Freud - Complete Works (439 page)

2615

TWO LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN

(1913)

2616

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2617

TWO LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN

We can understand children telling lies, when
in doing so, they are imitating the lies told by grown-up people.
But a number of lies told by well-brought-up children have a
particular significance and should cause those in charge of them to
reflect rather than be angry. These lies occur under the influence
of excessive feelings of love, and become momentous when they lead
to a misunderstanding between the child and the person it
loves.

I

   A girl of seven (in her second
year at school) had asked her father for some money to buy colours
for painting Easter eggs. Her father had refused, saying he had no
money. Shortly afterwards the girl asked her father for some money
for a contribution towards a wreath for the funeral of their
reigning princess, who had recently died. Each of the
schoolchildren was to bring fifty pfennigs. Her father gave her ten
marks; she paid her contribution, put nine marks on her
father’s writing-table, and with the remaining fifty pfennigs
bought some paints, which she hid in her toy cupboard. At dinner
her father asked suspiciously what she had done with the missing
fifty pfennigs, and whether she had not bought paints with them
after all. She denied it; but her brother, who was two years her
elder and with whom she had planned to paint the eggs, betrayed
her; the paints were found in the cupboard. The angry father handed
the culprit over to her mother for punishment, and it was severely
administered. Afterwards her mother was herself much shaken, when
she saw how great the child’s despair was. She caressed the
little girl after the punishment, and took her for a walk to
console her. But the effects of the experience, which were
described by the patient herself as the ‘turning-point in her
life’, proved to be ineradicable. Up to then she had been a
wild, self-confident child, afterwards she became shy and timid.
When she was engaged to be married and her mother undertook the
purchase of her furniture and her trousseau, she flew into a rage
which was incomprehensible even to herself. She had a feeling that
after all it was
her
money, and no one else ought to buy
anything with it. As a young wife she was shy of asking her husband
for any expenditure on her personal needs, and made an uncalled-for
distinction between ‘her’ money and his. During the
treatment it happened now and again that her husband’s
remittances to her were delayed, so that she was left without
resources in a foreign city. After she had told me this once, I
made her promise that if it happened again she would borrow the
small sum necessary from me. She promised to do so; but on the next
occasion of financial embarrassment she did not keep her promise,
but preferred to pawn her jewellery. She explained that she could
not take money from me.

Two Lies Told By Children

2618

   The appropriation of the fifty
pfennigs in her childhood had had a significance which her father
could not guess. Some time before she began going to school she had
played a singular prank with money. A neighbour with whom they were
friendly had sent the girl out with a small sum of money, in the
company of her own little boy who was even younger, to buy
something in a shop. Being the elder of the two, she was bringing
the change back home. But, meeting the neighbour’s servant in
the street, she threw the money down on the pavement. In the
analysis of this action, which she herself found inexplicable, the
thought of Judas occurred to her, who threw down the thirty pieces
of silver which he had been given for betraying his Master. She
said she was certainly acquainted with the story of the Passion
before she went to school. But in what way could she identify
herself with Judas?

   When she was three and a half she
had a nursemaid of whom she was extremely fond. This girl became
involved in a love affair with a doctor whose surgery she visited
with the child. It appears that at that time the child witnessed
various sexual proceedings. It is not certain whether she saw the
doctor give the girl money; but there is no doubt that, to make
sure of the child’s keeping silence, the girl gave her some
small coins, with which purchases were made (probably of sweets) on
the way home. It is possible too that the doctor himself
occasionally gave the child money. Nevertheless the child betrayed
the girl to her mother out of jealousy. She played so
ostentatiously with the coins she had brought home that her mother
could not help asking: ‘Where did you get that money?’
The girl was dismissed.

   To take money from anyone had
thus early come to mean to her a physical surrender, an erotic
relation. To take money from her father was equivalent to a
declaration of love. The phantasy that her father was her lover was
so seductive that with its help her childish wish for paints for
the Easter eggs easily put itself into effect in spite of the
prohibition. She could not admit, however, that she had
appropriated the money; she was obliged to disavow it, because her
motive for the deed, which was unconscious to herself, could not be
admitted. Her father’s punishment was thus a rejection of the
tenderness she was offering him - a humiliation - and so it broke
her spirit. During the treatment a period of severe depression
occurred (whose explanation led to her remembering the events
described here) when on one occasion I was obliged to reproduce
this humiliation by asking her not to bring me any more
flowers.

   For psycho-analysts I need hardly
emphasize the fact that in this little experience of the
child’s we have before us one of those extremely common cases
in which early anal erotism persists into later erotic life. Even
her desire to paint the eggs with colours derived from the same
source.

Two Lies Told By Children

2619

II

   A woman who is now seriously ill
in consequence of a frustration in life was in her earlier years a
particularly capable, truth-loving, serious and virtuous girl, and
became an affectionate wife. But still earlier, in the first years
of her life, she had been a wilful and discontented child, and,
though she had changed fairly quickly into an excessively good and
conscientious one, there were occurrences in her schooldays, which,
when she fell ill, caused her deep self-reproaches, and were
regarded by her as proofs of fundamental depravity. Her memory told
her that in those days she had often bragged and lied. Once on the
way to school a school-fellow had said boastfully: ‘Yesterday
we had ice at dinner.’ She replied: ‘Oh we have ice
every day.’ In reality she did not know what ice at dinner
could mean; she only knew ice in the long blocks in which it is
carted about, but she assumed that there must be something grand in
having it for dinner, so she refused to be outdone by her
school-fellow.

   When she was ten years old, they
were set the task in the drawing lesson of making a free-hand
drawing of a circle. But she used a pair of compasses, thus easily
producing a perfect circle, and showed her achievement in triumph
to her neighbour in class. The mistress came up, heard her
boasting, discovered the marks of the compasses in the circle, and
questioned the girl. But she stubbornly denied what she had done,
would not give way to any evidence, and took refuge in sullen
silence. The mistress consulted with her father about it. They were
both influenced by the girl’s usually good behaviour into
deciding not to take any further steps about the matter.

   Both the child’s lies were
instigated by the same complex. As the eldest of five children, the
little girl early developed an unusually strong attachment to her
father, which was destined when she was grown up to wreck her
happiness in life. But she could not long escape the discovery that
her beloved father was not so great a personage as she was inclined
to think him. He had to struggle against money difficulties; he was
not so powerful or so distinguished as she had imagined. But she
could not put up with this departure from her ideal. Since, as
women do, she based all her ambition on the man she loved, she
became too strongly dominated by the motive of supporting her
father against the world. So she boasted to her school-fellows, in
order not to have to belittle her father. When, later on, she
learned to translate ice for dinner by ‘
glace
’,
her self-reproaches about this reminiscence led her by an easy path
into a pathological dread of pieces or splinters of glass.

   Her father was an excellent
draughtsman, and had often enough excited the delight and
admiration of the children by exhibitions of his skill. It was as
an identification of herself with her father that she had drawn the
circle at school - which she could only do successfully by
deceitful methods. It was as though she wanted to boast:
‘Look at what my father can do!’ The sense of guilt
that was attached to her excessive fondness for her father found
its expression in connection with her attempted deception; an
admission was impossible for the same reason that was given in the
first of these observations: it would inevitably have been an
admission of her hidden incestuous love.

Two Lies Told By Children

2620

   We should not think lightly of
such episodes in the life of children. It would be a serious
mistake to read into childish misdemeanours like these a prognosis
of the development of a bad character. Nevertheless, they are
intimately connected with the most powerful motive forces in
children’s minds, and give notice of dispositions that will
lead to later eventualities in their lives or to future
neuroses.

2621

THE DISPOSITION TO OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

A
CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE OF NEUROSIS

(1913)

2622

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2623

THE DISPOSITION TO OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

A
CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE OF NEUROSIS

The problem of why and how a person may fall
ill of a neurosis is certainly among those to which psycho-analysis
should offer a solution. But it will probably be necessary to find
a solution first to another and narrower problem - namely, why it
is that this or that person must fall ill of a particular neurosis
and of none other. This is the problem of ‘choice of
neurosis’.

   What do we know so far about this
problem? Strictly speaking, only one single general proposition can
be asserted on the subject with certainty. It will be recalled that
we divide the pathogenic determinants concerned in the neuroses
into those which a person brings along with him into his life and
those which life brings to him - the constitutional and the
accidental - by whose combined operation alone the pathogenic
determinant is as a rule established. The general proposition,
then, which I have alluded to above, lays it down that the grounds
for determining the choice of neurosis are entirely of the former
kind - that is, that they are in the nature of dispositions and are
independent of experiences which operate pathogenically.

   Where are we to look for the
source of these dispositions? We have become aware that the
psychical functions concerned - above all, the sexual function, but
various important ego-functions too - have to undergo a long and
complicated development before reaching the state characteristic of
the normal adult. We can assume that these developments are not
always so smoothly carried out that the total function passes
through this regular progressive modification. Wherever a portion
of it clings to a previous stage, what is known as a ‘point
of fixation’ results, to which the function may regress if
the subject falls ill through some external disturbance.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2624

   Thus our dispositions are
inhibitions in development. We are confirmed in this view by the
analogy of the facts of general pathology of other illnesses. But
before the question as to what factors can bring about such
disturbances of development the work of psycho-analysis comes to a
stop: it leaves that problem to biological research.¹

   Already a few years back we
ventured, with the help of these hypotheses, to approach the
problem of choice of neurosis. Our method of work, which aims at
discovering normal conditions by studying their disturbances, led
us to adopt a very singular and unexpected line of attack. The
order in which the main forms of psychoneurosis are usually
enumerated - Hysteria, Obsessional Neurosis, Paranoia, Dementia
Praecox - corresponds (even though not quite exactly) to the order
of the ages at which the onset of these disorders occurs.
Hysterical forms of illness can be observed even in earliest
childhood; obsessional neurosis usually shows its first symptoms in
the second period of childhood (between the ages of six and eight);
while the two other psychoneuroses, which I have brought together
under the heading of ‘paraphrenia’, do not appear until
after puberty and during adult life. It is these disorders - the
last to emerge - which were the first to show themselves accessible
to our enquiry into the dispositions that result in the choice of
neurosis. The characteristics peculiar to both of them -
megalomania, turning away from the world of objects, increased
difficulty in transference - have obliged us to conclude that their
dispositional fixation is to be looked for in a stage of libidinal
development
before
object-choice has been established - that
is in the phase of auto-erotism and of narcissism. Thus these forms
of illness, which make their appearance so late, go back to very
early inhibitions and fixations.

  
¹
Since Wilhelm Fliess’s writings have
revealed the biological significance of certain periods of time it
has become conceivable that disturbances of development may be
traceable to temporal changes in the successive waves of
development.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2625

   This would accordingly lead us to
suppose that the disposition to hysteria and obsessional neurosis,
the two transference neuroses proper, which produce their symptoms
at an early age, lies in later phases of libidinal development. But
at what point in them should we find a developmental inhibition?
and, above all, what would be the difference in phases that would
determine a disposition to obsessional neurosis as contrasted with
hysteria? For a long time nothing was to be learned about this; and
my earlier attempts at discovering these two dispositions - the
notion, for instance, that hysteria might be determined by
passivity and obsessional neurosis by activity in infantile
experience - had soon to be abandoned as incorrect.

   I shall now take my footing once
more on the clinical observation of an individual case. Over a long
period I studied a woman patient whose neurosis underwent an
unusual change. It began, after a traumatic experience, as a
straightforward anxiety hysteria and retained that character for a
few years. One day, however, it suddenly changed into an
obsessional neurosis of the severest type. A case of this kind
could not fail to become significant in more than one direction. On
the one hand, it might perhaps claim to be looked upon like a
bilingual document and to show how an identical content could be
expressed by the two neuroses in different languages. On the other
hand, it threatened to contradict completely our theory that
disposition arises from developmental inhibition, unless we were
prepared to accept the supposition that a person could innately
possess more than one weak spot in his libidinal development. I
told myself that we had no right to dismiss this latter
possibility; but I was greatly interested to arrive at an
understanding of the case.

   When in the course of the
analysis this came about, I was forced to see that the situation
was quite different from what I had imagined. The obsessional
neurosis was not a further reaction to the same trauma which had
first provoked the anxiety hysteria; it was a reaction to a second
experience, which had completely wiped out the first. (Here, then,
we have an exception - though, it is true, a not indisputable one -
to our proposition affirming that choice of neurosis is independent
of experience.)

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2626

   Unfortunately I am unable, for
familiar reasons, to enter into the history of the case as far as I
should like, and I must restrict myself to the account which
follows. Up to the time of her falling ill the patient had been a
happy and almost completely satisfied wife. She wanted to have
children, from motives based on an infantile fixation of her
wishes, and she fell ill when she learned that it was impossible
for her to have any by the husband who was the only object of her
love. The anxiety hysteria with which she reacted to this
frustration corresponded, as she herself soon learned to
understand, to the repudiation of phantasies of seduction in which
her firmly implanted wish for a child found expression. She now did
all she could to prevent her husband from guessing that she had
fallen ill owing to the frustration of which he was the cause. But
I have had good reason for asserting that everyone possesses in his
own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the
utterances of the unconscious in other people. Her husband
understood, without any admission or explanation on her part, what
his wife’s anxiety meant; he felt hurt, without showing it,
and in his turn reacted neurotically by - for the first time -
failing in sexual intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he
started on a journey. His wife believed that he had become
permanently impotent, and produced her first obsessional symptoms
on the day before his expected return.

   The content of her obsessional
neurosis was a compulsion for scrupulous washing and cleanliness
and extremely energetic protective measures against severe injuries
which she thought other people had reason to fear from her - that
is to say, reaction-formations against her own
anal-erotic
and
sadistic
impulses. Her sexual need was obliged to find
expression in these shapes after her genital life had lost all its
value owing to the impotence of the only man of whom there could be
any question for her.

   This is the starting-point of the
small new fragment of theory which I have formulated. It is of
course only in appearance that it is based on this one observation;
actually it brings together a large number of earlier impressions,
though an understanding of them was only made possible by this last
experience. I told myself that my schematic picture of the
development of the libidinal function called for an extra insertion
in it. To begin with, I had only distinguished, first the phase of
auto-erotism during which the subject’s component instincts,
each on its own account, seek for the satisfaction of their desires
in his own body, and then the combination of all the component
instincts for the choice of an object, under the primacy of the
genitals acting on behalf of reproduction. The analysis of the
paraphrenias has, as we know, necessitated the insertion between
them of a stage of narcissism, during which the choice of an object
has already taken place but that object coincides with the
subject’s own ego. And now we see the need for yet another
stage to be inserted before the final shape is reached - a stage in
which the component instincts have already come together for the
choice of an object and that object is already something extraneous
in contrast to the subject’s own self, but in which
the
primacy of the genital zones has not yet been established
. On
the contrary, the component instincts which dominate this
pregenital organization
of sexual life are the anal-erotic
and sadistic ones.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2627

   I am aware that any such
hypotheses sound strange at first. It is only by discovering their
relations to our former knowledge that they become familiar to us;
and in the end it is often their fate to be regarded as minor and
long-foreseen innovations. Let us therefore turn with anticipations
such as these to a discussion of the ‘pregenital sexual
organization’.

   (
a
) The extraordinary part
played by impulses of hatred and anal erotism in the symptomatology
of obsessional neurosis has already struck many observers and has
recently been emphasized with particular clarity by Ernest Jones
(1913). This follows directly from our hypothesis if we suppose
that in that neurosis the component instincts in question have once
more taken over the representation of the genital instincts, whose
forerunners they were in the process of development.

   At this point a portion of our
case history fits in, which I have so far kept back. The
patient’s sexual life began in her earliest childhood with
beating-phantasies. After they were suppressed, an unusually long
period of latency set in, during which the girl passed through a
period of exalted moral growth, without any awakening of female
sexual feelings. Her marriage, which took place at an early age,
opened a time of normal sexual activity. This period, during which
she was a happy wife, continued for a number of years, until her
first great frustration brought on the hysterical neurosis. When
this was followed by her genital life losing all its value, her
sexual life, as I have said, returned to the infantile stage of
sadism.

   It is not difficult to determine
the characteristic which distinguishes this case of obsessional
neurosis from those more frequent ones which start at an early age
and thereafter run a chronic course with exacerbations of a more or
less striking kind. In these other cases, once the sexual
organization which contains the disposition to obsessional neurosis
is established it is never afterwards completely surmounted; in our
case it was replaced to begin with by the higher stage of
development, and was then re-activated by regression from the
latter.

The Disposition To Obsessional Neurosis

2628

   (
b
) If we wish to bring
our hypothesis into contact with biological lines of thought, we
must not forget that the antithesis between male and female, which
is introduced by the reproductive function, cannot be present as
yet at the stage of pregenital object-choice. We find in its place
the antithesis between trends with an active and with a passive
aim, an antithesis which later becomes firmly attached to that
between the sexes. Activity is supplied by the common instinct of
mastery, which we call sadism when we find it in the service of the
sexual function; and even in fully developed normal sexual life it
has important subsidiary services to perform. The passive trend is
fed by anal erotism, whose erotogenic zone corresponds to the old,
undifferentiated cloaca. A stressing of this anal erotism in the
pregenital stage of organization leaves behind a significant
predisposition to homosexuality in men when the next stage of the
sexual function, the primacy of the genitals, is reached. The way
in which this last phase is erected upon the preceding one and the
accompanying remoulding of the libidinal cathexes present analytic
research with the most interesting problems.