Freud - Complete Works (381 page)

   Nor is it advisable to attempt to
explain the case of Breuer’s patient from the point of view
of repression. That case history is not suited to this purpose,
because its findings were reached with the help of hypnotic
influence. It is only if you exclude hypnosis that you can observe
resistances and repressions and form an adequate idea of the truly
pathogenic course of events. Hypnosis conceals the resistance and
renders a certain area of the mind accessible; but, as against
this, it builds up the resistance at the frontiers of this area
into a wall that makes everything beyond it inaccessible.

   Our most valuable lesson from
Breuer’s observation was what it proved concerning the
relation between symptoms and pathogenic experiences or psychical
traumas, and we must not omit now to consider these discoveries
from the standpoint of the theory of repression. At first sight it
really seems impossible to trace a path from repression to the
formation of symptoms. Instead of giving a complicated theoretical
account, I will return here to the analogy which I employed earlier
for my explanation of repression. If you come to think of it, the
removal of the interrupter and the posting of the guardians at the
door may not mean the end of the story. It may very well be that
the individual who has been expelled, and who has now become
embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble. It is true
that he is no longer among us; we are free from his presence, from
his insulting laughter and his
sotto voce
comments. But in
some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful;
for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside
the room, and his shouting and banging on the door with his fists
interfere with my lecture even more than his bad behaviour did
before. In these circumstances we could not fail to be delighted if
our respected president, Dr. Stanley Hall, should be willing to
assume the role of mediator and peacemaker. He would have a talk
with the unruly person outside and would then come to us with a
request that he should be re-admitted after all: he himself would
guarantee that the man would now behave better. On Dr. Hall’s
authority we decide to lift the repression, and peace and quiet are
restored. This presents what is really no bad picture of the
physician’s task in the psycho-analytic treatment of the
neuroses.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2215

   To put the matter more directly.
The investigation of hysterical patients and of other neurotics
leads us to the conclusion that their repression of the idea to
which the intolerable wish is attached has been a
failure
.
It is true that they have driven it out of consciousness and out of
memory and have apparently saved themselves a large amount of
unpleasure.
But the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist
in the unconscious
. It is on the look-out for an opportunity of
being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into
consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable
substitute
for
what had been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the
same feelings of unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by
the repression. This substitute for the repressed idea - the
symptom
- is proof against further attacks from the
defensive ego; and in place of the short conflict an ailment now
appears which is not brought to an end by the passage of time.
Alongside the indication of distortion in the symptom, we can trace
in it the remains of some kind of indirect resemblance to the idea
that was originally repressed. The paths along which the
substitution was effected can be traced in the course of the
patient’s psycho-analytic treatment; and in order to bring
about recovery, the symptom must be led back along the same paths
and once more turned into the repressed idea. If what was repressed
is brought back again into conscious mental activity - a process
which presupposes the overcoming of considerable resistances - the
resulting psychical conflict, which the patient had tried to avoid,
can, under the physician’s guidance, reach a better outcome
than was offered by repression. There are a number of such
opportune solutions, which may bring the conflict and the neurosis
to a happy end, and which may in certain instances be combined. The
patient’s personality may be convinced that it has been wrong
in rejecting the pathogenic wish and may be led into accepting it
wholly or in part; or the wish itself may be directed to a higher
and consequently unobjectionable aim (this is what we call its
‘sublimation’); or the rejection of the wish may be
recognized as a justifiable one, but the automatic and therefore
inefficient mechanism of repression may be replaced by a condemning
judgement with the help of the highest human mental functions -
conscious control of the wish is attained.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2216

   You must forgive me if I have not
succeeded in giving you a more clearly intelligible account of
these basic positions adopted by the method of treatment that is
now described as ‘psycho-analysis’. The difficulties
have not lain only in the novelty of the subject. The nature of the
incompatible wishes which, in spite of repression, succeed in
making their existence in the unconscious perceptible, and the
subjective and constitutional determinants which must be present in
anyone before a failure of repression can occur and a substitute or
symptom be formed - on all this I shall have more light to throw in
some of my later observations.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2217

THIRD
LECTURE

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - It is not always easy to tell the truth
especially when one has to be concise; and I am thus to-day obliged
to correct a wrong statement that I made in my last lecture. I said
to you that, having dispensed with hypnosis, I insisted on my
patients nevertheless telling me what occurred to them in
connection with the subject under discussion, and assured them that
they really knew everything that they had ostensibly forgotten and
that the idea that occurred to them would infallibly contain what
we were in search of; and I went on to say to you that I found that
the first idea occurring to my patients did in fact produce the
right thing and turned out to be the forgotten continuation of the
memory. This, however, is not in general the case, and I only put
the matter so simply for the sake of brevity. Actually it was only
for the first few times that the right thing which had been
forgotten turned up as a result of simple insistence on my part.
When the procedure we carried further, ideas kept on emerging that
could not be the right ones, since they were not appropriate and
were rejected as being wrong by the patients themselves. Insistence
was of no further help at this point, and I found myself once more
regretting my abandonment of hypnosis.

   While I was thus at a loss, I
clung to a prejudice the scientific justification for which was
proved years later by my friend C. G. Jung and his pupils in
Zurich. I am bound to say that it is sometimes most useful to have
prejudices. I cherished a high opinion of the strictness with which
mental processes are determined, and I found it impossible to
believe that an idea produced by a patient while his attention was
on the stretch could be an arbitrary one and unrelated to the idea
we were in search of. The fact that the two ideas were not
identical could be satisfactorily explained from the postulated
psychological state of affairs. In the patient under treatment two
forces were in operation against each other: on the one hand, his
conscious endeavour to bring into consciousness the forgotten idea
in his unconscious, and on the other hand, the resistance we
already know about, which was striving to prevent what was
repressed or its derivatives from thus becoming conscious. If this
resistance amounted to little or nothing, what had been forgotten
became conscious without distortion. It was accordingly plausible
to suppose that the greater the resistance against what we were in
search of becoming conscious, the greater would be its distortion.
The idea which occurred to the patient in place of what we were in
search of had thus itself originated like a symptom: it was a new,
artificial and ephemeral substitute for what had been repressed,
and was dissimilar to it in proportion to the degree of distortion
it had undergone under the influence of the resistance. But, owing
to its nature as a symptom, it must nevertheless have a certain
similarity to what we were in search of; and if the resistance were
not too great, we ought to be able to guess the latter from the
former. The idea occurring to the patient must be in the nature of
an
allusion
to the repressed element, like a representation
of it in indirect speech.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2218

   We know cases in the field of
normal mental life in which situations analogous to the one we have
just assumed produce similar results. One such case is that of
jokes. The problems of psycho-analytic technique have compelled me
to investigate the technique of making jokes. I will give you one
example of this - incidentally, a joke in English.

   This is the anecdote.¹ Two
not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of
a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune,
and they were now making efforts to push their way into good
society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have
their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly-paid
artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The
precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening
party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential
connoisseur and art critic up to the wall on which the portraits
were hanging side by side. He studied the works for a long time,
and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had
missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly:
‘But where’s the Saviour?’² I see you are
all much amused at this joke. Let us now proceed to examine it.
Clearly what the connoisseur meant to say was: ‘You are a
couple of rogues, like the two thieves between whom the Saviour was
crucified.’ But he did not say this. Instead he made a remark
which seems at first sight strangely inappropriate and irrelevant,
but which we recognize a moment later as an
allusion
to the
insult that he had in mind and as a perfect substitute for it. We
cannot expect to find in jokes
all
the characteristics that
we have attributed to the ideas occurring to our patients, but we
must stress the identity of the
motive
for the joke and for
the idea. Why did the critic not tell the rogues straight out what
he wanted to say? Because he had excellent counter-motives working
against his desire to say it to their faces. There are risks
attendant upon insulting people who are one’s hosts and who
have at their command the fists of a large domestic staff. One
might easily meet with the fate which I suggested in my last
lecture as an analogy for repression. That was the reason why the
critic did not express the insult he had in mind directly but in
the form of an ‘allusion accompanied by omission’; and
the same state of things is responsible for our patients’
producing a more or less distorted
substitute
instead of the
forgotten idea we are in search of.

  
¹
Cf.
Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious
, 1905
c
.

  
²
[In English in the original.]

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2219

   It is highly convenient, Ladies
and Gentlemen, to follow the Zurich school (Bleuler, Jung, etc.) in
describing a group of interdependent ideational elements cathected
with affect as a ‘complex’. We see, then, that if in
our search for a repressed complex in one of our patients we start
out from the last thing he remembers, we shall have every prospect
of discovering the complex, provided that the patient puts a
sufficient number of his free associations at our disposal.
Accordingly, we allow the patient to say whatever he likes, and
hold fast to the postulate that nothing can occur to him which is
not in an indirect fashion dependent on the complex we are in
search of. If this method of discovering what is repressed strikes
you as unduly circumstantial, I can at least assure you that it is
the only practicable one.

   When we come to putting this
procedure into effect, we are subject to yet another interference.
For the patient will often pause and come to a stop, and assert
that he can think of nothing to say, and that nothing whatever
occurs to his mind. If this were so and if the patient were right,
then our procedure would once again have proved ineffective. But
closer observation shows that such a stoppage of the flow of ideas
never in fact occurs. It
appears
to happen only because the
patient holds back or gets rid of the idea that he has become aware
of, under the influence of the resistances which disguise
themselves as various critical judgements about the value of the
idea that has occurred to him. We can protect ourselves against
this by warning him beforehand of this behaviour and requiring him
to take no notice of such criticisms. He must, we tell him,
entirely renounce any critical selection of this kind and say
whatever comes into his head, even if he considers it incorrect or
irrelevant or nonsensical, and above all if he finds it
disagreeable to let himself think about what has occurred to him.
So long as this ordinance is carried out we are certain of
obtaining the material which will put us on the track of the
repressed complexes.