Freud - Complete Works (372 page)

  
¹
See
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
, 1905
d
.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2160

   Our present patient’s
behaviour in the matter of masturbation was most remarkable. He did
not practise it during puberty and therefore, according to one set
of views, he might have expected to be exempt from neurosis. On the
other hand, an impulsion towards masturbatory activities came over
him in his twenty-first year,
shortly after his father’s
death
. He felt very much ashamed of himself each time he gave
way to this kind of gratification, and soon foreswore the habit.
From that time onwards it reappeared only upon rare and
extraordinary occasions. It was provoked, he told me, when he
experienced especially fine moments, or when he read especially
fine passages. It occurred once, for instance, on a lovely
summer’s afternoon when, in the middle of Vienna, he heard a
postilion blowing his horn in the most wonderful way - until a
policeman stopped him, because blowing horns is not allowed in the
centre of the town. And another time it happened when he read in
Dichtung und Warheit
how the young Goethe had freed himself
in a burst of tenderness from the effects of a curse which a
jealous mistress had pronounced upon the next woman who should kiss
his lips after her; he had long, almost superstitiously, suffered
the curse to hold him back, but now he broke his bonds and kissed
his love joyfully again and again.

   It seemed to the patient not a
little strange that he should be impelled to masturbate precisely
upon such beautiful and uplifting occasions as these. But I could
not help pointing out that these two occasions had something in
common - a prohibition, and the defiance of a command.

   We must also consider in the same
connection his curious behaviour at a time when he was working for
an examination and toying with his favourite phantasy that his
father was still alive and might at any moment reappear. He used to
arrange that his working hours should be as late as possible in the
night. Between twelve and one o’clock at night he would
interrupt his work, and open the front door of the flat as though
his father were standing outside it; then, coming back into the
hall, he would take out his penis and look at it in the
looking-glass. This crazy conduct becomes intelligible if we
suppose that he was acting as though he expected a visit from his
father at the hour when ghosts are abroad. He had on the whole been
idle at his work during his father’s lifetime, and this had
often been a cause of annoyance to his father. And now that he was
returning as a ghost, he was to be delighted at finding his son
hard at work. But it was impossible that his father should be
delighted at the other part of his behaviour; in this therefore he
must be defying him. Thus, in a single unintelligible obsessional
act, he gave expression to the two sides of his relation with his
father, just as he did subsequently with regard to his lady by
means of his obsessional act with the stone.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2161

   Starting from these indications
and from other data of a similar kind, I ventured to put forward a
construction to the effect that when he was a child of under six he
had been guilty of some sexual misdemeanour connected with
masturbation and had been soundly castigated for it by his father.
This punishment, according to my hypothesis, had, it was true, put
an end to his masturbating, but on the other hand it had left
behind it an ineradicable grudge against his father and had
established him for all time in his role of an interferer with the
patient’s sexual enjoyment.¹ To my great astonishment
the patient then informed me that his mother had repeatedly
described to him an occurrence of this kind which dated from his
earliest childhood and had evidently escaped being forgotten by her
on account of its remarkable consequences. He himself, however, had
no recollection of it whatever. The tale was as follows. When he
was very small - it became possible to establish the date more
exactly owing to its having coincided with the fatal illness of an
elder sister - he had done something naughty, for which his father
had given him a beating. The little boy had flown into a terrible
rage and had hurled abuse at his father even while he was under his
blows. But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the
names of common objects that he could think of, and had screamed:
‘You lamp! You towel! You plate!’ and so on. His
father, shaken by such an outburst of elemental fury, had stopped
beating him, and had declared: ‘The child will be either a
great man or a great criminal!’² The patient believed
that the scene made a permanent impression upon himself as well as
upon his father. His father, he said, never beat him again; and he
also attributed to this experience a part of the change which came
over his own character. From that time forward he was a coward -
out of fear of the violence of his own rage. His whole life long,
moreover, he was terribly afraid of blows, and used to creep away
and hide, filled with terror and indignation, when one of his
brothers or sisters was beaten.

  
¹
Compare my suspicions to a similar effect
in one of the first sessions (
p. 2145
).

  
²
These alternatives did not exhaust the
possibilities. His father had overlooked the commonest outcome of
such premature passions - a neurosis.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2162

   The patient subsequently
questioned his mother again. She confirmed the story, adding that
at the time he had been between three and four years old and that
he had been given the punishment because he had
bitten
some
one. She could remember no further details, except for a very
uncertain idea that the person the little boy had hurt might have
been his nurse. In her account there was no suggestion of his
misdeed having been of a sexual nature.¹

  
¹
In psycho-analyses we frequently come
across occurrences of this kind, dating back to the earliest years
of the patient’s childhood, in which his infantile sexual
activity appears to reach its climax and often comes to a
catastrophic end owing to some misfortune or punishment. Such
occurrences are apt to appear in a shadowy way in dreams. Often
they will become so clear that the analyst thinks he has a firm
hold of them, and will nevertheless evade any final elucidation;
and unless he proceeds with the greatest skill and caution he may
be compelled to leave it undecided whether the scene in question
actually took place or not. It will help to put us upon the right
track in interpreting it, if we recognize that more than one
version of the scene (each often differing greatly from the other)
may be detected in the patient’s unconscious phantasies. If
we do not wish to go astray in our judgement of their historical
reality, we must above all bear in mind that people’s
‘childhood memories’ are only consolidated at a later
period, usually at the age of puberty; and that this involves a
complicated process of remodelling, analogous in every way to the
process by which a nation constructs legends about its early
history. It at once becomes evident that in his phantasies about
his infancy the individual as he grows up
endeavours to efface
the recollection of his auto-erotic activities
; and this he
does by exalting their memory-traces to the level of object-love,
just as a real historian will view the past in the light of the
present. This explains why these phantasies abound in seductions
and assaults, where the facts will have been confined to
auto-erotic activities and the caresses or punishments that
stimulated them. Furthermore, it becomes clear that in constructing
phantasies about his childhood the individual
sexualizes his
memories
; that is, he brings commonplace experiences into
relation with his sexual activity, and extends his sexual interest
to them - though in doing this he is probably following upon the
traces of a really existing connection. No one who remembers my
‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ will
need to be told that it is not my intention in these remarks to
detract from the importance which I have hitherto attached to
infantile sexuality by reducing it to nothing more than sexual
interest at the age of puberty. I merely wish to give some
technical advice that may help to clear up a class of phantasy
which is calculated to falsify the picture of infantile sexual
activity.

   It
is seldom that we are in the fortunate position of being able, as
in the present instance, to establish the facts upon which these
tales of the individual’s prehistoric past are based, by
recourse to the unimpeachable testimony of a grown-up person. Even
so, the statement made by our patient’s mother leaves the way
open to various possibilities. That she did not proclaim the sexual
character of the offence for which the child was punished may have
been due to the activity of her own censorship; for with all
parents it is precisely this sexual element in their
children’s past that their own censorship is most anxious to
eliminate. But it is just as possible that the child was reproved
by his nurse or by his mother herself for some commonplace piece of
naughtiness of a non-sexual nature, and that his reaction was so
violent that he was castigated by his father. In phantasies of this
kind nurses and servants are regularly replaced by the superior
figure of the mother. A deeper interpretation of the
patient’s dreams in relation to this episode revealed the
clearest traces of the presence in his mind of an imaginative
production of a positively epic character. In this his sexual
desires for his mother and sister and his sister’s premature
death were linked up with the young hero’s chastisement at
his father’s hand. It was impossible to unravel this tissue
of phantasy thread by thread; the therapeutic success of the
treatment was precisely what stood in the way of this. The patient
recovered, and his ordinary life began to assert its claims: there
were many tasks before him, which he had already neglected far too
long, and which were incompatible with a continuation of the
treatment. I am not to be blamed, therefore, for this gap in the
analysis. The scientific results of psycho-analysis are at present
only a by-product of its therapeutic aims, and for that reason it
is often just in those cases where treatment fails that most
discoveries are made.

   The
content of the sexual life of infancy consists in auto-erotic
activity on the part of the dominant sexual components, in traces
of object-love, and in the formation of that complex which deserves
to be called
the nuclear complex of the neuroses
. It is the
complex which comprises the child’s earliest impulses, alike
tender and hostile, towards its parents and brothers and sisters,
after its curiosity has been awakened - usually by the arrival of a
new baby brother or sister. The uniformity of the content of the
sexual life of children, together with the unvarying character of
the modifying tendencies which are later brought to bear upon it,
will easily account for the constant sameness which as a rule
characterizes the phantasies that are constructed around the period
of childhood, irrespective of how greatly or how little real
experiences have contributed towards them. It is entirely
characteristic of the nuclear complex of infancy that the
child’s father should be assigned the part of a sexual
opponent and of an interferer with auto-erotic sexual activities;
and real events are usually to a large extent responsible for
bringing this about.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2163

   A discussion of this childhood
scene will be found in the footnote, and here I will only remark
that its emergence shook the patient for the first time in his
refusal to believe that at some prehistoric period in his childhood
he had been seized with fury (which had subsequently become latent)
against the father whom he loved so much. I must confess that I had
expected it to have a greater effect, for the incident had been
described to him so often - even by his father himself - that there
could be no doubt of its objective reality. But, with that capacity
for being illogical which never fails to bewilder one in such
highly intelligent people as obsessional neurotics, he kept urging
against the evidential value of the story the fact that he himself
could not remember the scene. And so it was only along the painful
road of transference that he was able to reach a conviction that
his relation to his father really necessitated the postulation of
this unconscious complement. Things soon reached a point at which,
in his dreams, his waking phantasies, and his associations, he
began heaping the grossest and filthiest abuse upon me and my
family, though in his deliberate actions he never treated me with
anything but the greatest respect. His demeanour as he repeated
these insults to me was that of a man in despair. ‘How can a
gentleman like you, sir,’ he used to ask, ‘let yourself
be abused in this way by a low, good-for-nothing fellow like me?
You ought to turn me out: that’s all I deserve.’ While
he talked like this, he would get up from the sofa and roam about
the room, - a habit which he explained at first as being due to
delicacy of feeling: he could not bring himself, he said, to utter
such horrible things while he was lying there so comfortably. But
soon he himself found a more cogent explanation, namely, that he
was avoiding my proximity for fear of my giving him a beating. If
he stayed on the sofa he behaved like some one in desperate terror
trying to save himself from castigations of terrific violence; he
would bury his head in his hands, cover his face with his arm, jump
up suddenly and rush away, his features distorted with pain, and so
on. He recalled that his father had had a passionate temper, and
sometimes in his violence had not known where to stop. Thus, little
by little, in this school of suffering, the patient won the sense
of conviction which he had lacked - though to any disinterested
mind the truth would have been almost self-evident.