Freud - Complete Works (473 page)

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2825

(H) THE EDUCATIONAL INTEREST OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

   The overmastering interest which
must be felt in psycho-analysis by the theory of education is based
upon a fact which has become evident. Only someone who can feel his
way into the minds of children can be capable of educating them;
and we grown-up people cannot understand children because we no
longer understand our own childhood. Our infantile amnesia proves
that we have grown estranged from our childhood. Psycho-analysis
has brought to light the wishes, the thought structures and the
developmental processes of childhood. All earlier attempts in this
direction have been in the highest degree incomplete and misleading
because they have entirely overlooked the inestimably important
factor of sexuality in its physical and mental manifestations. The
incredulous astonishment which meets the most certainly established
findings of psycho-analysis on the subject of childhood - the
Oedipus complex, self-love (or ‘narcissism’), the
disposition to perversions, anal erotism, sexual curiosity - is a
measure of the gulf which separates our mental life, our judgements
of value and, indeed, our processes of thought from those of even
normal children.

   When educators have become
familiar with the findings of psycho-analysis, it will be easier
for them to reconcile themselves to certain phases of infantile
development and they will, among other things, not be in danger of
over-estimating the importance of the socially unserviceable or
perverse instinctual impulses which emerge in children. On the
contrary they will refrain from any attempt at forcibly suppressing
such impulses, when they learn that efforts of this kind often
produce no less undesirable results than the alternative, which is
so much dreaded by educators, of giving free play to
children’s naughtiness. The forcible suppression of strong
instincts by external means never has the effect in a child of
these instincts being extinguished or brought under control; it
leads to repression, which establishes a predisposition to later
nervous illness. Psycho-analysis has frequent opportunities of
observing the part played by inopportune and undiscerning severity
of upbringing in the production of neuroses, or the price, in loss
of efficiency and of capacity for enjoyment, which has to be paid
for the normality upon which the educator insists. And
psycho-analysis can also show what precious contributions to the
formation of character are made by these asocial and perverse
instincts in the child, if they are not subjected to repression but
are diverted from their original aims to more valuable ones by the
process known as ‘sublimation’. Our highest virtues
have grown up, as reaction formations and sublimations, out of our
worst dispositions. Education should scrupulously refrain from
burying these precious springs of action and should restrict itself
to encouraging the processes by which these energies are led along
safe paths. Whatever we can expect in the way of prophylaxis
against neurosis in the individual lies in the hands of a
psycho-analytically enlightened education.¹

  
¹
See the writings of the Zurich pastor, Dr.
Oskar Pfister.

The Claims Of Psycho-Analysis To Scientific Interest

2826

   It has not been my aim in my
present paper to lay before a scientifically orientated public an
account of the compass and content of psycho-analysis or of its
hypotheses, problems and findings. My purpose will have been
fulfilled if I have made clear the many spheres of knowledge in
which psycho-analysis is of interest and the numerous links which
it has begun to forge between them.

2827

OBSERVATIONS AND EXAMPLES FROM ANALYTIC PRACTICE

(1913)

2828

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2829

OBSERVATIONS AND EXAMPLES FROM ANALYTIC PRACTICE

The collection of short contributions, of
which we here present a first instalment, calls for a few
introductory words. The cases of illness which come under a
psycho-analyst’s observation are of course of unequal value
in adding to his knowledge. There are some on which he has to bring
to bear all that he knows and from which he learns nothing; and
there are others which show him what he already knows in a
particularly clearly marked manner and in exceptionally revealing
isolation, so that he is indebted to them not only for a
confirmation but for an extension of his knowledge. We are
justified in supposing that the psychical processes which we wish
to study are no different in the first class of cases from what
they are in the second, but we shall choose to describe them as
they occur in the favourable and clear examples afforded by the
latter. Similarly, the theory of evolution assumes that in the
animal kingdom the segmentation of the egg proceeds in the same
manner in those cases where a high degree of pigmentation is
present and which are unfavourable for observation, as it does in
those cases where the object of study is transparent and poorly
pigmented and which are on that account selected for
observation.

   But the numerous apt examples,
which, in the course of an analyst’s daily work, bring him a
confirmation of what he already knows, are for the most part lost
to view, since their collection into a larger whole often involves
long delays. There is therefore some advantage in the provision of
a framework within which observations and examples of this kind can
be published and made generally known without waiting to be worked
over from a more generalized point of view.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2830

   Under the heading which is here
introduced space will be offered for material of this kind.
Communications should be kept as concise as possible. The different
items are arranged in no particular order.

(1)

DREAM WITH AN UNRECOGNIZED PRECIPITATING
CAUSE

   A good sleeper awoke one morning
at a summer resort in the Tyrol, knowing that he had had a dream
that the Pope was dead. He could think of no explanation of it.
During the morning of the same day his wife said to him: ‘Did
you hear the dreadful noise the bells made early this
morning?’ He had not heard it but had evidently dreamt about
it. The interpretation which his dream gave of the bells was his
revenge on the pious Tyrolese. According to the newspapers the Pope
was slightly indisposed at that time.

(2)

THE TIME OF DAY IN DREAMS

   This very often stands for the
age of the dreamer at some particular period in his childhood. In
one dream a quarter past five in the morning meant the age of five
years and three months, which was significant, since that was the
dreamer’s age at the time of the birth of his younger
brother. - Many similar examples.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2831

(3)

REPRESENTATION OF AGES IN DREAMS

   A woman dreamt that she was
walking with two little girls whose ages differed by fifteen
months. She was unable to recall any family of her acquaintance to
whom this would apply. It occurred to her that both the children
represented herself and that the dream was reminding her that the
two traumatic events of her childhood were separated from each
other by fifteen months (3½ and 4¾).

(4)

POSITION WHEN WAKING FROM A
DREAM

   A woman dreamt that she was lying
on her back and pressing the soles of her feet against those of
another woman. The analysis made it seem probable that she was
thinking of scenes of romping which she had substituted for the
memory of an observation of sexual intercourse. When she woke up
she noticed that, on the contrary, she had been lying on her
stomach with her arms crossed, and had thus been imitating the
position of a man and his embrace.

(9)

TWO ROOMS AND ONE ROOM

   He had a dream in which he saw
two familiar rooms which had been made into one.

   Nothing factual. The dream
pointed to the female genitals and the anus, which, as a child, he
had regarded as one area, the ‘bottom’ (in accordance
with the infantile ‘cloaca theory’), while he now knows
that there are two separate cavities and orifices. A reversed
representation.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2832

(10)

OVERCOAT AS A SYMBOL

   In women’s dreams an
overcoat [German ‘
Mantel
’] is unquestionably
shown to be a symbol for a man. Linguistic assonance may perhaps
play some part in this.

(13)

DISGRACED FEET (SHOES)

   After several days of resistance
the patient reported that she had felt very much snubbed because a
young man whom she met regularly near the doctor’s house, and
who used as a rule to look at her admiringly, had on the last
occasion looked contemptuously at her feet. In fact she had no
reason to be ashamed of her feet. She produced the explanation
herself after admitting that she had regarded the young man as the
doctor’s son, who thus (by way of the transference) stood for
her elder brother. There now followed a memory of having been in
the habit of accompanying her brother to the lavatory when she was
about five years old and of watching him micturate. She was
overcome with envy at not being able to do it in the same way as he
did and one day tried to copy him (envy for the penis). But in
doing so she wetted her shoes and got very angry when her brother
teased her about it. For a long time afterwards her anger recurred
whenever her brother looked contemptuously at her shoes with the
object of reminding her of her misfortune. She added that this
experience had determined her later behaviour at school. If she was
unsuccessful in anything at the first attempt she could never bring
herself to try again, so that in many subjects she failed
completely. This is a good example of the way in which sexual life
acts as a model and influences character.

(15)

SELF-CRITICISM BY NEUROTICS

   It is always a striking thing and
deserves special notice when a neurotic is in the habit of speaking
ill of himself, expressing a low opinion of himself, and so on. As
in the case of self-reproaches, it is often possible to explain it
by supposing that he is identifying himself with someone else. But
in one patient the attendant circumstances during the session
necessitated another explanation of behaviour of this kind. A young
lady, who was never tired of declaring that she had very little
intelligence, was without gifts, etc., was only trying to indicate
by this that she had great physical beauty, and was concealing this
boast behind her self-criticism. Nor was a reference to the harmful
effects of masturbation - a reference which is to be expected in
all such cases - absent in this one.

Observations And Examples From Analytic Practice

2833

(19)

CONSIDERATIONS OF
REPRESENTABILITY

   A man dreamt that he was pulling
a woman out from behind a bed: i.e. he was giving her
preference.¹ - He (an officer) was sitting at a table opposite
the Emperor: i.e. he was putting himself in opposition to the
Emperor (his father). In both these cases the dreamer himself gave
the translation.

(20)

DREAMS ABOUT DEAD PEOPLE

   If someone dreams of talking to
dead people or associating with them, and so on, this often has the
meaning of his own death. But if he remembers in his dream that the
person in question is dead, the dreamer is repudiating the fact
that it signifies his own death.

(21)

FRAGMENTARY DREAMS

   These often contain only the
symbols relating to the subject of the dream. For instance, here is
a dream that occurred in a context of homosexual impulses: he was
going for a walk somewhere with a friend . . .
(indistinct) . . . balloons.

(22)

APPEARANCE IN THE DREAM OF THE SYMPTOMS OF
THE ILLNESS

   The symptoms of the illness
(anxiety, etc.), when they appear in a dream, seem generally
speaking to mean: ‘I fell ill because of this (i.e. in
connection with the earlier elements of the dream).’ Such
dreams, accordingly, correspond to a continuation of the analysis
in the dream.

  
¹
[The point depends on a similarity between
the German word for ‘pulling out’
(‘
hervorziehen
’) and ‘giving
preference’ (‘
vorziehen
’).]

2834

FAUSSE RECONNAISSANCE
(‘DÉJÀ RACONTÉ’)

IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC TREATMENT

(1914)

2835

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2836

FAUSSE RECONNAISSANCE
(‘DÉJÀ RACONTÉ’)

IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC TREATMENT

It not infrequently happens in the course of
an analytic treatment that the patient, after reporting some fact
that he has remembered, will go on to say: ‘
But I’ve
told you that already
’ - while the analyst himself feels
sure that this is the first time he has heard the story. If the
patient is contradicted upon the point, he will often protest with
energy that he is perfectly certain he is right, that he is ready
to swear to it, and so on; while the analyst’s own conviction
that what he has heard is new to him will become correspondingly
stronger. To try to decide the dispute by shouting the patient down
or by outvying him in protestations would be a most unpsychological
proceeding. It is familiar ground that a sense of conviction of the
accuracy of one’s memory has no objective value; and, since
one of the two persons concerned must necessarily be in the wrong,
it may just as well be the physician as the patient who has fallen
a victim to a paramnesia. The analyst will admit as much to the
patient, will break off the argument, and will postpone a
settlement of the point until some later occasion.

   In a minority of cases the
analyst himself will then recollect that he has already heard the
piece of information under dispute, and will at the same time
discover the subjective, and often far-fetched, reason which led to
this temporary forgetfulness. But in the great majority of cases it
is the patient who turns out to have been mistaken; and he can be
brought to recognize the fact. The explanation of this frequent
occurrence appears to be that the patient really had an
intention
of giving this information, that once or even
several times he actually made some remark leading up to it, but
that he was then prevented by resistance from carrying out his
purpose, and afterwards confused a recollection of his intention
with a recollection of its performance.

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2837

   Leaving on one side any cases in
which there may still be some element of doubt, I will now bring
forward a few others which are of special theoretical interest.
With certain people it happens, and may even happen repeatedly,
that they cling with particular obstinacy to the assertion that
they have already told the analyst this or that, when the nature of
the circumstances and of the information in question makes it quite
impossible that they can be right. For what they claim to have told
the analyst already and what they claim to recognize as something
old, which must be familiar to the analyst as well, turn out to be
memories of the greatest importance to the analysis - confirmatory
facts for which the analyst has long been waiting, or solutions
which wind up a whole section of the work and which he would
certainly have made the basis of an exhaustive discussion. In the
face of these considerations the patient himself soon admits that
his recollection must have deceived him, though he is unable to
account for its definite character.

   The phenomenon presented by the
patient in cases like this deserves to be called a ‘
fausse
reconnaissance
’, and is completely analogous to what
occurs in certain other cases and has been described as a
‘
déjà vu
’. In these other cases
the subject has a spontaneous feeling such as ‘I’ve
been in this situation before’, or ‘I’ve been
through all this already’, without ever being in a position
to confirm his conviction by discovering an actual recollection of
the previous occasion. This latter phenomenon, as is well known,
has provoked a large number of attempts at explanation, which can
be divided roughly into two groups.¹ One class of explanation
looks upon the feeling which constitutes the phenomenon as
deserving of credence, and assumes that something really has been
remembered - the only question being what. The second and far
larger class of explanation includes those which maintain, on the
contrary, that what we have to deal with is an illusory memory, and
that the problem is to discover how this paramnesic error can have
arisen. This latter group comprises many widely different
hypotheses. There is, for instance, the ancient view, ascribed to
Pythagoras, that the phenomenon of
déjà vu
is
evidence of the subject having had a former life; again, there is
the hypothesis based on anatomy (put forward by Wigan in 1860) to
the effect that the phenomenon is based on an absence of
simultaneity in the functioning of the two cerebral hemispheres;
and finally there are the purely psychological theories, supported
by the majority of more recent authorities, which regard the
déjà vu
as an indication of an apperceptive
weakness, and assign the responsibility for its occurrence to such
causes as fatigue, exhaustion and distraction.

  
¹
One of the most recent bibliographies of
the subject is to be found in Havelock Ellis (1911).

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2838

   In 1904 Grasset put forward an
explanation of the
déjà vu
which must be
reckoned as one of the group which ‘believes’ in the
phenomenon. He was of opinion that the phenomenon indicates that at
some earlier time there has been an
unconscious
perception,
which only now makes its way into consciousness under the influence
of a new and similar impression. Several other authorities have
agreed with this view, and have maintained that the basis of the
phenomenon is the recollection of something that has been dreamed
and then forgotten. In both cases it would be a question of the
activation of an unconscious impression.

   In 1907, in the second edition of
my
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, I proposed an exactly
similar explanation for this form of apparent paramnesia without
mentioning Grasset’s paper or knowing of its existence. By
way of excuse I may remark that I arrived at my conclusion as the
result of a psycho-analytic investigation which I was able to make
of an example of
déjà vu
in a female patient;
it was extremely clear, although it had taken place some 28 years
earlier. I shall not reproduce the little analysis in this place.
It showed that the situation in which the
déjà
vu
occurred was really calculated to revive the memory of an
earlier experience of the patient’s. The patient, who was at
that time a twelve year-old child, was visiting a family in which
there was a brother who was seriously ill and at the point of
death; while her own brother had been in a similarly dangerous
condition a few months earlier. But with the earlier of these two
similar events there had been associated a phantasy that was
incapable of entering consciousness - namely, a wish that her
brother should die. Consequently, the analogy between the two cases
could no become conscious. And the perception of it was replaced by
the phenomenon of ‘having been through it all before’,
the identity being displaced from the really common element on to
the locality.

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2839

   The name
‘
déjà vu
’ is, as we know, applied
to a whole class of analogous phenomena, such as the
‘
déjà entendu
’, the
‘
déjà éprouve
’ and the
‘
déjà senti
’. The case which I am
now about to report, as a single instance out of many similar ones,
consists of a ‘
déjà raconte
’; and
it could be traced back to an unconscious resolution which was
never carried out.

   A patient said to me in the
course of his associations: ‘When I was playing in the garden
with a knife (that was when I was five years old) and cut through
my little finger - oh, I only
thought
it was cut through -
but I’ve told you about that already.’

   I assured him that I had no
recollection of anything of the kind. He insisted with increasing
conviction that it was impossible he could be mistaken. I finally
put an end to the argument in the manner I have described above and
asked him in any case to repeat the story. Then we should see where
we were.

   ‘When I was five years old,
I was playing in the garden near my nurse, and was carving with my
pocket-knife in the bark of one of the walnut-trees that come into
my dream as well.¹ Suddenly, to my unspeakable terror, I
noticed that I had cut through the little finger of my (right or
left?) hand, so that it was only hanging on by its skin. I felt no
pain, but great fear. I did not venture to say anything to my
nurse, who was only a few paces distant, but I sank down on the
nearest seat and sat there incapable of casting another glance at
my finger. At last I calmed down, took a look at the finger, and
saw that it was entirely uninjured.’

  
¹
Cf. ‘The Occurrence in Dreams of
Material from Fairy Tales’. In telling the story again on a
later occasion he made the following correction: ‘I
don’t believe I was cutting the tree. That was a confusion
with another recollection, which must also have been
hallucinatorily falsified, of having made a cut in a tree with my
knife and of
blood
having come out of the
tree.’

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2840

   We soon agreed that, in spite of
what he had thought, he could not have told me the story of this
vision or hallucination before. He was very well aware that I could
not have failed to exploit such evidence as this of his having had
a
fear of castration
at the age of five. The episode broke
down his resistance to assuming the existence of a castration
complex; but he raised the question: ‘Why did I feel so
certain of having told you this recollection before?’

   It then occurred to both of us
that repeatedly and in various connections he had brought out the
following trivial recollection, and each time without our deriving
my profit from it:

   ‘Once when my uncle went
away on a journey he asked me and my sister what we should like him
to bring us back. My sister asked for a book, and I asked for a
pocket-knife.’ We now understood that this association which
had emerged months before had in reality been a screen memory for
the repressed recollection, and had been an attempt (rendered
abortive by resistance) at telling the story of his imagined loss
of his little finger - an unmistakable equivalent for his penis.
The knife which his uncle did in fact bring him back was, as he
clearly remembered, the same one that made its appearance in the
episode which had been suppressed for so long.

   It seems unnecessary to add
anything in the way of an interpretation of this little occurrence,
so far as it throws light upon the phenomenon of ‘
fausse
reconnaissance
’. As regards the subject-matter of the
patient’s vision, I may remark that, particularly in relation
to the castration complex, similar hallucinatory falsifications are
of not infrequent occurrence, and that they can just as easily
serve the purpose of correcting unwelcome perceptions.

Fausse Reconnaissance ('Deja Raconte') In Psycho-Analytic Treatment

2841

   In 1911 a man of university
education, residing in a university town in Germany, with whom I am
unacquainted and whose age is unknown to me, put the following
notes upon his childhood at my disposal.

   ‘In the course of reading
your study on Leonardo da Vinci, I was moved to internal dissent by
the observations near the beginning of Chapter III. Your assertion
that male children are dominated by an interest in their own
genitals provoked me to make a counter-assertion to the effect that
"if that is the general rule, I at all events am an exception
to it". I then went on to read the passage that follows with
the utmost amazement, such amazement as one feels when one comes
across a fact of an entirely novel character. In the midst of my
amazement a recollection occurred to me which showed me, to my own
surprise, that the fact could not be by any means so novel as it
had seemed. For, at the time at which I was passing through the
period of "infantile sexual researches", a lucky chance
gave me an opportunity of inspecting the female genitals in a
little girl of my own age, and in doing so
I quite clearly
observed a penis of the same kind as my own
. Soon afterwards I
was plunged into fresh confusion by the sight of some female
statues and nudes; and in order to get over this
"scientific" discrepancy I devised the following
experiment. By pressing my thighs together I succeeded in making my
genitals disappear between them; and I was glad to find that in
that way all differences between my own appearance and that of a
female nude could be got rid of. Evidently, I thought to myself,
the genitals have been made to disappear in a similar way in female
nudes.

   ‘At this point another
recollection occurred to me, which has always been of the greatest
importance to me, in so far as it is
one
of the three
recollections which constitute all that I can remember of my
mother, who died when I was very young. I remember seeing my mother
standing in front of the washing-stand and cleaning the glasses and
washing-basin, while I was playing in the same room and committing
some misdemeanour. As a punishment my hand was soundly slapped.
Then to my very great terror I saw my little finger fall off; and
in fact it fell into the pail. Knowing that my mother was angry, I
did not venture to say anything; but my terror grew still more
intense when I saw the pail carried off soon afterwards by the
servant girl. For a long time I was convinced that I had lost a
finger - up to the time, I believe, at which I learnt to count.