Freud - Complete Works (374 page)

  
²
It was no doubt a weasel, of which there
are great numbers in the Zentralfriedhof [the principal cemetery]
in Vienna.

  
³
Compare the words of
Mephistopheles:

               
Doch dieser Schwelle Zauber zu zerspalten

               
Bedarf ich eines Rattenzahns.

               
.     .    .     .     .     .     .     .

               
Noch einen Biss, so ist’s geschehn!

               
[But to break through the magic of this threshold

               
I need a rat’s tooth. (
He conjures up a
rat
.)

               
.     .    .     .     .     .     .     .

               
Another bite, and it is done!]

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2169

   According, then, to his earliest
and most momentous experiences, rats were children. And at this
point he brought out a piece of information which he had kept away
from its context long enough, but which now fully explained the
interest he was bound to feel in children. The lady, whose admirer
he had been for so many years, but whom he had nevertheless not
been able to make up his mind to marry, was condemned to
childlessness by reason of a gynaecological operation which had
involved the removal of both ovaries. This indeed - for he was
extraordinarily fond of children - had been the chief reason for
his hesitation.

   It was only then that it became
possible to understand the inexplicable process by which his
obsessional idea had been formed. With the assistance of our
knowledge of infantile sexual theories and of symbolism (as learnt
from the interpretation of dreams) the whole thing could be
translated and given a meaning. When, at the afternoon halt (during
which he had lost his pince-nez), the captain had told him about
the rat punishment, the patient had only been struck at first by
the combined cruelty and lasciviousness of the situation depicted.
But immediately afterwards a connection had been set up with the
scene from his childhood in which he himself had bitten some one.
The captain - a man who could defend such punishments - had become
a substitute for his father, and had thus drawn down upon himself a
part of the reviving animosity which had burst out, on the original
occasion, against his cruel father. The idea which came into his
consciousness for a moment, to the effect that something of the
sort might happen to some one he was fond of, is probably to be
translated into a wish such as ‘You ought to have the same
thing done to you!’ aimed at the teller of the story, but
through him at his father. A day and a half later,¹ when the
captain had handed him the packet upon which the charges were due
and had requested him to pay back the 3.80
kronen
to
Lieutenant A., he had already been aware that his ‘cruel
superior’ was making a mistake, and that the only person he
owed anything to was the young lady at the post office. It might
easily, therefore, have occurred to him to think of some derisive
reply, such as, ‘Will I, though?’ or ‘Pay your
grandmother!’ or ‘Yes! You bet I’II pay him back
the money!’ - answers which would have been subject to no
compulsive force. But instead, out of the stirrings of his
father-complex and out of his memory of the scene from his
childhood, there formed in his mind some such answer as:
‘Yes! I’II pay back the money to A. when my father and
the lady have children!’ or ‘As sure as my father and
the lady can have children, I’ll pay him back the
money!’ In short, a derisive affirmation attached to an
absurd condition which could never be fulfilled.²

  
¹
Not that evening, as he first told me. It
was quite impossible that the pince-nez he had ordered could have
arrived the same day. The patient shortened the interval of time
retrospectively, because it was the period during which the
decisive mental connections had been set up, and during which the
repressed episode had taken place - the episode of his interview
with the officer who told him of the friendly conduct of the young
lady at the post office.

  
²
Thus absurdity signifies derision in the
language of obsessional thought, just as it does in dreams. See my
Interpretation of Dreams
.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2170

   But now the crime had been
committed; he had insulted the two persons who were dearest to him
- his father and his lady. The deed had called for punishment, and
the penalty had consisted in his binding himself by a vow which it
was impossible for him to fulfil and which entailed literal
obedience to his superior’s ill-founded request. The vow ran
as follows: ‘
Now you must really pay back the money to
A.
’ In his convulsive obedience he had repressed his
better knowledge that the captain’s request had been based
upon erroneous premises: ‘Yes, you must pay back the money to
A., as your father’s surrogate has required. Your father
cannot be mistaken.’ So too the king cannot be mistaken; if
he addresses one of his subjects by a title which is not his, the
subject bears that title ever afterwards.

   Only vague intelligence of these
events reached the patient’s consciousness. But his revolt
against the captain’s order and the sudden transformation of
that revolt into its opposite were both represented there. First
had come the idea that he was
not
to pay back the money, or
it (that is, the rat punishment) would happen; and then had come
the transformation of this idea into a vow to the opposite effect,
as a punishment for his revolt.

   Let us, further, picture to
ourselves the general conditions under which the formation of the
patient’s great obsessional idea occurred. His libido had
been increased by a long period of abstinence coupled with the
friendly welcome which a young officer can always reckon upon
receiving when he goes among women. Moreover, at the time when he
had started for the manoeuvres, there had been a certain coolness
between himself and his lady. This intensification of his libido
had inclined him to a renewal of his ancient struggle against his
father’s authority, and he had dared to think of having
sexual intercourse with other women. His loyalty to his
father’s memory had grown weaker, his doubts as to his
lady’s merits had increased; and in that frame of mind he let
himself be dragged into insulting the two of them, and had then
punished himself for it. In doing so he had copied an old model.
And when at the end of the manoeuvres he had hesitated so long
whether he should travel to Vienna or whether he should stop and
fulfil his vow, he had represented in a single picture the two
conflicts by which he had from the very first been torn - whether
or no he should remain obedient to his father and whether or no he
should remain faithful to his beloved.¹

  
¹
It is perhaps not uninteresting to observe
that once again obedience to his father coincided with abandoning
the lady. If he had stopped and paid back the money to A., he would
have made atonement to his father, and at the same time he would
have deserted his lady in favour of some one else more attractive.
In this conflict the lady had been victorious - with the
assistance, to be sure, of the patient’s own normal good
sense.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2171

   I may add a word upon the
interpretation of the ‘sanction’ which, it will be
remembered, was to the effect that ‘otherwise the rat
punishment will be carried out on both of them’. It was based
upon the influence of two infantile sexual theories, which I have
discussed elsewhere.¹ The first of these theories is that
babies come out of the anus; and the second, which follows
logically from the first, is that men can have babies just as well
as women. According to the technical rules for interpreting dreams,
the notion of coming
out of
the rectum can be represented by
the opposite notion of creeping
into
the rectum (as in the
rat punishment), and
vice versa
.

   We should not be justified in
expecting such severe obsessional ideas as were present in this
case to be cleared up in any simpler manner or by any other means.
When we reached the solution that has been described above, the
patient’s rat delirium disappeared.

  
¹
‘On the Sexual Theories of
Children’ (1908
c
).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2172

II

THEORETICAL

(A)  SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF
OBSESSIONAL STRUCTURES
¹

In the year 1896 I defined obsessional ideas
as ‘transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from
repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was
performed with pleasure in childhood’. This definition now
seems to me to be open to criticism upon formal grounds, though its
component elements are unobjectionable. It was aiming too much at
unification, and took as its model the practice of obsessional
neurotics themselves, when, with their characteristic liking for
indeterminateness, they heap together under the name of
‘obsessional ideas’ the most heterogeneous psychical
structures.² In point of fact, it would be more correct to
speak of ‘obsessive thinking’, and to make it clear
that obsessional structures can correspond to every sort of
psychical act. They can be classed as wishes, temptations,
impulses, reflections, doubts, commands, or prohibitions. Patients
endeavour in general to tone down such distinctions and to regard
what remains of these psychical acts after they have been deprived
of their affective index simply as ‘obsessional ideas’.
Our present patient gave an example of this type of behaviour in
one of his first sessions, when he attempted to reduce a wish to
the level of a mere ‘train of thought’ (
p. 2144
).

  
¹
Several of the points dealt with in this
and the following section have already been mentioned in the
literature on the subject of obsessional neuroses, as may be
gathered from Löwenfeld’s exhaustive study,
Die
psychischen Zwangserscheinungen
, 1904, which is the standard
work upon this form of disease.

  
²
This fault in my definition is to some
extent corrected in the paper itself. The following passage will be
found: ‘The re-activated memories, however, and the
self-reproaches formed from them never re-emerge into consciousness
unchanged: what become conscious as obsessional ideas and affects,
and take the place of the pathogenic memories so far as conscious
life is concerned, are structures in the nature of a compromise
between the repressed ideas and the repressing ones.’ In the
definition, that is to say, especial stress is to be laid on the
word ‘transformed’.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2173

   It must be confessed, moreover,
that even the phenomenology of obsessional thinking has not yet had
sufficient attention paid to it. During the secondary defensive
struggle, which the patient carries on against the
‘obsessional ideas’ that have forced their way into his
consciousness, psychical structures make their appearance which
deserve to be given a special name. (Such, for example, were the
sequences of thoughts that occupied our patient’s mind on his
journey back from the manoeuvres.) They are not purely reasonable
considerations arising in opposition to the obsessional thoughts,
but, as it were, hybrids between the two species of thinking; they
accept certain of the premises of the obsession they are combating,
and thus, while using the weapons of reason, are established upon a
basis of pathological thought. I think such structures as these
deserve to be given the name of ‘
deliria
’. To
make the distinction clear, I will give an instance, which should
be inserted into its proper context in the patient’s case
history. I have already described the crazy conduct to which he
gave way at one time when he was preparing for an examination -
how, after working till far into the night, he used to go and open
the front door to his father’s ghost, and then look at his
genitals in the looking-glass (
p. 2160
). He tried to bring himself to
his senses by asking himself what his father would say to it all if
he were really still alive. But the argument had no effect so long
as it was put forward in this rational shape. The spectre was not
laid until he had transformed the same idea into a
‘delirious’ threat to the effect that if he ever went
through this nonsense again some evil would befall his father in
the next world.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2174

   The distinction between a primary
and a secondary defensive struggle is no doubt well founded, but we
find its value unexpectedly diminished when we discover that
the
patients themselves do not know the wording of their own
obsessional ideas
. This may sound paradoxical, but it is
perfectly good sense. During the progress of a psycho-analysis it
is not only the patient who plucks up courage, but his disease as
well; it grows bold enough to speak more plainly than before. To
drop the metaphor, what happens is that the patient, who his
hitherto turned his eyes away in terror from his own pathological
productions, begins to attend to them and obtains a clearer and
more detailed view of them.¹