Freud - Complete Works (480 page)
One day, when I was a young
house-physician, I was walking across the town with Breuer, when a
man came up who evidently wanted to speak to him urgently. I fell
behind. As soon as Breuer was free, he told me in his friendly,
instructive way that this man was the husband of a patient of his
and had brought him some news of her. The wife, he added, was
behaving in such a peculiar way in society that she had been
brought to him for treatment as a nervous case. He concluded:
‘These things are always
secrets
d’alcôve
!’ I asked him in astonishment what
he meant, and he answered by explaining the word
alcôve
(‘marriage-bed’) to me, for he
failed to realize how extraordinary the
matter
of his
statement seemed to me.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2883
Some years later, at one of
Charcot’s evening receptions, I happened to be standing near
the great teacher at a moment when he appeared to be telling
Brouardel a very interesting story about something that had
happened during his day’s work. I hardly heard the beginning,
but gradually my attention was seized by what he was talking of: a
young married couple from a distant country in the East - the woman
a severe sufferer, the man either impotent or exceedingly awkward.
‘
Tâchez donc
,’ I heard Charcot repeating,
‘
je vous assure, vous y arriverez
.’¹
Brouardel, who spoke less loudly, must have expressed his
astonishment that symptoms like the wife’s could have been
produced by such circumstances. For Charcot suddenly broke out with
great animation: ‘
Mais, dans des cas pareils c’est
toujours la chose génitale, toujours . . .
toujours . . . toujours
’;² and he
crossed his arms over his stomach, hugging himself and jumping up
and down on his toes several times in his own characteristically
lively way. I know that for a moment I was almost paralysed with
amazement and said to myself: ‘Well, but if he knows that,
why does he never say so?’ But the impression was soon
forgotten; brain anatomy and the experimental induction of
hysterical paralyses absorbed all my interest.
A year later, I had begun my
medical career in Vienna as a lecturer in nervous diseases, and in
everything relating to the aetiology of the neuroses I was still as
ignorant and innocent as one could expect of a promising student
trained at a university. One day I had a friendly message from
Chrobak, asking me to take a woman patient of his to whom he could
not give enough time, owing to his new appointment as a University
teacher. I arrived at the patient’s house before he did and
found that she was suffering from attacks of meaningless anxiety,
and could only be soothed by the most precise information about
where her doctor was at every moment of the day. When Chrobak
arrived he took me aside and told me that the patient’s
anxiety was due to the fact that although she had been married for
eighteen years she was still
virgo intacta
. The husband was
absolutely impotent. In such cases, he said, there was nothing for
a medical man to do but to shield this domestic misfortune with his
own reputation, and put up with it if people shrugged their
shoulders and said of him: ‘He’s no good if he
can’t cure her after so many years.’ The sole
prescription for such a malady, he added, is familiar enough to us,
but we cannot order it. It runs:
‘Rx Penis
normalis
dosim
repetatur!’
I had never heard of such a prescription, and
felt inclined to shake my head over my kind friend’s
cynicism.
¹
[‘Go on trying! I promise you,
you’ll succeed.’]
²
[‘But in this sort of case it’s
always a question of the genitals - always, always,
always.’]
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2884
I have not of course disclosed
the illustrious parentage of this scandalous idea in order to
saddle other people with the responsibility for it. I am well aware
that it is one thing to give utterance to an idea once or twice in
the form of a passing
aperçu
, and quite another to
mean it seriously - to take it literally and pursue it in the face
of every contradictory detail, and to win it a place among accepted
truths. It is the difference between a casual flirtation and a
legal marriage with all its duties and difficulties.
‘
Épouser les idées
de
. . .’¹ is no uncommon figure of
speech, at any rate in French.
Among the other new factors which
were added to the cathartic procedure as a result of my work and
which transformed it into psycho-analysis, I may mention in
particular the theory of repression and resistance, the recognition
of infantile sexuality, and the interpreting and exploiting of
dreams as a source of knowledge of the unconscious.
The theory of repression quite
certainly came to me independently of any other source; I know of
no outside impression which might have suggested it to me, and for
a long time I imagined it to be entirely original, until Otto Rank
(1911
a
) showed us a passage in Schopenhauer’s
World
as Will and Idea
in which the philosopher seeks to give an
explanation of insanity. What he says there about the struggle
against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my
concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the
chance of making a discovery to my not being well-read. Yet others
have read the passage and passed it by without making this
discovery, and perhaps the same would have happened to me if in my
young days I had had more taste for reading philosophical works. In
later years I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading
the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being
hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis
by any sort of anticipatory ideas. I had therefore to be prepared -
and I am so, gladly - to forgo all claims to priority in the many
instances in which laborious psycho-analytic investigation can
merely confirm the truths which the philosopher recognized by
intuition.
¹
[‘To espouse an
idea.’]
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2885
The theory of repression is the
corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests.
It is the most essential part of it; and yet it is nothing but a
theoretical formulation of a phenomenon which may be observed as
often as one pleases if one undertakes an analysis of a neurotic
without resorting to hypnosis. In such cases one comes across a
resistance which opposes the work of analysis and in order to
frustrate it pleads a failure of memory. The use of hypnosis was
bound to hide this resistance; the history of psycho-analysis
proper, therefore, only begins with the new technique that
dispenses with hypnosis. The theoretical consideration of the fact
that this resistance coincides with an amnesia leads inevitably to
the view of unconscious mental activity which is peculiar to
psycho-analysis and which, too, distinguishes it quite clearly from
philosophical speculations about the unconscious. It may thus be
said that the theory of psycho-analysis is an attempt to account
for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge
whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic
back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference
and of resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these
two facts and takes them as the starting-point of its work has a
right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at
results other than my own. But anyone who takes up other sides of
the problem while avoiding these two hypotheses will hardly escape
a charge of misappropriation of property by attempted
impersonation, if he persists in calling himself a
psycho-analyst.
If anyone sought to place the
theory of repression and resistance among the
premisses
instead of the
findings
of psycho-analysis, I should oppose
him most emphatically. Such premisses of a general psychological
and biological nature do exist, and it would be useful to consider
them on some other occasion; but the theory of repression is a
product of psycho-analytic work, a theoretical inference
legitimately drawn from innumerable observations.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2886
Another product of this sort was
the hypothesis of infantile sexuality. This, however, was made at a
much later date. In the early days of tentative investigation by
analysis no such thing was thought of. At first it was merely
observed that the effects of present-day experiences had to be
traced back to something in the past. But enquirers often find more
than they bargain for. One was drawn further and further back into
the past; one hoped at last to be able to stop at puberty, the
period in which the sexual impulses are traditionally supposed to
awake. But in vain; the tracks led still further back into
childhood and into its earlier years. On the way, a mistaken idea
had to be overcome which might have been almost fatal to the young
science. Influenced by Charcot’s view of the traumatic origin
of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and
aetiologically significant the statements made by patients in which
they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in the
first years of childhood - to put it bluntly, to seduction. When
this aetiology broke down under the weight of its own improbability
and contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the
result at first was helpless bewilderment. Analysis had led back to
these infantile sexual traumas by the right path, and yet they were
not true. The firm ground of reality was gone. At that time I would
gladly have given up the whole work, just as my esteemed
predecessor, Breuer, had done when he made his unwelcome discovery.
Perhaps I persevered only because I no longer had any choice and
could not then begin again at anything else. At last came the
reflection that, after all, one had no right to despair because one
has been deceived in one’s expectations; one must revise
those expectations. If hysterical subjects trace back their
symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which
emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in
phantasy
, and this psychical reality requires to be taken
into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon
followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to
cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood,
to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from
behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual
life came to light.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2887
With this sexual activity of the
first years of childhood the inherited constitution of the
individual also came into its own. Disposition and experience are
here linked up in an indissoluble aetiological unity. For
disposition
exaggerates impressions which would otherwise
have been completely commonplace and have had no effect, so that
they become traumas giving rise to stimulations and fixations;
while
experiences
awaken factors in the disposition which,
without them, might have long remained dormant and perhaps never
have developed. The last word on the subject of traumatic aetiology
was spoken later by Abraham, when he pointed out that the sexual
constitution which is peculiar to children is precisely calculated
to provoke sexual experiences of a particular kind - namely
traumas.
In the beginning, my statements
about infantile sexuality were founded almost exclusively on the
findings of analysis in adults which led back into the past. I had
no opportunity of direct observations on children. It was therefore
a very great triumph when it became possible years later to confirm
almost all my inferences by direct observation and the analysis of
very young children - a triumph that lost some of its magnitude as
one gradually realized that the nature of the discovery was such
that one should really be ashamed of having had to make it. The
further one carried these observations on children, the more
self-evident the facts became; but the more astonishing, too, did
it become that one had taken so much trouble to overlook them.
Such a certain conviction of the
existence and importance of infantile sexuality can, however, only
be obtained by the method of analysis, by pursuing the symptoms and
peculiarities of neurotics back to their ultimate sources, the
discovery of which then explains whatever is explicable in them and
enables whatever is modifiable to be changed. I can understand that
one would arrive at different results if, as C. G. Jung has
recently done, one first forms a theoretical conception of the
nature of the sexual instinct and then seeks to explain the life of
children on that basis. A conception of this kind is bound to be
selected arbitrarily or in accordance with irrelevant
considerations, and runs the risk of proving inadequate for the
field to which one is seeking to apply it. It is true that the
analytic method, too, leads to certain ultimate difficulties and
obscurities in regard to sexuality and its relation to the total
life of the individual. But these problems cannot be got rid of by
speculation; they must await solution through other observations or
through observations in other fields.