Freud - Complete Works (469 page)
¹
Or, more correctly, their parental
complex.
²
Since I am used to being misunderstood, I
think it worth while to insist explicitly that the derivations
which I have proposed in these pages do not in the least overlook
the complexity of the phenomena under review. All that they claim
is to have added a new factor to the sources, known or still
unknown, of religion, morality and society - a factor based on a
consideration of the implications of psycho-analysis. I must leave
to others the task of synthesizing the explanation into a unity. It
does, however, follow from the nature of the new contribution that
it could not play any other than a central part in such a
synthesis, even though powerful emotional resistance might have to
be overcome before its great importance was recognized.
Totem And Taboo
2797
Further reflection, however, will
show that I am not alone in the responsibility for this bold
procedure. Without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes
it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by
the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general
cannot exist. Unless psychical processes were continued from one
generation to another, if each generation were obliged to acquire
its attitude to life anew, there would be no progress in this field
and next to no development. This gives rise to two further
questions: how much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the
sequence of generations? and what are the ways and means employed
by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next
one? I shall not pretend that these problems are sufficiently
explained or that direct communication and tradition - which are
the first things that occur to one - are enough to account for the
process. Social psychology shows very little interest, on the
whole, in the manner in which the required continuity in the mental
life of successive generations is established. A part of the
problem seems to be met by the inheritance of psychical
dispositions which, however, need to be given some sort of impetus
in the life of the individual before they can be roused into actual
operation. This may be the meaning of the poet’s words:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.
¹
The problem would seem even more difficult if
we had to admit that mental impulses could be so completely
suppressed as to leave no trace whatever behind them. But that is
not the case. Even the most ruthless suppression must leave room
for distorted surrogate impulses and for reactions resulting from
them. If so, however, we may safely assume that no generation is
able to conceal any of its more important mental processes from its
successor. For psycho-analysis has shown us that everyone possesses
in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him
to interpret other people’s reactions, that is, to undo the
distortions which other people have imposed on the expression of
their feelings. An unconscious understanding such as this of all
the customs, ceremonies and dogmas left behind by the original
relation to the father may have made it possible for later
generations to take over their heritage of emotion.
¹
[‘What thou hast inherited from thy
fathers, acquire it to make it thine.’]
Totem And Taboo
2798
Another difficulty might actually
be brought forward from psycho-analytic quarters. The earliest
moral precepts and restrictions in primitive society have been
explained by us as reactions to a deed which gave those who
performed it the concept of ‘crime’. They felt remorse
for the deed and decided that it should never be repeated and that
its performance should bring no advantage. This creative sense of
guilt still persists among us. We find it operating in an asocial
manner in neurotics, and producing new moral precepts and
persistent restrictions, as an atonement for crimes that have been
committed and as a precaution against the committing of new
ones.¹ If, however, we inquire among these neurotics to
discover what were the deeds which provoked these reactions, we
shall be disappointed. We find no deeds, but only impulses and
emotions, set upon evil ends but held back from their achievement.
What lie behind the sense of guilt of neurotics are always
psychical
realities and never
factual
ones. What
characterizes neurotics is that they prefer psychical to factual
reality and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do
to realities.
May not the same have been true
of primitive men? We are justified in believing that, as one
of the phenomena of their narcissistic organization, they
overvalued their psychical acts to an extraordinary degree.²
Accordingly the mere hostile
impulse
against the father, the
mere existence of a wishful
phantasy
of killing and
devouring him, would have been enough to produce the moral reaction
that created totemism and taboo. In this way we should avoid the
necessity for deriving the origin of our cultural legacy, of which
we justly feel so proud, from a hideous crime, revolting to all our
feelings. No damage would thus be done to the causal chain
stretching from the beginning to the present day, for psychical
reality would be strong enough to bear the weight of these
consequences. To this it may be objected that an alteration in the
form of society from a patriarchal horde to a fraternal clan did
actually take place. This is a powerful argument, but not a
conclusive one. The alteration might have been effected in a less
violent fashion and none the less have been capable of determining
the appearance of the moral reaction. So long as the pressure
exercised by the primal father could be felt, the hostile feelings
towards him were justified, and remorse on their account would have
to await a later day. And if it is further argued that everything
derived from the ambivalent relation to the father - taboo and the
sacrificial ordinance - is characterized by the deepest seriousness
and the most complete reality, this further objection carries just
as little weight. For the ceremonials and inhibitions of
obsessional neurotics show these same characteristics and are
nevertheless derived only from psychical reality - from intentions
and not from their execution. We must avoid transplanting a
contempt for what is merely thought or wished from our commonplace
world, with its wealth of material values, into the world of
primitive men and neurotics, of which the wealth lies only within
themselves.
¹
Cf. the essay on taboo, the second in this
work.
²
Cf. the third essay in this
work.
Totem And Taboo
2799
Here we are faced by a decision
which is indeed no easy one. First, however, it must be confessed
that the distinction, which may seem fundamental to other people,
does not in our judgement affect the heart of the matter. If wishes
and impulses have the full value of facts for primitive men, it is
our business to give their attitude our understanding attention
instead of correcting it in accordance with our own standards. Let
us, then, examine more closely the case of neurosis - comparison
with which led us into our present uncertainty. It is not accurate
to say that obsessional neurotics, weighed down under the burden of
an excessive morality, are defending themselves only against
psychical
reality and are punishing themselves for impulses
which were merely
felt
.
Historical
reality has a
share in the matter as well. In their childhood they had these evil
impulses pure and simple, and turned them into acts so far as the
impotence of childhood allowed. Each of these excessively virtuous
individuals passed though an evil period in his infancy - a phase
of perversion which was the forerunner and precondition of the
later period of excessive morality. The analogy between primitive
men and neurotics will therefore be far more fully established if
we suppose that in the former instance, too, psychical reality - as
to the form taken by which we are in no doubt - coincided at the
beginning with factual reality: that primitive men actually
did
what all the evidence shows that they intended to
do.
Nor must we let ourselves be
influenced too far in our judgement of primitive men by the analogy
of neurotics. There are distinctions, too, which must be borne in
mind. It is no doubt true that the sharp contrast that
we
make between thinking and doing is absent in both of them. But
neurotics are above all
inhibited
in their actions: with
them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed. Primitive
men, on the other hand, are
uninhibited
: thought passes
directly into action. With them it is rather the deed that is a
substitute for the thought. And that is why, without laying claim
to any finality of judgement, I think that in the case before us it
may safely be assumed that ‘in the beginning was the
Deed’.
2800
THE CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO SCIENTIFIC INTEREST
(1913)
2801
Intentionally left blank
2802
THE CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO SCIENTIFIC INTEREST
PART I
THE
PSYCHOLOGICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
Psycho-analysis is a medical procedure which
aims at the cure of certain forms of nervous disease (the neuroses)
by a psychological technique. In a small volume published in
1910.¹ I described the evolution of psycho-analysis from Josef
Breuer’s cathartic procedure and its relation to the theories
of Charcot and Pierre Janet.
We may give as instances of
disorders that are accessible to psycho-analytic treatment
hysterical convulsions and paralyses as well as the various
symptoms of obsessional neurosis (obsessive ideas and actions). All
of these are conditions which are occasionally subject to
spontaneous recovery and are dependent on the personal influence of
the physician in a haphazard fashion which has not yet been
explained. Psycho-analysis has no therapeutic effect on the severer
forms of mental disorder properly so called. But - for the first
time in the history of medicine - psycho-analysis has made it
possible to get some insight into the origin and mechanism alike of
the neuroses and psychoses.
This medical significance of
psycho-analysis would not, however, justify me in bringing it to
the notice of a circle of
savants
concerned in the synthesis
of the sciences. And such a plan must seem particularly premature
so long as a large number of psychiatrists and neurologists are
opposed to the new therapeutic method and reject both its
postulates and its findings. If, nevertheless, I regard the
experiment as a legitimate one, it is because psycho-analysis can
also claim to be of interest to others than psychiatrists, since it
touches upon various other spheres of knowledge and reveals
unexpected relations between them and the pathology of mental
life.
Accordingly in my present paper I
shall leave the medical interest of psycho-analysis on one side and
illustrate what I have just asserted of the young science by a
series of examples.
¹
Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis
.
The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest
2803
There are a large number of
phenomena related to facial and other expressive movements and to
speech, as well as many processes of thought (both in normal and
sick people), which have hitherto escaped the notice of psychology
because they have been regarded as no more than the results of
organic disorder or of some abnormal failure in function of the
mental apparatus. What I have in mind are ‘parapraxes’
(slips of the tongue or pen, forgetfulness, etc.), haphazard
actions and dreams in normal people, and convulsive attacks,
deliria, visions, and obsessive ideas or acts in neurotic subjects.
These phenomena (in so far as they were not entirely neglected, as
was the case with the parapraxes) were relegated to pathology and
an attempt was made to find ‘physiological’
explanations of them, though these were invariably unsatisfactory.
Psycho-analysis, on the contrary, has been able to show that all
these things can be explained by means of hypotheses of a purely
psychological nature and can be fitted into the chain of psychical
events already known to us. Thus on the one hand psycho-analysis
has narrowed the region subject to the physiological point of view
and on the other hand has brought a large section of pathology into
the sphere of psychology. In this instance the normal phenomena
provide the more convincing evidence. Psycho-analysis cannot be
accused of having applied to normal cases findings arrived at from
pathological material. The evidence in the latter and in the former
was reached independently and shows that normal processes and what
are described as pathological ones follow the same rules.
I shall now discuss in greater
detail two of the normal phenomena with which we are here concerned
(phenomena, that is, which can be observed in normal people) -
namely, parapraxes and dreams.
The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest
2804
By parapraxes, then, I understand
the occurrence in healthy and normal people of such events as
forgetting words and names that are normally familiar to one,
forgetting what one intends to do, making slips of the tongue and
pen, misreading, mislaying things and being unable to find them,
losing things, making mistakes against one’s better
knowledge, and certain habitual gestures and movements. All of
these have on the whole had little attention paid to them by
psychology; they have been classed as instances of
‘absent-mindedness’ and have been attributed to
fatigue, to distracted attention or to the contributory effects of
certain slight illnesses. Analytic enquiry, however, shows with
enough certainty to satisfy every requirement that these latter
factors merely operate as facilitating factors and may be absent.
Parapraxes are full-blown psychical phenomena and always have a
meaning and an intention. They serve definite purposes which, owing
to the prevailing psychological situation, cannot be expressed in
any other way. These situations as a rule involve a psychical
conflict which prevents the underlying intention from finding
direct expression and diverts it along indirect paths. A person who
is guilty of a parapraxis may notice it or overlook it; the
suppressed intention underlying it may well be familiar to him; but
he is usually unaware, without analysis, that that intention is
responsible for the parapraxis in question. Analyses of parapraxes
are often quite easily and quickly made. If a person’s
attention is drawn to a blunder, the next thought that occurs to
him provides its explanation.
Parapraxes are the most
convenient material for anyone who wishes to convince himself of
the trustworthiness of psycho-analytic explanations. In a small
work, first published in book form in 1904, I presented a large
number of examples of this kind, and since then I have been able to
add to my collection many contributions from other
observers.¹
The commonest motive for
suppressing an intention, which has thereafter to be content with
finding its expression in a parapraxis, turns out to be the
avoidance of unpleasure. Thus, one obstinately forgets a proper
name if one nourishes a secret grudge against its owner; one
forgets to carry out an intention if one has in fact only formed it
unwillingly - only, for instance, under the pressure of some
convention; one loses an object, if one has quarrelled with someone
of whom the object reminds one - with its original donor, for
instance; one gets into the wrong train if one is making a journey
unwillingly and would rather be somewhere else. This motive of
avoiding unpleasure is seen most clearly where the forgetting of
impressions and experiences is concerned - a fact which had already
been observed by many writers before psycho-analysis existed.
Memory shows its partiality by being ready to prevent the
reproduction of impressions with a distressing affect, even though
this purpose cannot be achieved in every case.
¹
The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
. Cf. also works on the subject by Maeder, Brill, Jones,
Rank, etc.
The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest
2805
In other instances the analysis
of a parapraxis is less simple and requires less obvious
explanations, on account of the intrusion of a process which we
describe as ‘displacement’. One may, for instance,
forget the name of someone against whom one has no objection;
analysis will show, however, that the name has stirred up the
memory of someone else, who has the same or a similar-sounding name
and whom one has good reason to dislike. This connection has led to
the innocent person’s name being forgotten; the intention to
forget has, as it were, been displaced along some line of
association.
Nor is the intention to avoid
unpleasure the only one which can find its outlet in parapraxes. In
many cases analysis reveals other purposes which have been
suppressed in the particular situation and which can only make
themselves felt, so to say, as background disturbances. Thus a slip
of the tongue will often serve to betray opinions which the speaker
wishes to conceal from his interlocutor. Slips of the tongue have
been understood in this sense by various great writers and employed
for this purpose in their works. The loss of precious objects often
turns out to be an act of sacrifice intended to avert some expected
evil; and many other superstitions too survive in educated people
in the form of parapraxes. The mislaying of objects means as a rule
getting rid of them; damage is done to one’s possessions
(ostensibly by accident) so as to make it necessary to acquire
something better - and so on.
Nevertheless, in spite of the
apparent triviality of these phenomena, the psycho-analytic
explanation of parapraxes involves some slight modifications in our
view of the world. We find that even normal people are far more
frequently moved by contradictory motives than we should have
expected. The number of occurrences that can be described as
‘accidental’ is considerably diminished. It is almost a
consolation to be able to exclude the loss of objects from among
the chance events of life; our blunders often turn out to be a
cover for our secret intentions. But - what is more important -
many serious accidents that we should otherwise have ascribed
entirely to chance reveal under analysis the participation of the
subject’s own volition, though without its being clearly
admitted by him. The distinction between a chance accident and
deliberate self-destruction, which in practice is so often hard to
draw, becomes even more dubious when looked at from an analytic
point of view.
The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest
2806
The explanation of parapraxes
owes its theoretical value to the ease with which they can be
solved and their frequency in normal people. But the success of
psycho-analysis in explaining them is far surpassed in importance
by a further achievement made by it, relating to another phenomenon
of normal mental life. What I have in mind is the interpretation of
dreams
, which brought psycho-analysis for the first time
into the conflict with official science which was to be its
destiny. Medical research explains dreams as purely somatic
phenomena, without meaning or significance, and regards them as the
reaction of a mental organ sunk in a state of sleep to physical
stimuli which partially awaken it. Psycho-analysis raises the
status of dreams into that of psychical acts possessing meaning and
purpose, and having a place in the subject’s mental life, and
thus disregards their strangeness, incoherence and absurdity. On
this view somatic stimuli merely play the part of material that is
worked over in the course of the construction of the dream. There
is no half-way house between these two views of dreams. What argues
against the physiological hypothesis is its unfruitfulness, and
what may be argued in favour of the psycho-analytic one is the fact
that it has translated and given a meaning to thousands of dreams
and has used them to throw light on the intimate details of the
human mind.
I devoted a volume published in
1900 to the important subject of dream-interpretation and have had
the satisfaction of seeing the theories put forward in it confirmed
and amplified by contributions from almost every worker in the
field of psycho-analysis.¹ It is generally agreed that
dream-interpretation is the foundation stone of psycho-analytic
work and that its findings constitute the most important
contribution made by psycho-analysis to psychology.
¹
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
). See also my shorter essay
On Dreams
(1901
a
), and other writings by Rank, Stekel, Jones,
Silberer, Brill, Maeder, Abraham, Ferenczi, etc.
The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest
2807
I cannot enter here into the
technique by which an interpretation of dreams is arrived at, nor
can I give the grounds for the conclusions to which the
psycho-analytic investigation of dreams has led. I must restrict
myself to enunciating some new concepts, reporting my findings and
stressing their importance for normal psychology.
Psycho-analysis, then, has
demonstrated the following facts. All dreams have a meaning. Their
strangeness is due to distortions that have been made in the
expression of their meaning. Their absurdity is deliberate and
expresses derision, ridicule and contradiction. Their incoherence
is a matter of indifference for their interpretation. The dream as
we remember it after waking is described by us as its
‘manifest content’. In the process of interpreting
this, we are led to the ‘latent dream-thoughts’, which
lie hidden behind the manifest content and which are represented by
it. These latent dream-thoughts are no longer strange, incoherent
or absurd; they are completely valid constituents of our waking
thought. We give the name of ‘dream-work’ to the
process which transforms the latent dream-thoughts into the
manifest content of the dream; it is this dream-work that brings
about the distortion which makes the dream-thoughts unrecognizable
in the content of the dream.