Freud - Complete Works (375 page)

   There are, besides this, two
special ways in which a more precise knowledge of obsessional
structures can be gained. In the first place, experience shows that
an obsessional command (or whatever it may be), which in waking
life is known only in a truncated and distorted form, like a
mutilated telegraph message, may have its actual text brought to
light in a dream. Such texts appear in dreams in the shape of
speeches, and are thus an exception to the rule that speeches in
dreams are derived from speeches in real life.² Secondly, in
the course of the analytic examination of a case history, one
becomes convinced that if a number of obsessions succeed one
another they are often - even though their wording is not identical
- ultimately one and the same. The obsession may have been
successfully shaken off on its first appearance, but it comes back
a second time in a distorted form and without being recognized, and
may then perhaps be able to hold its own in the defensive struggle
more effectively, precisely because of its distortion. But the
original form is the correct one, and often displays its meaning
quite openly. When we have at great pains elucidated an
unintelligible obsessional idea, it often happens that the patient
informs us that just such a notion, wish, or temptation as the one
we have constructed did in fact make its appearance on one occasion
before the obsessional idea had arisen, but that it did not
persist. It would unfortunately involve us in too lengthy a
digression if we were to give instances of this from the history of
our present patient.

  
¹
Some patients carry the diversion of their
attention to such lengths that they are totally unable to give the
content of an obsessional idea or to describe an obsessional act
though they have performed it over and over again.

  
²
See
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
1900
a
, Chapter VI, Section F.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2175

   What is officially described as
an ‘obsessional idea’ exhibits, therefore, in its
distortion from its original wording, traces of the primary
defensive struggle. Its distortion enables it to persist, since
conscious thought is thus compelled to misapprehend it, just as
though it were a dream; for dreams also are a product of compromise
and distortion, and are also misapprehended by waking thought.

   This misapprehension on the part
of consciousness can be seen at work not only in reference to the
obsessional ideas themselves, but also in reference to the products
of the secondary defensive struggle, such, for instance, as the
protective formulas. I can produce two good examples of this. Our
patient used to employ as a defensive formula a rapidly pronounced
‘
aber
’ [‘but’] accompanied by a
gesture of repudiation. He told me on one occasion that this
formula had become altered recently; he now no longer said
‘
áber
’ but
‘
abér
’. When he was asked to give the
reason for this new departure, he declared that the mute
‘
e
’ of the second syllable gave him no sense of
security against the intrusion, which he so much dreaded, of some
foreign and contradictory element, and that he had therefore
decided to accent the ‘
e
’. This explanation (an
excellent sample of the obsessional neurotic style) was, however,
clearly inadequate; the most that it could claim to be was a
rationalization. The truth was that
‘
abér
’ was an approximation towards the
similar-sounding ‘
abwehr
’
[’defence’], a term which he had learnt in the course
of our theoretical discussions of psycho-analysis. He had thus put
the treatment to an illegitimate and ‘delirious’ use in
order to strengthen a defensive formula. Another time he told me
about his principal magic word, which was an apotropaic against
every evil; he had put it together out of the initial letters of
the most powerfully beneficent of his prayers and had clapped on an
‘amen’ at the end of it. I cannot reproduce the word
itself, for reasons which will become apparent immediately. For,
when he told it me, I could not help noticing that the word was in
fact an anagram of the name of his lady. Her name contained an
‘s’, and this he had put last, that is, immediately
before the ‘amen’ at the end. We may say, therefore,
that by this process he had brought his ‘
Samen
’
[‘semen’] into contact with the woman he loved; in
imagination, that is to say, he had masturbated with her. He
himself, however, had never noticed this very obvious connection;
his defensive forces had allowed themselves to be fooled by the
repressed ones. This is also a good example of the rule that in
time the thing which is meant to be warded off invariably finds its
way into the very means which is being used for warding it off.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2176

   I have already asserted that
obsessional thoughts have undergone a distortion similar to that
undergone by dream-thoughts before they become the manifest content
of a dream. The technique of this distortion may therefore be of
interest to us, and there should be nothing to prevent our
exhibiting its various modes by means of a series of obsessions
which have been translated and made clear. But here again the
conditions governing the publication of this case make it
impossible for me to give more than a few specimens. Not all of the
patient’s obsessions were so complicated in their structure
and so difficult to solve as the great rat idea. In some of the
others a very simple technique was employed - namely, that of
distortion by omission or ellipsis. This technique is pre-eminently
applicable to jokes, but in our present case, too, it did useful
work as a means of protecting things from being understood.

   For instance, one of the
patient’s oldest and favourite obsessions (which corresponded
to an admonition or warning) ran as follows: ‘
If I marry
the lady, some misfortune will befall my father
(in the next
world).’ If we insert the intermediate steps, which had been
skipped but were known to us from the analysis, we get the
following train of thought: ‘If my father were alive, he
would be as furious over my design of marrying the lady as he was
in the scene in my childhood; so that I should fly into a rage with
him once more and wish him every possible evil; and thanks to the
omnipotence of my wishes¹ these evils would be bound to come
upon him.’

   Here is another instance in which
a solution can be reached by filling out an ellipsis. It is once
more in the nature of a warning or an ascetic prohibition. The
patient had a charming little niece of whom he was very fond. One
day this idea came into his head: ‘
If you indulge in
intercourse, something will happen to Ella
’ (i.e. she
will die). When the omissions have been made good, we have:
‘Every time you copulate, even with a stranger, you will not
be able to avoid the reflection that in your married life sexual
intercourse can never bring you a child (on account of the
lady’s sterility). This will grieve you so much that you will
become envious of your sister on account of little Ella, and you
will grudge her the child. These envious impulses will inevitably
lead to the child’s death.’²

  
¹
This omnipotence is discussed further
on.

  
²
An example from another of my works,
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
, will recall to
the reader the manner in which this elliptical technique is
employed in making jokes: ‘There is a witty and pugnacious
journalist in Vienna, whose biting invective has repeatedly led to
his being physically maltreated by the subjects of his attacks. On
one occasion, when a fresh misdeed on the part of one of his
habitual opponents was being discussed, somebody exclaimed:
"If X hears of this, he’ll get his ears boxed
again." . . . The apparent absurdity of this
remark disappears if between the two clauses we insert the words:
"he’ll write such a scathing article upon the man, that,
etc."' - This elliptical joke, we may note, is similar in
its content, as well as in its form, to the first example quoted in
the text.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2177

   The technique of distortion by
ellipsis seems to be typical of obsessional neuroses; I have come
across it in the obsessional thoughts of other patients as well.
One example, a particularly transparent one, is of especial
interest on account of a certain structural similarity with the rat
idea. It was a case of doubting, and occurred in a lady who suffers
principally from obsessional
acts
. This lady was going for a
walk with her husband in Nuremberg, and made him take her into a
shop, where she purchased various objects for her child and amongst
them a comb. Her husband, finding that the shopping was too long a
business for his taste, said that he had noticed some coins in an
antique shop on the way which he was anxious to secure, adding that
after he had made his purchase he would come and fetch her in the
shop in which they at present were. But he stayed away, as she
thought, far too long. When he came back she accordingly asked him
where he had been. ‘Why,’ he replied, ‘at the
antique shop I told you about.’ At the same instant she was
seized by a tormenting doubt whether she had not as a matter of
fact always possessed the comb which she had just bought for her
child. She was naturally quite unable to discover the simple mental
link that was involved. There is nothing for it but to regard the
doubt as having become displaced, and to reconstruct the complete
chain of unconscious thoughts as follows: ‘If it is true that
you were only at the antique shop, if I am really to believe that,
then I may just as well believe that this comb that I bought a
moment ago has been in my possession for years.’ Here,
therefore, the lady was drawing a derisive and ironical parallel,
just as when our patient thought: ‘Oh yes, as sure as those
two’ (his father and the lady) ‘will have children, I
shall pay back the money to A.’ In the lady’s case the
doubt was dependent upon her unconscious jealousy, which led her to
suppose that her husband had spent the interval of his absence in
paying a visit of gallantry.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2178

   I shall not in the present paper
attempt any discussion of the
psychological
significance of
obsessional thinking. Such a discussion would be of extraordinary
value in its results, and would do more to clarify our ideas upon
the nature of the conscious and the unconscious than any study of
hysteria or the phenomena of hypnosis. It would be a most desirable
thing if the philosophers and psychologists who develop brilliant
theoretical views on the unconscious upon a basis of hearsay
knowledge or from their own conventional definitions would first
submit to the convincing impressions which may be gained from a
first-hand study of the phenomena of obsessional thinking. We might
almost go to the length of
requiring
it of them, if the task
were not so far more laborious than the methods of work to which
they are accustomed. I will only add here that in obsessional
neuroses the unconscious mental processes occasionally break
through into consciousness in their pure and undistorted form, that
such incursions may take place at every possible stage of the
unconscious process of thought, and that at the moment of the
incursion the obsessional ideas can, for the most part, be
recognized as formations of very long standing. This accounts for
the striking circumstance that, when the analyst tries, with the
patient’s help, to discover the date of the first occurrence
of an obsessional idea, the patient is obliged to place it further
and further back as the analysis proceeds, and is constantly
finding fresh ‘first’ occasions for the appearance of
the obsession.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2179

(B)  SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES
OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROTICS:

THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD REALITY, SUPERSTITION
AND DEATH

   In this section I intend to deal
with a few mental characteristics of obsessional neurotics which,
though they do not seem important in themselves, nevertheless lie
upon the road to a comprehension of more important things. They
were strongly marked in our present patient; but I know that they
are not attributable to his individual character, but to his
disorder, and that they are to be met with quite typically in other
obsessional patients.

   Our patient was to a high degree
superstitious, and this although he was a highly educated and
enlightened man of considerable acumen, and although he was able at
times to assure me that he did not believe a word of all this
rubbish. Thus he was at once superstitious and not superstitious;
and there was a clear distinction between his attitude and the
superstition of uneducated people who feel themselves at one with
their belief. He seemed to understand that his superstition was
dependent upon his obsessional thinking, although at times he gave
way to it completely. The meaning of this inconsistent and
vacillating behaviour can be most easily, grasped if it is regarded
in the light of a hypothesis which I shall now proceed to mention.
I did not hesitate to assume that the truth was not that the
patient still had an open mind upon this subject, but that he had
two separate and contradictory convictions upon it. His oscillation
between these two views quite obviously depended upon his momentary
attitude towards his obsessional disorder. As soon as he had got
the better of one of these obsessions, he used to smile in a
superior way at his own credulity, and no events then occurred that
were calculated to shake his firmness; but the moment he came under
the sway of another obsession which had not been cleared up - or,
what amounts to the same thing, of a resistance - the strangest
coincidences would happen, to support him in his credulous
belief.