Freud - Complete Works (471 page)

  
¹
Cf. Abel on the antithetical meaning of
primal words, and my review of his paper.

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2814

   If we reflect that the means of
representation in dreams are principally visual images and not
words, we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare
dreams with a system of writing than with a language. In fact the
interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the
decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian
hieroglyphs. In both cases there are certain elements which are not
intended to be interpreted (or read, as the case may be) but are
only designed to serve as ‘determinatives’, that is to
establish the meaning of some other element. The ambiguity of
various elements of dreams finds a parallel in these ancient
systems of writing; and so too does the omission of various
relations, which have in both cases to be supplied from the
context. If this conception of the method of representation in
dreams has not yet been followed up, this, as will be readily
understood, must be ascribed to the fact that psycho-analysts are
entirely ignorant of the attitude and knowledge with which a
philologist would approach such a problem as that presented by
dreams.

   The language of dreams may be
looked upon as the method by which unconscious mental activity
expresses itself. But the unconscious speaks more than one dialect.
According to the differing psychological conditions governing and
distinguishing the various forms of neurosis, we find regular
modifications in the way in which unconscious mental impulses are
expressed. While the gesture-language of hysteria agrees on the
whole with the picture-language of dreams and visions, etc., the
thought-language of obsessional neurosis and of the paraphrenias
(dementia praecox and paranoia) exhibits special idiomatic
peculiarities which, in a number of instances, we have been able to
understand and interrelate. For instance, what a hysteric expresses
by vomiting an obsessional will express by painstaking protective
measures against infection, while a paraphrenic will be led to
complaints or suspicions that he is being poisoned. These are all
of them different representations of the patient’s wish to
become pregnant which have been repressed into the unconscious, or
of his defensive reaction against that wish.

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(B) THE PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

   Philosophy, in so far as it is
built on psychology, will be unable to avoid taking the
psycho-analytic contributions to psychology fully into account and
reacting to this new enrichment of our knowledge just as it has to
every considerable advance in the specialized sciences. In
particular, the setting up of the hypothesis of unconscious mental
activities must compel philosophy to decide one way or the other
and, if it accepts the idea, to modify its own views on the
relation of mind to body so that they may conform to the new
knowledge. It is true that philosophy has repeatedly dealt with the
problem of the unconscious, but, with few exceptions, philosophers
have taken up one or other of the two following positions. Either
their unconscious has been something mystical, something intangible
and undemonstrable, whose relation to the mind has remained
obscure, or they have identified the mental with the conscious and
have proceeded to infer from this definition that what is
unconscious cannot be mental or a subject for psychology. These
opinions must be put down to the fact that philosophers have formed
their judgement on the unconscious without being acquainted with
the phenomena of unconscious mental activity, and therefore without
any suspicion of how far unconscious phenomena resemble conscious
ones or of the respects in which they differ from them. If anyone
possessing that knowledge nevertheless holds to the conviction
which equates the conscious and the psychical and consequently
denies the unconscious the attribute of being psychical, no
objection can, of course, be made except that such a distinction
turns out to be highly unpractical. For it is easy to describe the
unconscious and to follow its developments if it is approached from
the direction of its relation to the conscious, with which it has
so much in common. On the other hand, there still seems no
possibility of approaching it from the direction of physical
events. So that it is bound to remain a matter for psychological
study.

   There is yet another way in which
philosophy can derive a stimulus from psycho-analysis, and that is
by itself becoming a subject of psycho-analytic research.
Philosophical theories and systems have been the work of a small
number of men of striking individuality. In no other science does
the personality of the scientific worker play anything like so
large a part as in philosophy. And now for the first time
psycho-analysis enables us to construct a
‘psychography’ of a personality. (See the sociological
section below,
p. 2824
.) It teaches
us to recognize the affective units - the complexes dependent on
instincts - whose presence is to be presumed in each individual,
and it introduces us to the study of the transformations and
end-products arising from these instinctual forces. It reveals the
relations of a person’s constitutional disposition and the
events of his life to the achievements open to him owing to his
peculiar gifts. It can conjecture with more or less certainty from
an artist’s work the intimate personality that lies behind
it. In the same way, psycho-analysis can indicate the subjective
and individual motives behind philosophical theories which have
ostensibly sprung from impartial logical work, and can draw a
critic’s attention to the weak spots in the system. It is not
the business of psycho-analysis, however, to undertake such
criticism itself, for, as may be imagined, the fact that a theory
is psychologically determined does not in the least invalidate its
scientific truth.

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(C) THE BIOLOGICAL INTEREST OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

   It has not been the fate of
psycho-analysis to be greeted (like other young sciences) with the
sympathetic encouragement of those who are interested in the
advance of knowledge. For a long time it was disregarded, and when
at last it could no longer be neglected it became, for emotional
reasons, the object of the most violent attacks from people who had
not taken the trouble to become acquainted with it. It owed this
unfriendly reception to a single circumstance: for at an early
stage of its researches psycho-analysis was driven to the
conclusion that nervous illnesses are an expression of a
disturbance of the sexual function and it was thus led to devote
its attention to an investigation of that function - one which had
been far too long neglected. But anyone who respects the rule that
scientific judgement should not be influenced by emotional
attitudes will assign a high degree of biological interest to
psycho-analysis on account of these very investigations and will
regard the resistances to it as actual evidence in favour of the
correctness of its assertions.

   Psycho-analysis has done justice
to the sexual function in man by making a detailed examination of
its importance in mental and practical life - an importance which
has been emphasized by many creative writers and by some
philosophers, but which has never been recognized by science. But
in the first place it was necessary to enlarge the unduly
restricted concept of sexuality, an enlargement that was justified
by reference to the extensions of sexuality occurring in the so
called perversions and to the behaviour of children. It turned out
to be impossible to maintain any longer that childhood was asexual
and was invaded for the first time by a sudden inrush of sexual
impulses at the age of puberty. On the contrary, when once the
blinkers of partiality and prejudice had been removed, observation
had no difficulty in revealing that sexual interests and activities
are present in the human child at almost every age and from the
very first. The importance of this infantile sexuality is not
impaired by the fact that we cannot everywhere draw a clear line
between it and a child’s asexual activity. It differs,
however, from what is described as the ‘normal’
sexuality of adults. It includes the germs of all those sexual
activities which in later life are sharply contrasted with normal
sexual life as being perversions, and as such bound to seem
incomprehensible and vicious. The normal sexuality of adults
emerges from infantile sexuality by a series of developments,
combinations, divisions and suppressions, which are scarcely ever
achieved with ideal perfection and consequently leave behind
predispositions to a retrogression of the function in the form of
illness.

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   Infantile sexuality exhibits two
other characteristics which are of importance from a biological
point of view. It turns out to be put together from a number of
component instincts which seem to be attached to certain regions of
the body (‘erotogenic zones’) and some of which emerge
from the beginning in pairs of opposites - instincts with an active
and a passive aim. Just as in later life what is loved is not
merely the object’s sexual organs but his whole body, so from
the very first it is not merely the genitals but many other parts
of the body which are the seat of sexual excitation and respond to
appropriate stimuli with sexual pleasure. This fact is closely
related to the second characteristic of infantile sexuality -
namely that to start with it is attached to the functions of
nutrition and excretion, and, in all probability, of muscular
excitation and sensory activity.

   If we examine sexuality in the
adult with the help of psycho-analysis, and consider the life of
children in the light of the knowledge thus gained, we perceive
that sexuality is not merely a function serving the purposes of
reproduction, on a par with digestion, respiration, etc. It is
something far more independent, which stands in contrast to all the
individual’s other activities and is only forced into an
alliance with the individual’s economy after a complicated
course of development involving the imposition of numerous
restrictions. Cases, theoretically quite conceivable, in which the
interests of these sexual impulses fail to coincide with the
self-preservation of the individual seem actually to be presented
by the group of neurotic illnesses. For the final formula which
psycho-analysis has arrived at on the nature of the neuroses runs
thus: The primal conflict which leads to neuroses is one between
the sexual instincts and those which maintain the ego. The neuroses
represent a more or less partial overpowering of the ego by
sexuality after the ego’s attempts at suppressing sexuality
have failed.

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2818

   We have found it necessary to
hold aloof from biological considerations during our
psycho-analytic work and to refrain from using them for heuristic
purposes, so that we may not be misled in our impartial judgement
of the psycho-analytic facts before us. But after we have completed
our psycho-analytic work we shall have to find a point of contact
with biology; and we may rightly feel glad if that contact is
already assured at one important point or another. The contrast
between the ego instincts and the sexual instinct, to which we have
been obliged to trace back the origin of the neuroses, is carried
into the sphere of biology in the contrast between the instincts
which serve the preservation of the individual and those which
serve the survival of the species. In biology we come upon the more
comprehensive conception of an immortal germ-plasm to which the
different transitory individuals are attached like organs that
develop successively. It is only this conception which enables us
rightly to understand the part played by the sexual instinctual
forces in physiology and psychology.

   In spite of all our efforts to
prevent biological terminology and considerations from dominating
psycho-analytic work, we cannot avoid using them even in our
descriptions of the phenomena that we study. We cannot help
regarding the term ‘instinct’ as a concept on the
frontier between the spheres of psychology and biology. We speak,
too, of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ mental
attributes and impulses, although, strictly speaking, the
differences between the sexes can lay claim to no special psychical
characterization. What we speak of in ordinary life as
‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ reduces itself
from the point of view of psychology to the qualities of
‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ - that is, to
qualities determined not by the instincts themselves but by their
aims. The regular association of these ‘active’ and
‘passive’ instincts in mental life reflects the
bisexuality of individuals, which is among the clinical postulates
of psycho-analysis.

   I shall be satisfied if these few
remarks have drawn attention to the many respects in which
psycho-analysis acts as an intermediary between biology and
psychology.

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(D) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM A
DEVELOPMENTAL POINT OF VIEW

   Not every analysis of
psychological phenomena deserves the name of psycho-analysis. The
latter implies more than the mere analysis of composite phenomena
into simpler ones. It consists in tracing back one psychical
structure to another which preceded it in time and out of which it
developed. Medical psycho-analytic procedure was not able to
eliminate a symptom until it had traced that symptom’s origin
and development. Thus from the very first psycho-analysis was
directed towards tracing developmental processes. It began by
discovering the genesis of neurotic symptoms, and was led, as time
went on, to turn its attention to other psychical structures and to
construct a genetic psychology which would apply to them too.