the other hand, the problem of
masturbation becomes insoluble if we attempt to treat it as a
clinical unit, and forget that it can represent the discharge of
every variety of sexual component and of every sort of phantasy to
which such components can give rise. The injurious effects of
masturbation are only in a very small degree autonomous - that is
to say, determined by its own nature. They are in substance merely
part and parcel of the pathogenic significance of the
subject’s sexual life as a whole. The fact that so many
people can tolerate masturbation - that is, a certain amount of it
- without injury merely shows that their sexual constitution and
the course of development of their sexual life have been such as to
allow them to exercise the sexual function within the limits of
what is culturally permissible; whereas other people, because their
sexual constitution has been less favourable or their development
has been disturbed, fall ill as a result of their sexuality - they
cannot, that is, achieve the necessary suppression or sublimation
of their sexual components without having recourse to inhibitions
or substitutes.¹