Freud - Complete Works (383 page)

  
¹
Cf.
The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
(1901
b
).

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2225

   As you already see,
psycho-analysts are marked by a particularly strict belief in the
determination of mental life. For them there is nothing trivial,
nothing arbitrary or haphazard. They expect in every case to find
sufficient motives where, as a rule, no such expectation is raised.
Indeed, they are prepared to find
several
motives for one
and the same mental occurrence, whereas what seems to be our innate
craving for causality declares itself satisfied with a
single
psychical cause.

   If you will now bring together
the means we possess for uncovering what is concealed, forgotten
and repressed in the mind (the study of the ideas occurring to
patients under free association, of their dreams and of their
faulty and symptomatic actions), and if you will add to these the
exploitation of certain other phenomena which occur during
psycho-analytic treatment and on which I shall have a few remarks
to make later under the heading of ‘transference’ - if
you bear all these in mind, you will agree with me in concluding
that our technique is already efficient enough to fulfil its task,
to bring the pathogenic psychical material into consciousness and
so to get rid of the ailments that have been brought about by the
formation of substitutive symptoms. And if, in the course of our
therapeutic endeavours, we extend and deepen our knowledge of the
human mind both in health and sickness, that can, of course, only
be regarded as a peculiar attraction in our work.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2226

   You may have formed an impression
that the technique through whose armoury I have just conducted you
is particularly difficult. In my opinion that technique is entirely
in conformity with the material with which it has to deal. But this
much at least is clear: it is not a self-evident one and it must be
learnt just as the techniques of histology or surgery must be
learnt. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that in Europe we
have heard a large number of judgements on psycho-analysis from
people who know nothing of this technique and do not employ it; and
who go on to demand with apparent scorn that we shall prove to them
the correctness of our findings. Among these adversaries there are
no doubt some to whom a scientific mode of thought is not as a rule
alien, who, for instance, would not reject the results of a
microscopic examination because it could not be confirmed on the
anatomical preparation with the naked eye, but who would first form
a judgement on the matter themselves with the help of a microscope.
But, where psycho-analysis is concerned, the prospects of
recognition are in truth less favourable. Psycho-analysis is
seeking to bring to conscious recognition the things in mental life
which are repressed; and everyone who forms a judgement on it is
himself a human being, who possesses similar repressions and may
perhaps be maintaining them with difficulty. They are therefore
bound to call up the same resistance in him as in our patients; and
that resistance finds it easy to disguise itself is an intellectual
rejection and to bring up arguments like those which we ward off in
our patients by means of the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis.
We often become aware in our opponents, just as we do in our
patients, that their power of judgement is very noticeably
influenced affectively in the sense of being diminished. The
arrogance of consciousness (in rejecting dreams with such contempt,
for instance) is one of the most powerful of the devices with which
we are provided as a universal protection against the incursion of
unconscious complexes. That is why it is so hard to convince people
of the reality of the unconscious and to teach them to recognize
something new which is in contradiction to their conscious
knowledge.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2227

FOURTH LECTURE

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - You will want to know now what we have found
out about the pathogenic complexes and repressed wishful impulses
of neurotics with the help of the technical methods I have
described.

   First and foremost we have found
out one thing. Psycho-analytic research traces back the symptoms of
patients’ illnesses with really surprising regularity to
impressions from their
erotic life
. It shows us that the
pathogenic wishful impulses are in the nature of erotic instinctual
components; and it forces us to suppose that among the influences
leading to the illness the predominant significance must be
assigned to erotic disturbances, and that this is the case in both
sexes.

   I am aware that this assertion of
mine will not be willingly believed. Even workers who are ready to
follow my psychological studies are inclined to think that I
over-estimate the part played by sexual factors; they meet me with
the question why
other
mental excitations should not lead to
the phenomena I have described of repression and the formation of
substitutes. I can only answer that I do not know why they should
not, and that I should have no objection to their doing so; but
experience shows that they do not carry this weight, that at most
they
support
the operation of the sexual factors but cannot
replace them. Far from this position having been postulated by me
theoretically, at the time of the joint publication of the
Studies
with Dr. Breuer in 1895 I had not yet adopted it;
and I was only converted to it when my experiences became more
numerous and penetrated into the subject more deeply. There are
among my present audience a few of my closest friends and
followers, who have travelled with me here to Worcester. Enquire
from them, and you will hear that they all began by completely
disbelieving my assertion that sexual aetiology was of decisive
importance, until their own analytic experiences compelled them to
accept it.

   A conviction of the correctness
of this thesis was not precisely made easier by the behaviour of
patients. Instead of willingly presenting us with information about
their sexual life, they try to conceal it by every means in their
power. People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They
do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a
heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather
were bad in the world of sexuality. Nor are they mistaken. It is a
fact that sun and wind are not favourable to sexual activity in
this civilized world of ours; none of us can reveal his erotism
freely to others. But when your patients discover that they can
feel quite easy about it while they are under your treatment, they
discard this veil of lies, and only then are you in a position to
form a judgement on this debatable question. Unluckily even doctors
are not preferred above other human creatures in their personal
relation to questions of sexual life, and many of them are under
the spell of the combination of prudery and prurience which governs
the attitude of most ‘civilized people’ in matters of
sexuality.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2228

   Let me now proceed with my
account of our findings. In another set of cases psycho-analytic
investigation traces the symptoms back, it is true, not to sexual
experiences but to commonplace traumatic ones. But this distinction
loses its significance owing to another circumstance. For the work
of analysis required for the thorough explanation and complete
recovery of a case never comes to a stop at events that occurred at
the time of the onset of the illness, but invariably goes back to
the patient’s puberty and early childhood; and it is only
there that it comes upon the impressions and events which
determined the later onset of the illness. It is only experiences
in childhood that explain susceptibility to later traumas and it is
only by uncovering these almost invariably forgotten memory-traces
and by making them conscious that we acquire the power to get rid
of the symptoms. And here we reach the same conclusion as in our
investigation of dreams: the imperishable, repressed wishful
impulses of childhood have alone provided the power for the
construction of symptoms, and without them the reaction to later
traumas would have taken a normal course. But these powerful
wishful impulses of childhood may without exception be described as
sexual.

   And now at last I am quite
certain that I have surprised you. ‘Is there such a thing,
then, as infantile sexuality?’ you will ask ‘Is not
childhood on the contrary the period of life that is marked by the
absence of the sexual instinct?’ No, Gentlemen, it is
certainly not the case that the sexual instinct enters into
children at the age of puberty in the way in which, in the Gospel,
the devil entered into the swine. A child has its sexual instincts
and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them;
and, after an important course of development passing through many
stages, they lead to what is known as the normal sexuality of the
adult. There is even no difficulty in observing the manifestations
of these sexual activities in children; on the contrary, it calls
for some skill to overlook them or explain them away.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2229

   By a lucky chance I am in a
position to call a witness in favour of my assertions from your
very midst. I have here in my hand a paper written by a Dr. Sanford
Bell, which was published in
The American Journal of
Psychology
in 1902. The author is a Fellow of Clark University,
of the very institution in whose lecture-room we are now assembled.
In this work, which is entitled ‘A Preliminary Study of the
Emotion of Love between the Sexes’, and which appeared three
years before my
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, the
author says exactly what I have just told you: ‘The emotion
of sex-love . . . does not make its appearance for
the first time at the period of adolescence, as has been
thought.’ He carried out his work in what we in Europe would
call ‘the American manner’, collecting no fewer than
2,500 positive observations in the course of fifteen years, among
them 800 of his own. Concerning the signs by which these instances
of falling in love are revealed he writes as follows: ‘The
unprejudiced mind in observing these manifestations in hundreds of
couples of children cannot escape referring them to sex origin. The
most exacting mind is satisfied when to these observations are
added the confessions of those who have, as children, experienced
the emotion to a marked degree of intensity and whose memories of
childhood are relatively distinct.’ But those of you who do
not wish to believe in infantile sexuality will be most of all
surprised to hear that not a few of these children who have fallen
in love so early are of the tender age of three, four and five.

   It would not astonish me if you
were to attach more credence to these observations made by one of
your closest neighbours than to mine. I myself have recently been
fortunate enough to obtain a fairly complete picture of the somatic
instinctual manifestations and mental products at an early stage of
a child’s erotic life from the analysis of a five-year-old
boy, suffering from anxiety - an analysis carried out with a
correct technique by his own father.¹ And I may remind you
that only a few hours ago, in this same room, my friend Dr. C. G.
Jung reported an observation to you made on a still younger girl
who, with a precipitating cause similar to my patient’s (the
birth of a younger child in the family), made it possible to infer
with certainty the presence of almost the same sensual impulses,
wishes and complexes. I do not despair, therefore, of your becoming
reconciled to what seems at first sight the strange idea of
infantile sexuality. And I should like to quote to you the
praiseworthy example of the Zurich psychiatrist, Dr. E. Bleuler,
who declared publicly not many years ago that he was ‘unable
to comprehend my theories of sexuality’, and who has since
then confirmed the existence of infantile sexuality to its full
extent from his own observations. (Cf. Bleuler, 1908.)

   It is only too easy to explain
why most people (whether medical observers or others) will hear
nothing of the sexual life of children. They have forgotten their
own infantile sexual activity under the pressure of their education
to a civilized life, and they do not wish to be reminded of what
has been repressed. They would arrive at other convictions if they
were to begin their enquiry with a self-analysis, a revision and
interpretation of their childhood memories.

  
¹
‘The Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-Year-Old Boy’.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2230

   Put away your doubts, then, and
join me in a consideration of infantile sexuality from the earliest
age.¹ A child’s sexual instinct turns out to be put
together out of a number of factors; it is capable of being divided
up into numerous components which originate from various sources.
Above all, it is still independent of the reproductive function,
into the service of which it will later be brought. It serves for
the acquisition of different kinds of pleasurable feeling, which,
basing ourselves on analogies and connections, we bring together
under the idea of sexual pleasure. The chief source of infantile
sexual pleasure is the appropriate excitation of certain parts of
the body that are especially susceptible to stimulus: apart from
the genitals, these are the oral, anal and urethral orifices, as
well as the skin and other sensory surfaces. Since at this first
phase of infantile sexual life satisfaction is obtained from the
subject’s own body and extraneous objects are disregarded, we
term this phase (from a word coined by Havelock Ellis) that of
auto-erotism
. We call the parts of the body that are
important in the acquisition of sexual pleasure ‘erotogenic
zones’. Thumb-sucking (or sensual sucking) in the youngest
infants is a good example of this auto-erotic satisfaction from an
erotogenic zone. The first scientific observer of this phenomenon,
a paediatrician in Budapest named Lindner (1879), already
interpreted it correctly as sexual satisfaction and described
exhaustively its transition to other and higher forms of sexual
activity. Another sexual satisfaction at this period of life is the
masturbatory excitation of the genitals, which retains so much
importance in later life and by many people is never completely
conquered. Alongside these and other auto-erotic activities, we
find in children at a very early age manifestations of those
instinctual components of sexual pleasure (or, as we like to say,
of libido) which presuppose the taking of an extraneous person as
an object. These instincts occur in pairs of opposites, active and
passive. I may mention as the most important representatives of
this group the desire to cause pain (sadism) with its passive
counterpart (masochism) and the active and passive desire for
looking, from the former of which curiosity branches off later on
and from the latter the impulsion to artistic and theatrical
display. Others of a child’s sexual activities already imply
the making of an ‘object-choice’, where an extraneous
person becomes the main feature, a person who owes his importance
in the first instance to considerations arising from the
self-preservative instinct. But at this early period of childhood
difference in sex plays no decisive part as yet. Thus you can
attribute some degree of homosexuality to every child without doing
him an injustice. This widespread and copious but dissociated
sexual life of children, in which each separate instinct pursues
its own acquisition of pleasure independently of all the rest, is
now brought together and organized in two main directions, so that
by the end of puberty the individual’s final sexual character
is as a rule completely formed. On the one hand, the separate
instincts become subordinated to the dominance of the genital zone,
so that the whole sexual life enters the service of reproduction,
and the satisfaction of the separate instincts retains its
importance only as preparing for and encouraging the sexual act
proper. On the other hand, object-choice pushes auto-erotism into
the background, so that in the subject’s erotic life all the
components of the sexual instinct now seek satisfaction in relation
to the person who is loved. Not all of the original sexual
components, however, are admitted to take part in this final
establishment of sexuality. Even before puberty extremely energetic
repressions of certain instincts have been effected under the
influence of education, and mental forces such as shame, disgust
and morality have been set up, which, like watchmen, maintain these
repressions. So that when at puberty the high tide of sexual
demands is reached, it is met by these mental reactive or resistant
structures like dams, which direct its flow into what are called
normal channels and make it impossible for it to reactivate the
instincts that have undergone repression. It is in particular the
coprophilic impulses of childhood - that is to say, the desires
attaching to the excreta - which are submitted the most rigorously
to repression, and the same is true, furthermore, of fixation to
the figures to which the child’s original object-choice was
attached.