Freud - Complete Works (384 page)

  
¹
Cf.
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
(1905
d
).

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2231

   There is a dictum in general
pathology, Gentlemen, which asserts that every developmental
process carries with it the seed of a pathological disposition, in
so far as that process may be inhibited, delayed, or may run its
course incompletely. The same thing is true of the highly
complicated development of the sexual function. It does not occur
smoothly in every individual; and, if not, it leaves behind it
either abnormalities or a predisposition to fall ill later, along
the path of involution (i.e. regression). It may happen that not
all the component instincts submit to the dominance of the genital
zone. An instinct which remains in this way independent leads to
what we describe as a
perversion
, and may substitute its own
sexual aim for the normal one. It very often happens, as I have
already said, that auto-erotism is not completely conquered, and
evidence of this is given by a great variety of subsequent
disturbances. The originally equal value attached to the two sexes
as sexual objects may persist, and this will lead to a tendency in
adult life to homosexual activity, which can in certain
circumstances be intensified into exclusive homosexuality. These
classes of disturbance represent direct inhibitions in the
development of the sexual function; they comprise the perversions
and, what is by no means rare, general infantilism in sexual
life.

   The predisposition to
neurosis
is traceable to impaired sexual development in a
different way. Neuroses are related to perversions as negative to
positive. The same instinctual components as in the perversions can
be observed in the neuroses as vehicles of complexes and
constructors of symptoms, but in the latter case they operate from
the unconscious. Thus they have undergone repression, but have been
able, in defiance of it, to persist in the unconscious.
Psycho-analysis makes it clear that an excessively strong
manifestation of these instincts at a very early age leads to a
kind of partial
fixation
, which then constitutes a weak
point in the structure of the sexual function. If in maturity the
performance of the normal sexual function comes up against
obstacles, the repression that took place during the course of
development will be broken through at the precise points at which
the infantile fixations occurred.

   But here you will perhaps protest
that all this is not sexuality. I have been using the word in a far
wider sense than that in which you have been accustomed to
understand it. So much I am quite ready to grant you. But the
question arises whether it is not rather you who have been using
the word in far too narrow a sense by restricting it to the sphere
of reproduction. It means that you are sacrificing an understanding
of the perversions and the connection between the perversions, the
neuroses and normal sexual life; and you are making it impossible
for you to recognize in its true significance the easily observable
beginnings of the somatic and mental erotic life of children. But
however you may choose to decide the verbal usage, you should bear
firmly in mind that psycho-analysts understand sexuality in the
full sense to which one is led by a consideration of infantile
sexuality.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2232

   Let us return to the sexual
development of children. We have some arrears to make up owing to
our having paid more attention to the somatic than to the mental
phenomena of sexual life. The child’s first choice of an
object, which derives from its need for help, claims our further
interest. Its choice is directed in the first instance to all those
who look after it, but these soon give place to its parents.
Children’s relations to their parents, as we learn alike from
direct observations of children and from later analytic examination
of adults, are by no means free from elements of accompanying
sexual excitation. The child takes both of its parents, and more
particularly one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes. In so
doing, it usually follows some indication from its parents, whose
affection bears the clearest characteristics of a sexual activity,
even though of one that is inhibited in its aims. As a rule a
father prefers his daughter and a mother her son; the child reacts
to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father’s
place, and, if she is a daughter, her mother’s. The feelings
which are aroused in these relations between parents and children
and in the resulting ones between brothers and sisters are not only
of a positive or affectionate kind but also of a negative or
hostile one. The complex which is thus formed is doomed to early
repression; but it continues to exercise a great and lasting
influence from the unconscious. It is to be suspected that,
together with its extensions, it constitutes the
nuclear
complex
of every neurosis, and we may expect to find it no less
actively at work in other regions of mental life. The myth of King
Oedipus, who killed his father and took his mother to wife,
reveals, with little modification, the infantile wish, which is
later opposed and repudiated by the
barrier against incest
.
Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
is equally rooted in the soil of
the incest-complex, but under a better disguise.

   During the time when the child is
dominated by the still unrepressed nuclear complex, an important
part of his intellectual activity is brought into the service of
his sexual interests. He begins to enquire where babies come from,
and, on the basis of the evidence presented to him, guesses more of
the true facts than the grown-ups imagine. His interest in these
researches is usually set going by the very real threat offered to
him by the arrival of a new baby, which to begin with he regards
merely as a competitor. Under the influence of the component
instincts that are active in himself, he arrives at a number of
‘infantile sexual theories’ - such as attributing a
male genital organ to both sexes alike, or supposing that babies
are conceived by eating and born through the end of the bowel, or
regarding sexual intercourse as a hostile act, a kind of violent
subjugation. But as a result precisely of the incompleteness of his
sexual constitution, and of the gap in his knowledge due to the
hidden nature of the female sexual channel, the young investigator
is obliged to abandon his work as a failure. The fact of this
childish research itself, as well as the different infantile sexual
theories that it brings to light, remain of importance in
determining the formation of the child’s character and the
content of any later neurotic illness.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2233

   It is inevitable and perfectly
normal that a child should take his parents as the first objects of
his love. But his libido should not remain fixated to these first
objects; later on, it should merely take them as a model, and
should make a gradual transition from them on to extraneous people
when the time for the final choice of an object arrives. The
detachment of the child from his parents is thus a task that cannot
be evaded if the young individual’s social fitness is not to
be endangered. During the time at which repression is making its
selection among the component instincts, and later, when there
should be a slackening of the parents’ influence, which is
essentially responsible for the expenditure of energy on these
repressions, the task of education meets with great problems, which
at the present time are certainly not always dealt with in an
understanding and unobjectionable manner.

   You must not suppose, Ladies and
Gentlemen, that these discussions on sexual life and the
psychosexual development of children have led us too far from
psycho-analysis and the problem of curing nervous disorders. You
can, if you like, regard psycho-analytic treatment as no more than
a prolongation of education for the purpose of overcoming the
residues of childhood.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2234

FIFTH
LECTURE

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - With the discovery of infantile sexuality and
the tracing back of neurotic symptoms to erotic instinctual
components we have arrived at some unexpected formulas concerning
the nature and purposes of neurotic illnesses. We see that human
beings fall ill when, as a result of external obstacles or of an
internal lack of adaptation, the satisfaction of their erotic needs
in reality
frustrated. We see that they then take flight
into
illness
in order that by its help they may find a
satisfaction to take the place of what has been frustrated. We
recognize that the pathological symptoms constitute a portion of
the subject’s sexual activity or even the whole of his sexual
life, and we find that the withdrawal from reality is the main
purpose of the illness but also the main damage caused by it. We
suspect that our patients’ resistance to recovery is no
simple one, but compounded of several motives. Not only does the
patient’s ego rebel against giving up the repressions by
means of which it has risen above its original disposition, but the
sexual instincts are unwilling to renounce their substitutive
satisfaction so long as it is uncertain whether reality will offer
them anything better.

   The flight from unsatisfactory
reality into what, on account of the biological damage involved, we
call illness (though it is never without an immediate yield of
pleasure to the patient) takes place along the path of involution,
of regression, of a return to earlier phases of sexual life, phases
from which at one time satisfaction was not withheld. This
regression appears to be a twofold one: a
temporal
one, in
so far as the libido, the erotic needs, hark back to stages of
development that are earlier in time, and a
formal
one, in
that the original and primitive methods of psychical expression are
employed in manifesting those needs. Both these kinds of
regression, however, lead back to childhood and unite in bringing
about an infantile condition of sexual life.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2235

   The deeper you penetrate into the
pathogenesis of nervous illness, the more you will find revealed
the connection between the neuroses and other productions of the
human mind, including the most valuable. You will be taught that we
humans, with the high standards of our civilization and under the
pressure of our internal repressions, find reality unsatisfying
quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy
in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality by
the production of wish-fulfilments. These phantasies include a
great deal of the true constitutional essence of the
subject’s personality as well as of those of his impulses
which are repressed where reality is concerned. The energetic and
successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his
wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of
the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s
own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws
into his more satisfying world of phantasy, the content of which is
transformed into symptoms should he fall ill. In certain favourable
circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another
path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming
permanently estranged from it by regressing to infancy. If a person
who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an
artistic
gift
(a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he
can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of
into symptoms. In this manner he can escape the doom of neurosis
and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality. (Cf.
Rank, 1907.) If there is persistent rebellion against the real
world and if this precious gift is absent or insufficient, it is
almost inevitable that the libido, keeping to the sources of the
phantasies, will follow the path of regression, and will revive
infantile wishes and end in neurosis. To-day neurosis takes the
place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom
life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.

   Let me at this point state the
principal finding to which we have been led by the psycho-analytic
investigation of neurotics. The neuroses have no psychical content
that is peculiar to them and that might not equally be found in
healthy people. Or, as Jung has expressed it, neurotics fall ill of
the same complexes against which we healthy people struggle as
well. Whether that struggle ends in health, in neurosis, or in a
countervailing superiority of achievement, depends on
quantitative
considerations, on the relative strength of the
conflicting forces.

Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

2236

   I have not yet told you, Ladies
and Gentlemen, of the most important of the observations which
confirm our hypothesis of the sexual instinctual forces operating
in neuroses. In every psycho-analytic treatment of a neurotic
patient the strange phenomenon that is known as
‘transference’ makes its appearance. The patient, that
is to say, directs towards the physician a degree of affectionate
feeling (mingled, often enough, with hostility) which is based on
no real relation between them and which - as is shown by every
detail of its emergence - can only be traced back to old wishful
phantasies of the patient’s which have become unconscious.
Thus the part of the patient’s emotional life which he can no
longer recall to memory is re-experienced by him in his relation to
the physician; and it is only this re-experiencing in the
‘transference’ that convinces him of the existence and
of the power of these unconscious sexual impulses. His symptoms, to
take an analogy from chemistry, are precipitates of earlier
experiences in the sphere of love (in the widest sense of the
word), and it is only in the raised temperature of his experience
of the transference that they can be resolved and reduced to other
psychical products. In this reaction the physician, if I may borrow
an apt phrase from Ferenczi (1909), plays the part of a catalytic
ferment, which temporarily attracts to itself the affects liberated
in the process. A study of transference, too, can give you the key
to an understanding of hypnotic suggestion, which we employed to
begin with as a technical method for investigating the unconscious
in our patients. At that time hypnosis was found to be a help
therapeutically, but a hindrance to the scientific understanding of
the facts; for it cleared away the psychical resistances in a
certain area while building them up into an unscalable wall at its
frontiers. You must not suppose, moreover, that the phenomenon of
transference (of which, unfortunately, I can tell you all too
little to-day) is
created
by psycho-analytic influence.
Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships just
as it does between the patient and the physician. It is everywhere
the true vehicle of therapeutic influence; and the less its
presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates. So
psycho-analysis does not create it, but merely reveals it to
consciousness and gains control of it in order to guide psychical
processes towards the desired goal. I cannot, however, leave the
topic of transference without stressing the fact that this
phenomenon plays a decisive part in bringing conviction not only to
the patient but also to the physician. I know it to be true of all
my followers that they were only convinced of the correctness of my
assertions on the pathogenesis of the neuroses by their experiences
with transference; and I can very well understand that such
certainty of judgement cannot be attained before one has carried
out psycho-analyses and has oneself observed the workings of
transference.