Freud - Complete Works (376 page)

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2180

   His superstition was nevertheless
that of an educated man, and he avoided such vulgar prejudices as
being afraid of Friday or of the number thirteen, and so on. But he
believed in premonitions and in prophetic dreams; he would
constantly meet the very person of whom, for some inexplicable
reason, he had just been thinking; or he would receive a letter
from some one who had suddenly come into his mind after being
forgotten for many years. At the same time he was honest enough -
or rather, he was loyal enough to his official conviction - not to
have forgotten instances in which he strangest forebodings had come
to nothing. On one occasion, for instance, when he went away for
his summer holidays, he had felt morally certain that he would
never return to Vienna alive. He also admitted that the great
majority of his premonitions related to things which had no special
personal importance to him, and that, when he met an acquaintance
of whom, until a few moments previously, he had not thought for a
very long time, nothing further took place between himself and the
miraculous apparition. And he naturally could not deny that all the
important events of his life had occurred without his having had
any premonition of them, and that, for instance, his father’s
death had taken him entirely by surprise. But arguments such as
these had no effect upon the discrepancy in his convictions. They
merely served to prove the obsessional nature of his superstitions,
and that could already be inferred from the way in which they came
and went with the increase and decrease of his resistance.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2181

   I was not in a position, of
course, to give a rational explanation of all the miraculous
stories of his remoter past. But as regards the similar things that
happened during the time of his treatment, I was able to prove to
him that he himself invariably had a hand in the manufacture of
these miracles, and I was able to point out to him the methods that
he employed. He worked by means of peripheral vision and reading,
forgetting, and, above all, errors of memory. In the end he used
himself to help me in discovering the little sleight-of-hand tricks
by which these wonders were performed. I may mention one
interesting infantile root of his belief that forebodings and
premonitions came true. It was brought to light by his recollection
that very often, when a date was being fixed for something, his
mother used to say: ‘I shan’t be able to on
such-and-such a day. I shall have to stop in bed then.’ And
in fact when the day in question arrived she had invariably stayed
in bed!

   There can be no doubt that the
patient felt a need for finding experiences of this kind to act as
props for his superstition, and that it was for that reason that he
occupied himself so much with the inexplicable coincidences of
everyday life with which we are all familiar, and helped out their
shortcomings with unconscious activity of his own. I have come
across a similar need in many other obsessional patients and have
suspected its presence in many more besides. It seems to me easily
explicable in view of the psychological characteristics of the
obsessional neurosis. In this disorder, as I have already explained
(
p. 2155
), repression is effected not
by means of amnesia but by a severance of causal connections
brought about by a withdrawal of affect. These repressed
connections appear to persist in some kind of shadowy form (which I
have elsewhere compared to an endopsychic perception),¹ and
they are thus transferred, by a process of projection, into the
external world, where they bear witness to what has been effaced
from consciousness.

  
¹
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901
b
), Chapter XII, Section C (
b
).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2182

   Another mental need, which is
also shared by obsessional neurotics and which is in some respects
related to the one just mentioned, is the need for
uncertainty
in their life, or for
doubt
. An enquiry
into this characteristic leads deep into the investigation of
instinct. The creation of uncertainty is one of the methods
employed by the neurosis for drawing the patient away from
reality
and isolating him from the world - which is among
the objects of every psychoneurotic disorder. Again, it is only too
obvious what efforts are made by the patients themselves in order
to be able to avoid certainty and remain in doubt. Some of them,
indeed, give a vivid expression to this tendency in a dislike of
clocks and watches (for these at least make the time of day
certain), and in the unconscious artifices which they employ in
order to render these doubt removing instruments innocuous. Our
present patient had developed a peculiar talent for avoiding a
knowledge of any facts which would have helped him in deciding his
conflict. Thus he was in ignorance upon those matters relating to
his lady which were the most relevant to the question of his
marriage: he was ostensibly unable to say who had operated upon her
and whether the operation had been unilateral or bilateral. He had
to be forced into remembering what he had forgotten and into
finding out what he had overlooked.

   The predilection felt by
obsessional neurotics for uncertainty and doubt leads them to turn
their thoughts by preference to those subjects upon which all
mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgements
must necessarily remain open to doubt. The chief subjects of this
kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory -
in the last of which we are all in the habit of believing, without
having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness.¹

  
¹
As Lichtenberg says, ‘An astronomer
knows whether the moon is inhabited or not with about as much
certainty as he knows who was his father, but not with so much
certainty as he knows who was his mother’. A great advance
was made in civilization when men decided to put their inferences
upon a level with the testimony of their senses and to make the
step from matriarchy to patriarchy. The prehistoric figures which
show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are
representations of patrilineal descent; Athena had no mother, but
sprang from the head of Zeus. A witness who testifies to something
before a court of law is still called ‘
Zeuge
’
[literally, ‘begetter’] in German, after the part
played by the male in the act of procreation; so too in
hieroglyphics the word for a ‘witness’ is written with
a representation of the male organ.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2183

   In obsessional neuroses the
uncertainty of memory is used to the fullest extent as a help in
the formation of symptoms; and we shall learn directly the part
played in the actual content of the patients’ thoughts by the
questions of length of life and life after death. But as an
appropriate transition I will first consider one particular
superstitious trait in our patient to which I have already alluded
(
p. 2176
) and which will no doubt
have puzzled more than one of my readers.

   I refer to the
omnipotence
which he ascribed to his thoughts and feelings, and to his wishes,
whether good or evil. It is, I must admit, decidedly tempting to
declare that this idea was a delusion and that it oversteps the
limits of obsessional neurosis. I have, however, come across the
same conviction in another obsessional patient; and he was long ago
restored to health and is leading a normal life. Indeed, all
obsessional neurotics behave as though they shared this conviction.
It will be our business to throw some light upon these
patients’ over-estimation of their powers. Assuming, without
more ado, that this belief is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of
the old megalomania of infancy, we will proceed to ask our patient
for the grounds of his conviction. In reply, he adduces two
experiences. When he returned for a second visit to the hydropathic
establishment at which his disorder had been relieved for the first
and only time, he asked to be given his old room, for its position
had facilitated his relations with one of the nurses. He was told
that the room was already taken and that it was occupied by an old
professor. This piece of news considerably diminished his prospects
of successful treatment, and he reacted to it with the unamiable
thought: ‘I wish he may be struck dead for it!’ A
fortnight later he was woken up from his sleep by the disturbing
idea of a corpse; and in the morning he heard that the professor
had really had a stroke, and that he had been carried up into his
room at about the time he himself had woken up. The second
experience related to an unmarried woman, no longer young, though
with a great desire to be loved, who had paid him a great deal of
attention and had once asked him point blank whether he could not
love her. He had given her an evasive answer. A few days afterwards
he heard that she had thrown herself out of a window. He then began
to reproach himself, and said to himself that it would have been in
his power to save her life by giving her his love. I n this way he
became convinced of the omnipotence of his love and of his hatred.
Without denying the omnipotence of love we may point out that both
these instances were concerned with death, and we may adopt the
obvious explanation that, like other obsessional neurotics, our
patient was compelled to overestimate the effects of his hostile
feelings upon the external world, because a large part of their
internal, mental effects escaped his conscious knowledge. His love
- or rather his hatred - was in truth overpowering; it was
precisely they that created the obsessional thoughts, of which he
could not understand the origin and against which he strove in vain
to defend himself.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1923:] The
omnipotence of thoughts, or, more accurately speaking, of wishes,
has since been recognized as an essential element in the mental
life of primitive people. See
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2184

   Our patient had a quite peculiar
attitude towards the question of death. He showed the deepest
sympathy whenever any one died, and religiously attended the
funeral; so that among his brothers and sisters he earned the
nickname of ‘carrion crow’. In his imagination, too, he
was constantly making away with people so as to show his heartfelt
sympathy for their bereaved relatives. The death of an elder
sister, which took place when he was between three and four years
old, played a great part in his phantasies, and was brought into
intimate connection with his childish misdemeanours during the same
period. We know, moreover, at what an early age thoughts about his
father’s death had occupied his mind, and we may regard his
illness itself as a reaction to that event, for which he had felt
an obsessional wish fifteen years earlier. The strange extension of
his obsessional fears to the ‘next world’ was nothing
else than a compensation for these death-wishes which he had felt
against his father. It was introduced eighteen months after his
father had died, at a time when there had been a revival of his
sorrow at the loss, and it was designed - in defiance of reality,
and in deference to the wish which had previously been showing
itself in phantasies of every kind - were intended to undo the fact
of his father’s death. We have had occasion in several places
(pp.
2173
, and
2176
) to translate the phrase ‘in the
next world’ by the words ‘if my father were still
alive’.

   But the behaviour of other
obsessional neurotics does not differ greatly from that of our
present patient, even though it has not been their fate to come
face to face with the phenomenon of death at such an early age.
Their thoughts are unceasingly occupied with other people’s
length of life and possibility of death; their superstitious
propensities have had no other content to begin with, and have
perhaps no other source whatever. But these neurotics need the help
of the possibility of death chiefly in order that it may act as a
solution of conflicts they have left unsolved. Their essential
characteristic is that they are incapable of coming to a decision,
especially in matters of love; they endeavour to postpone every
decision, and, in their doubt which person they shall decide for or
what measures they shall take against a person, they are obliged to
choose as their model the old German courts of justice, in which
the suits were usually brought to an end, before judgement had been
given, by the death of the parties to the dispute. Thus in every
conflict which enters their lives they are on the look out for the
death of some one who is of importance to them, usually of some one
they love - such as one of their parents, or a rival, or one of the
objects of their love between which their inclinations are
wavering. But at this point our discussion of the death-complex in
obsessional neuroses touches upon the problem of the instinctual
life of obsessional neurotics. And to this problem we must now
turn.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2185

(C)  THE INSTINCTUAL LIFE OF
OBSESSIONAL NEUROTICS,

AND THE ORIGINS OF COMPULSION AND
DOUBT