Freud - Complete Works (377 page)

   If we wish to obtain a grasp of
the psychical forces whose interplay built up this neurosis, we
must turn back to what we have learnt from the patient on the
subject of the precipitating causes of his falling ill as a
grown-up man and as a child. He fell ill when he was in his
twenties on being faced with a temptation to marry another woman
instead of the one whom he had loved so long; and he avoided a
decision of this conflict by postponing all the necessary
preliminary actions. The means for doing this was given him by his
neurosis. His hesitation between the lady he loved and the other
girl can be reduced to a conflict between his father’s
influence and his love for his lady, or, in other words, to a
conflicting choice between his father and his sexual object, such
as had already subsisted (judging from his recollections and
obsessional ideas) in his remote childhood. All through his life,
moreover, he was unmistakably victim to a conflict between love and
hatred, in regard both to his lady and to his father. His
phantasies of revenge and such obsessional phenomena as his
obsession for understanding and his exploit with the stone in the
road bore witness to his divided feelings; and they were to a
certain degree comprehensible and normal, for the lady by her
original refusal and subsequently by her coolness had given him
some excuse for hostility. But his relations with his father were
dominated by a similar division of feeling, as we have seen from
our translation of his obsessional thoughts; and his father, too,
must have given him an excuse for hostility in his childhood, as
indeed we have been able to establish almost beyond question. His
attitude towards the lady - a compound of tenderness and hostility
- came to a great extent within the scope of his conscious
knowledge; at most he deceived himself over the degree and violence
of his negative feelings. But his hostility towards his father, on
the contrary, though he had once been acutely conscious of it, had
long since vanished from his ken, and it was only in the teeth of
the most violent resistance that it could be brought back into his
consciousness. We may regard the repression of his infantile hatred
of his father as the event which brought his whole subsequent
career under the dominion of the neurosis.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2186

   The conflicts of feeling in our
patient which we have here enumerated separately were not
independent of each other, but were bound together in pairs. His
hatred of his lady was inevitably coupled with his attachment to
his father, and inversely his hatred of his father with his
attachment to his lady. But the two conflicts of feeling which
result from this simplification - namely, the opposition between
his relation to his father and to his lady, and the contradiction
between his love and his hatred within each of these relations -
had no connection whatever with each other, either in their content
or in their origin. The first of these two conflicts corresponds to
the normal vacillation between male and female which characterizes
every one’s choice of a love-object. It is first brought to
the child’s notice by the time-honoured question:
‘Which do you love most, Daddy or Mummy?’ and it
accompanies him through his whole life, whatever may be the
relative intensity of his feelings to the two sexes or whatever may
be the sexual aim upon which he finally becomes fixed. But normally
this opposition soon loses the character of a hard-and-fast
contradiction, of an inexorable ‘either-or’. Room is
found for satisfying the unequal demands of both sides, although
even in a normal person the higher estimation of one sex is always
thrown into relief by a depreciation of the other.

   The other conflict, that between
love and hatred, strikes us more strangely. We know that incipient
love is often perceived as hatred, and that love, if it is denied
satisfaction, may easily be partly converted into hatred, and poets
tell us that in the more tempestuous stages of love the two opposed
feelings may subsist side by side for a while as though in rivalry
with each other. But the
chronic
co-existence of love and
hatred, both directed towards the same person and both of the
highest degree of intensity, cannot fail to astonish us. We should
have expected that the passionate love would long ago have
conquered the hatred or been devoured by it. And in fact such a
protracted survival of two opposites is only possible under quite
peculiar psychological conditions and with the co-operation of the
state of affairs in the unconscious. The love has not succeeded in
extinguishing the hatred but only in driving it down into the
unconscious; and in the unconscious the hatred, safe from the
danger of being destroyed by the operations of consciousness, is
able to persist and even to grow. In such circumstances the
conscious love attains as a rule, by way of reaction, an especially
high degree of intensity, so as to be strong enough for the
perpetual task of keeping its opponent under repression. The
necessary condition for the occurrence of such a strange state of
affairs in a person’s erotic life appears to be that at a
very early age, somewhere in the prehistoric period of his infancy,
the two opposites should have been split apart and one of them,
usually the hatred, have been repressed.¹

  
¹
Compare the discussion on this point during
one of the first sessions. - (
Added
1923:) Bleuler
subsequently introduced the appropriate term
‘ambivalence’ to describe this emotional constellation.
See also a further development of this line of thought in my paper
‘The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis’
(1913
I
).

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2187

   If we consider a number of
analyses of obsessional neurotics we shall find it impossible to
escape the impression that a relation between love and hatred such
as we have found in our present patient is among the most frequent,
the most marked, and probably, therefore, the most important
characteristics of obsessional neurosis. But however tempting it
may be to bring the problem of the ‘choice of neurosis’
into connection with instinctual life, there are reasons enough for
avoiding such a course. For we must remember that in every neurosis
we come upon the same suppressed instincts behind the symptoms.
After all, hatred, kept suppressed in the unconscious by love,
plays a great part in the pathogenesis of hysteria and paranoia. We
know too little of the nature of love to be able to arrive at any
definite conclusion here; and, in particular, the relation between
the
negative
factor¹ in love and the sadistic
components of the libido remains completely obscure. What follows
is therefore to be regarded as no more than a provisional
explanation. We may suppose, then, that in the cases of unconscious
hatred with which we are concerned the sadistic components of love
have, from constitutional causes, been exceptionally strongly
developed, and have consequently undergone a premature and all too
thorough suppression, and that the neurotic phenomena we have
observed arise on the one hand from conscious feelings of affection
which have become exaggerated as a reaction, and on the other hand
from sadism persisting in the unconscious in the form of
hatred.

  
¹
Alcibiades says of Socrates in the
Symposium
: ‘Many a time have I wished that he were
dead, and yet I know that I should be much more sorry than glad if
he were to die: so that I am at my wits’
end,’

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2188

   But in whatever way this
remarkable relation of love and hatred is to be explained, its
occurrence is established beyond any possibility of doubt by the
observations made in the present case; and it is gratifying to find
how easily we can now follow the puzzling processes of an
obsessional neurosis by bringing them into relation with this one
factor. If an intense love is opposed by an almost equally powerful
hatred, and is at the same time inseparably bound up with it, the
immediate consequence is certain to be a partial paralysis of the
will and an incapacity for coming to a decision upon any of those
actions for which love ought to provide the motive power. But this
indecision will not confine itself for long to a single group of
actions. For, in the first place, what actions of a lover are not
brought into relation with his one principal motive? And secondly a
man’s attitude in sexual things has the force of a model to
which the rest of his reactions tend to conform. And thirdly, it is
an inherent characteristic in the psychology of an obsessional
neurotic to make the fullest possible use of the mechanism of
displacement
. So the paralysis of his powers of decision
gradually extends itself over the entire field of the
patient’s behaviour.

   And here we have the domination
of
compulsion
and
doubt
such as we meet with in the
mental life of obsessional neurotics.

   The
doubt
corresponds to
the patient’s internal perception of his own indecision,
which, in consequence of the inhibition of his love by his hatred,
takes possession of him in the face of every intended action. The
doubt is in reality a doubt of his own love - which ought to be the
most certain thing in his whole mind; and it becomes diffused over
everything else, and is especially apt to become displaced on to
what is most insignificant and small.¹  A man who doubts
his own love may, or rather
must
, doubt every lesser
thing.²

  
¹
Compare the use of ‘representation by
something very small’ as a technique in making jokes. Cf.
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
.

  
²
So in the love-verses addressed by Hamlet
to Ophelia:

                                               
Doubt thou the stars are fire;

                                               
    Doubt that the sun doth move;

                                               
Doubt truth to be a liar;

                                               
    But never doubt I love.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2189

   It is this same doubt that leads
the patient to uncertainty about his protective measures, and to
his continual repetition of them in order to banish that
uncertainty; and it is this doubt, too, that eventually brings it
about that the patient’s protective acts themselves become as
impossible to carry out as his original inhibited decision in
connection with his love. At the beginning of my investigations I
was led to assume another and more general origin for the
uncertainty of obsessional neurotics and one which seemed to be
nearer the normal. If, for instance, while I am writing a letter
some one interrupts me with questions, I afterwards feel a quite
justifiable uncertainty as to what I may not have written under the
influence of the disturbance, and, to make sure, I am obliged to
read the letter over after I have finished it. In the same way I
might suppose that the uncertainty of obsessional neurotics, when
they are praying, for instance, is due to unconscious phantasies
constantly mingling with their prayers and disturbing them. This
hypothesis is correct, but it may be easily reconciled with what I
have just said. It is true that the patient’s uncertainty
whether he has carried through a protective measure is due to the
disturbing effect of unconscious phantasies; but the content of
these phantasies is precisely the contrary impulse - which it was
the very aim of the prayer to ward off. This became clearly evident
in our patient on one occasion, for the disturbing element did not
remain unconscious but made its appearance openly. The words he
wanted to use in his prayer were, ‘
May God protect
her
’, but a hostile ‘
not
’ suddenly
darted out of his unconscious and inserted itself into the
sentence; and he understood that this was an attempt at a curse (
p. 2152
). If the ‘not’ had
remained mute, he would have found himself in a state of
uncertainty and would have kept on prolonging his prayers
indefinitely. But since it became articulate he eventually gave up
praying. Before doing so, however, he, like other obsessional
patients, tried every kind of method for preventing the opposite
feeling from insinuating itself. He shortened his prayers, for
instance, or said them more rapidly. And similarly other patients
will endeavour to ‘
isolate
’ all such protective
acts from other things. But none of these technical procedures are
of any avail in the long run. If the impulse of love achieves any
success by displacing itself on to some trivial act, the impulse of
hostility will very soon follow it on to its new ground and once
more proceed to undo all that it has done.

Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis

2190

   And when the obsessional patient
lays his finger on the weak spot in the security of our mental life
- on the untrustworthiness of our memory - the discovery enables
him to extend his doubt over everything, even over actions which
have already been performed and which have so far had no connection
with the love-hatred complex, and over the entire past. I may
recall the instance of the woman who had just bought a comb for her
little daughter in a shop, and, becoming suspicious of her husband,
began to doubt whether she had not as a matter of fact been in
possession of the comb for a long time. Was not this woman saying
point-blank: ‘If I can doubt your love’ (and this was
only a projection of her doubt of her own love for him),
‘then I can doubt this too, then I can doubt
everything’ - thus revealing to us the hidden meaning of
neurotic doubt?