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¹ [The French term for ‘dual
consciousness’.]

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2209

   This last part of my account will
not, I fear, strike you as particularly clear. But you should bear
in mind that we are dealing with novel and difficult
considerations, and it may well be that it is not possible to make
them much clearer - which shows that we still have a long way to go
in our knowledge of the subject. Moreover, Breuer’s theory of
‘hypnoid states’ turned out to be impeding and
unnecessary, and it has been dropped by psycho-analysis to-day.
Later on, you will at least have a hint of the influences and
processes that were to be discovered behind the screen of hypnoid
states erected by Breuer. You will have rightly formed the opinion,
too, that Breuer’s investigation has only succeeded in
offering you a very incomplete theory and an unsatisfying
explanation of the phenomena observed. But complete theories do not
fall ready-made from the sky and you would have even better grounds
for suspicion if anyone presented you with a flawless and complete
theory at the very beginning of his observations. Such a theory
could only be a child of his speculation and could not be the fruit
of an unprejudiced examination of the facts.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2210

SECOND LECTURE

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - At about the same time at which Breuer was
carrying on the ‘talking cure’ with his patient, the
great Charcot in Paris had begun the researches into hysterical
patients at the Salpêtrière which were to lead to a
new understanding of the disease. There was no possibility of his
findings being known in Vienna at that time. But when, some ten
years later, Breuer and I published our ‘Preliminary
Communication’ on the psychical mechanism of hysterical
phenomena, we were completely under the spell of Charcot’s
researches. We regarded the pathogenic experiences of our patients
as psychical traumas, and equated them with the somatic traumas
whose influence on hysterical paralyses had been established by
Charcot; and Breuer’s hypothesis of hypnoid states was itself
nothing but a reflection of the fact that Charcot had reproduced
those traumatic paralyses artificially under hypnosis.

   The great French observer, whose
pupil I became in 1885-6, was not himself inclined to adopt a
psychological outlook. It was his pupil, Pierre Janet, who first
attempted a deeper approach to the peculiar psychical processes
present in hysteria, and we followed his example when we took the
splitting of the mind and dissociation of the personality as the
centre of our position. You will find in Janet a theory of hysteria
which takes into account the prevailing views in France on the part
played by heredity and degeneracy. According to him, hysteria is a
form of degenerate modification of the nervous system, which shows
itself in an innate weakness in the power of psychical synthesis.
Hysterical patients, he believes, are inherently incapable of
holding together the multiplicity of mental processes into a unity,
and hence arises the tendency to mental dissociation. If I may be
allowed to draw a homely but clear analogy, Janet’s
hysterical patient reminds one of a feeble woman who has gone out
shopping and is now returning home laden with a multitude of
parcels and boxes. She cannot contain the whole heap of them with
her two arms and ten fingers. So first of all one object slips from
her grasp; and when she stoops to pick it up, another one escapes
her in its place, and so on. This supposed mental weakness of
hysterical patients is not confirmed when we find that, alongside
these phenomena of diminished capacity, examples are also to be
observed of a partial increase in efficiency: as though by way of
compensation. At the time when Breuer’s patient had forgotten
her mother tongue and every other language but English, her grasp
of English reached such heights that, if she was handed a German
book, she was able straight away to read out a correct and fluent
translation of it.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2211

   When, later on, I set about
continuing on my own account the investigations that had been begun
by Breuer, I soon arrived at another view of the origin of
hysterical dissociation (the splitting of consciousness). A
divergence of this kind, which was to be decisive for everything
that followed, was inevitable, since I did not start out, like
Janet, from laboratory experiments, but with therapeutic aims in
mind.

   I was driven forward above all by
practical necessity. The cathartic procedure, as carried out by
Breuer, presupposed putting the patient into a state of deep
hypnosis; for it was only in a state of hypnosis that he attained a
knowledge of the pathogenic connections which escaped him in his
normal state. But I soon came to dislike hypnosis, for it was a
temperamental and, one might almost say, a mystical ally. When I
found that, in spite of all my efforts, I could not succeed in
bringing more than a fraction of my patients into a hypnotic state,
I determined to give up hypnosis and to make the cathartic
procedure independent of it. Since I was not able at will to alter
the mental state of the majority of my patients, I set about
working with them in their
normal
state. At first, I must
confess, this seemed a senseless and hopeless undertaking. I was
set the task of learning from the patient something that I did not
know and that he did not know himself. How could one hope to elicit
it? But there came to my help a recollection of a most remarkable
and instructive experiment which I had witnessed when I was with
Bernheim at Nancy. Bernheim showed us that people whom he had put
into a state of hypnotic somnambulism, and who had had all kinds of
experiences while they were in that state, only
appeared
to
have lost the memory of what they had experienced during
somnambulism; it was possible to revive these memories in their
normal state. It is true that, when he questioned them about their
somnambulistic experiences, they began by maintaining that they
knew nothing about them; but if he refused to give way, and
insisted, and assured them that they
did
know about them,
the forgotten experiences always reappeared.

   So I did the same thing with my
patients. When I reached a point with them at which they maintained
that they knew nothing more, I assured them that they
did
know it all the same, and that they had only to say it; and I
ventured to declare that the right memory would occur to them at
the moment at which I laid my hand on their forehead. In that way I
succeeded, without using hypnosis, in obtaining from the patients
whatever was required for establishing the connection between the
pathogenic scenes they had forgotten and the symptoms left over
from those scenes. But it was a laborious procedure, and in the
long run an exhausting one; and it was unsuited to serve as a
permanent technique.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2212

   I did not abandon it, however,
before the observations I made during my use of it afforded me
decisive evidence. I found confirmation of the fact that the
forgotten memories were not lost. They were in the patient’s
possession and were ready to emerge in association to what was
still known by him; but there was some force that prevented them
from becoming conscious and compelled them to remain unconscious.
The existence of this force could be assumed with certainty, since
one became aware of an effort corresponding to it if, in opposition
to it, one tried to introduce the unconscious memories into the
patient’s consciousness. The force which was maintaining the
pathological condition became apparent in the form of
resistance
on the part of the patient.

   It was on this idea of
resistance, then, that I based my view of the course of psychical
events in hysteria. In order to effect a recovery, it had proved
necessary to remove these resistances. Starting out from the
mechanism of cure, it now became possible to construct quite
definite ideas of the origin of the illness. The same forces which,
in the form of resistance, were now offering opposition to the
forgotten material’s being made conscious, must formerly have
brought about the forgetting and must have pushed the pathogenic
experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name of
‘
repression
’ to this hypothetical process, and I
considered that it was proved by the undeniable existence of
resistance.

   The further question could then
be raised as to what these forces were and what the determinants
were of the repression in which we now recognized the pathogenic
mechanism of hysteria. A comparative study of the pathogenic
situations which we had come to know through the cathartic
procedure made it possible to answer this question. All these
experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which
was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes and which
proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his
personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of this
internal struggle was that the idea which had appeared before
consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable wish fell a
victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with all its
attached memories, and was forgotten. Thus the incompatibility of
the wish in question with the patient’s ego was the motive
for the repression; the subject’s ethical and other standards
were the repressing forces. An acceptance of the incompatible
wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have
produced a high degree of unpleasure; this unpleasure was avoided
by means of repression, which was thus revealed as one of the
devices serving to protect the mental personality.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2213

   To take the place of a number of
instances, I will relate a single one of my cases, in which the
determinants and advantages of repression are sufficiently evident.
For my present purpose I shall have once again to abridge the case
history and omit some important underlying material. The patient
was a girl, who had lost her beloved father after she had taken a
share in nursing him - a situation analogous to that of
Breuer’s patient. Soon afterwards her elder sister married,
and her new brother-in-law aroused in her a peculiar feeling of
sympathy which was easily masked under a disguise of family
affection. Not long afterwards her sister fell ill and died, in the
absence of the patient and her mother. They were summoned in all
haste without being given any definite information of the tragic
event. When the girl reached the bedside of her dead sister, there
came to her for a brief moment an idea that might be expressed in
these words: ‘Now he is free and can marry me.’ We may
assume with certainty that this idea, which betrayed to her
consciousness the intense love for her brother-in-law of which she
had not herself been conscious, was surrendered to repression a
moment later, owing to the revolt of her feelings. The girl fell
ill with severe hysterical symptoms; and while she was under my
treatment it turned out that she had completely forgotten the scene
by her sister’s bedside and the odious egoistic impulse that
had emerged in her. She remembered it during the treatment and
reproduced the pathogenic moment with signs of the most violent
emotion, and, as a result of the treatment, she became healthy once
more.

   Perhaps I may give you a more
vivid picture of repression and of its necessary relation to
resistance, by a rough analogy derived from our actual situation at
the present moment. Let us suppose that in this lecture-room and
among this audience, whose exemplary quiet and attentiveness I
cannot sufficiently commend, there is nevertheless someone who is
causing a disturbance and whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering
and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention from my
task. I have to announce that I cannot proceed with my lecture; and
thereupon three or four of you who are strong men stand up and,
after a short struggle, put the interrupter outside the door. So
now he is ‘repressed’, and I can continue my lecture.
But in order that the interruption shall not be repeated, in case
the individual who has been expelled should try to enter the room
once more, the gentlemen who have put my will into effect place
their chairs up against the door and thus establish a
‘resistance’ after the repression has been
accomplished. If you will now translate the two localities
concerned into psychical terms as the ‘conscious’ and
the ‘unconscious’, you will have before you a fairly
good picture of the process of repression.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2214

   You will now see in what it is
that the difference lies between our view and Janet’s. We do
not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for
synthesis on the part of the mental apparatus; we explain it
dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces and
recognize it as the outcome of an active struggling on the part of
the two psychical groupings against each other. But our view gives
rise to a large number of fresh problems. Situations of mental
conflict are, of course, exceedingly common; efforts by the ego to
ward off painful memories are quite regularly to be observed
without their producing the result of a mental split. The
reflection cannot be escaped that further determinants must be
present if the conflict is to lead to dissociation. I will also
readily grant you that the hypothesis of repression leaves us not
at the end but at the beginning of a psychological theory. We can
only go forward step by step however, and complete knowledge must
await the results of further and deeper researches.