Freud - Complete Works (511 page)
Just as for primaeval man, so
also for our unconscious, there is one case in which the two
opposing attitudes towards death, the one which acknowledges it as
the annihilation of life and the other which denies it as unreal,
collide and come into conflict. This case is the same as in primal
ages: the death, or the risk of death, of someone we love, a parent
or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a dear
friend. These loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession,
components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly
strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few
situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our
love-relations a small portion of hostility which can excite an
unconscious death-wish. But this conflict due to ambivalence does
not now, as it did then, lead to the doctrine of the soul and to
ethics, but to neurosis, which affords us deep insight into normal
mental life as well. How often have physicians who practise
psycho-analysis had to deal with the symptom of an exaggerated
worry over the well-being of relatives, or with entirely unfounded
self-reproaches after the death of a loved person. The study of
such phenomena has left them in no doubt about the extent and
importance of unconscious death-wishes.
Thoughts For The Times On War And Death
3091
The layman feels an extraordinary
horror at the possibility of such feelings, and takes this aversion
as a legitimate ground for disbelief in the assertions of
psycho-analysis. Mistakenly, I think. No depreciation of feelings
of love is intended, and there is in fact none. It is indeed
foreign to our intelligence as well as to our feelings thus to
couple love and hate; but Nature, by making use of this pair of
opposites, contrives to keep love ever vigilant and fresh, so as to
guard it against the hate which lurks behind it. It might be said
that we owe the fairest flowerings of our love to the reaction
against the hostile impulse which we sense within us.
To sum up: our unconscious is
just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as
murderously inclined towards strangers, just as divided (that is,
ambivalent) towards those we love, as was primaeval man. But how
far we have moved from this primal state in our conventional and
cultural attitude towards death!
It is easy to see how war
impinges on this dichotomy. It strips us of the later accretions of
civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It
compels us once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own
death; it stamps strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought
about or desired; it tells us to disregard the death of those we
love. But war cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of
existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion
so violent, there are bound to be wars. The question then arises:
Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war?
Should we not confess that in our civilized attitude towards death
we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and
should we not rather turn back and recognize the truth? Would it
not be better to give death the place in reality and in our
thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to
the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so
carefully suppressed? This hardly seems an advance to higher
achievement, but rather in some respects a backward step - a
regression; but it has the advantage of taking the truth more into
account, and of making life more tolerable for us once again. To
tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living
beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for
us.
We recall the old saying:
Si
vis pacem, para bellum
. If you want to preserve peace, arm for
war.
It would be in keeping with the
times to alter it:
Si vis vitam, para mortem
. If you want to
endure life, prepare yourself for death.
Thoughts For The Times On War And Death
3092
APPENDIX
LETTER TO FREDERIK VAN EEDEN
Vienna,
December 28, 1914.
Dear Dr. van Eeden,
I venture, under the impact of
the war, to remind you of two theses which have been put forward by
psycho-analysis and which have undoubtedly contributed to its
unpopularity.
Psycho-analysis has inferred from
the dreams and parapraxes of healthy people, as well as from the
symptoms of neurotics, that the primitive, savage and evil impulses
of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual members but
persist, although in a repressed state, in the unconscious (to use
our technical terms), and lie wait for opportunities of becoming
active once more. It has further taught us that our intellect is a
feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our instincts
and affects, and that we are all compelled to behave cleverly or
stupidly according to the commands of our attitudes and internal
resistances.
If you will now observe what is
happening in the war - the cruelties and injustices for which the
most civilized nations are responsible, the different way in which
they judge their own lies and wrong-doings and those of their
enemies, and the general lack of insight which prevails - you will
have to admit that psycho-analysis has been right in both its
theses.
It may not have been entirely
original in this; many thinkers and students of mankind have made
similar assertions. But our science has worked out both of them in
detail and has employed them to throw light on many psychological
puzzles. I hope we shall meet again in happier times.
Yours
very sincerely,
Sigm.
Freud
¹
[Written by Freud at the end of
1914]
3093
ON TRANSIENCE
(1916)
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3095
ON TRANSIENCE
Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a
smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a
young but already famous poet. The poet admired the beauty of the
scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the
thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would
vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty
and splendour that men have created or may create. All that he
would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of
its worth by the transience which was its doom.
The proneness to decay of all
that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two
different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching
despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to
rebellion against the fact asserted. No! it is impossible that all
this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations
and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It
would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow
or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all
the powers of destruction.
But this demand for immortality
is a product of our wishes too unmistakable to lay claim to
reality: what is painful may none the less be true. I could not see
my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist
upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I
did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience
of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.
On the contrary, an increase!
Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the
possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. It
was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the
transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As
regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter
it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our
lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the
human form and face vanish for ever in the course of our own lives,
but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower that
blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that
account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty
and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement
should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation. A time
may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire
to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no
longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a
geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the
earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection
is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives,
it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of
absolute duration.
On Transience
3096
These considerations appeared to
me incontestable; but I noticed that I had made no impression
either upon the poet or upon my friend. My failure led me to infer
that some powerful emotional factor was at work which was
disturbing their judgement, and I believed later that I had
discovered what it was. What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must
have been a revolt in their minds against mourning. The idea that
all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds
a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and, since the mind
instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt
their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its
transience.
Mourning over the loss of
something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the
layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists
mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot
themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be
traced back. We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity
for love - what we call libido - which in the earliest stages of
development is directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at
a very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego on to
objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the
objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for
love (our libido) is once more liberated; and it can then either
take other objects instead or can temporarily return to the ego.
But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects
should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not
hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We
only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce
those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such
then is mourning.
On Transience
3097
My conversation with the poet
took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke
out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the
beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of
art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride
in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many
philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the
differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty
impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their
nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought
had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the
noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of
the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved,
and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded
as changeless.
We cannot be surprised that our
libido, thus bereft of so many of its objects, has clung with all
the greater intensity to what is left to us, that our love of our
country, our affection for those nearest us and our pride in what
is common to us have suddenly grown stronger. But have those other
possessions, which we have now lost, really ceased to have any
worth for us because they have proved so perishable and so
unresistant? To many of us this seems to be so, but once more
wrongly, in my view. I believe that those who think thus, and seem
ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious
has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for
what is Lost. Mourning, as we know, however painful it may becomes
to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has
been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more
free (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the
lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to
be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this
war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high
opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our
discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war
has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than
before.
3098
SOME CHARACTER-TYPES MET WITH IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK
(1916)
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3100
SOME CHARACTER-TYPES MET WITH IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK
When a doctor carries out the psycho-analytic
treatment of a neurotic, his interest is by no means directed in
the first instance to the patient’s character. He would much
rather know what the symptoms mean, what instinctual impulses are
concealed behind them and are satisfied by them, and what course
was followed by the mysterious path that has led from the
instinctual wishes to the symptoms. But the technique which he is
obliged to follow soon compels him to direct his immediate
curiosity towards other objectives. He observes that his
investigation is threatened by resistances set up against him by
the patient, and these resistances he may justly count as part of
the latter’s character. This now acquires the first claim on
his interest.
What opposes the doctor’s
efforts is not always those traits of character which the patient
recognizes in himself and which are attributed to him by people
round him. Peculiarities in him which he had seemed to possess only
to a modest degree are often brought to light in surprisingly
increased intensity, or attitudes reveal themselves in him which
had not been betrayed in other relations of life. The pages which
follow will be devoted to describing and tracing back a few of
these surprising traits of character.
I
THE
‘EXCEPTIONS’
Psycho-analytic work is continually confronted
with the task of inducing the patient to renounce an immediate and
directly attainable yield of pleasure. He is not asked to renounce
all pleasure; that could not, perhaps, be expected of any human
being, and even religion is obliged to support its demand that
earthly pleasure shall be set aside by promising that it will
provide instead an incomparably greater amount of superior pleasure
in another world. No, the patient is only asked to renounce such
satisfactions as will inevitably have detrimental consequences. His
privation is only to be temporary; he has only to learn to exchange
an immediate yield of pleasure for a better assured, even though a
postponed one. Or, in other words, under the doctor’s
guidance he is asked to make the advance from the pleasure
principle to the reality principle by which the mature human being
is distinguished from the child. In this educative process, the
doctor’s clearer insight can hardly be said to play a
decisive part; as a rule, he can only tell his patient what the
latter’s own reason can tell him. But it is not the same to
know a thing in one’s own mind and to hear it from someone
outside. The doctor plays the part of this effective outsider; he
makes use of the influence which one human being exercises over
another. Or - recalling that it is the habit of psycho-analysis to
replace what is derivative and etiolated by what is original and
basic - let us say that the doctor, in his educative work, makes
use of one of the components of love. In this work of
after-education, he is probably doing no more than repeat the
process which made education of any kind possible in the first
instance. Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the
great educator; and it is by the love of those nearest him that the
incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of
necessity and to spare himself the punishment that follows any
infringement of them.
Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work
3101
When in this way one asks the
patient to make a provisional renunciation of some pleasurable
satisfaction, to make a sacrifice, to show his readiness to accept
some temporary suffering for the sake of a better end, or even
merely to make up his mind to submit to a necessity which applies
to everyone, one comes upon individuals who resist such an appeal
on a special ground. They say that they have renounced enough and
suffered enough, and have a claim to be spared any further demands;
they will submit no longer to any disagreeable necessity, for they
are
exceptions
and, moreover, intend to remain so. In one
such patient this claim was magnified into a conviction that a
special providence watched over him, which would protect him from
any painful sacrifices of the sort. The doctor’s arguments
will achieve nothing against an inner confidence which expresses
itself as strongly as this; even
his
influence, indeed, is
powerless at first, and it becomes clear to him that he must
discover the sources from which this damaging prepossession is
being fed.
Now it is no doubt true that
everyone would like to consider himself an ‘exception’
and claim privileges over others. But precisely because of this
there must be a particular reason, and one not universally present,
if someone actually proclaims himself an exception and behaves as
such. This reason may be of more than one kind; in the cases I
investigated I succeeded in discovering a common peculiarity in the
earlier experiences of these patients’ lives. Their neuroses
were connected with some experience or suffering to which they had
been subjected in their earliest childhood, one in respect of which
they knew themselves to be guiltless, and which they could look
upon as an unjust disadvantage imposed upon them. The privileges
that they claimed as a result of this injustice, and the
rebelliousness it engendered, had contributed not a little to
intensifying the conflicts leading to the outbreak of their
neurosis. In one of these patients, a woman, the attitude towards
life which I am discussing came to a head when she learnt that a
painful organic trouble, which had hindered her from attaining her
aims in life, was of congenital origin. So long as she looked upon
this trouble as an accidental and late acquisition, she bore it
patiently; as soon as she found that it was part of an innate
inheritance, she became rebellious. The young man who believed that
he was watched over by a special providence had in his infancy been
the victim of an accidental infection from his wet-nurse, and had
spent his whole later life making claims for compensation, an
accident pension, as it were, without having any idea on what he
based those claims. In his case the analysis, which constructed
this event out of obscure mnemic residues and interpretations of
the symptoms, was confirmed objectively by information from his
family.
For reasons which will be easily
understood I cannot communicate very much about these or other case
histories. Nor do I propose to go into the obvious analogy between
deformities of character resulting from protracted sickliness in
childhood and the behaviour of whole nations whose past history has
been full of suffering. Instead, however, I will take the
opportunity of pointing to a figure created by the greatest of
poets - a figure in whose character the claim to be an exception is
closely bound up with and is motivated by the circumstance of
congenital disadvantage.
Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work
3102
In the opening soliloquy to
Shakespeare’s
Richard III
, Gloucester, who
subsequently becomes King, says:
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s
majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
* * * * *
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
At a first glance this tirade may
perhaps seem unrelated to our present theme. Richard seems to say
nothing more than: ‘I find these idle times tedious, and I
want to enjoy myself. As I cannot play the lover on account of my
deformity, I will play the villain; I will intrigue, murder and do
anything else I please.’ Such a frivolous motivation could
not but stifle any stirring of sympathy in the audience, if it were
not a screen for something much more serious. Otherwise the play
would be psychologically impossible, for the writer must know how
to furnish us with a secret background of sympathy for his hero, if
we are to admire his boldness and adroitness without inward
protest; and such sympathy can only be based on understanding or on
a sense of a possible inner fellow-feeling for him.
I think, therefore, that
Richard’s soliloquy does not say everything; it merely gives
a hint, and leaves us to fill in what it hints at. When we do so,
however, the appearance of frivolity vanishes, the bitterness and
minuteness with which Richard has depicted his deformity make their
full effect, and we clearly perceive the fellow-feeling which
compels our sympathy even with a villain like him. What the
soliloquy thus means is: ‘nature has done me a grievous wrong
in denying me the beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes
me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it. I have a
right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others
let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has
been done to me.’ And now we feel that we ourselves might
become like Richard, that on a small scale, indeed, we are already
like him. Richard is an enormous magnification of something we find
in ourselves as well. We all think we have reason to reproach
Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages;
we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our
self-love. Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of Balder or
the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of genius or the noble
profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a middle-class home
instead of in a royal palace? We could carry off beauty and
distinction quite as well as any of those whom we are now obliged
to envy for these qualities.
Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work
3103
It is, however, a subtle economy
of art in the poet that he does not permit his hero to give open
and complete expression to all his secret motives. By this means he
obliges us to supplement them; he engages our intellectual
activity, diverts it from critical reflection and keeps us firmly
identified with his hero. A bungler in his place would give
conscious expression to all that he wishes to reveal to us, and
would then find himself confronted by our cool, untrammelled
intelligence, which would preclude any deepening of the
illusion.
Before leaving the
‘exceptions’, however, we may point out that the claim
of women to privileges and to exemption from so many of the
importunities of life rests upon the same foundation. As we learn
from psycho-analytic work, women regard themselves as having been
damaged in infancy, as having been undeservedly cut short of
something and unfairly treated; and the embitterment of so many
daughters against their mother derives, ultimately, from the
reproach against her of having brought them into the world as women
instead of as men.
Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work
3104
II
THOSE WRECKED BY SUCCESS
Psycho-analytic work has furnished us with the
thesis that people fall ill of a neurosis as a result of
frustration
. What is meant is the frustration of the
satisfaction of their libidinal wishes, and some digression is
necessary in order to make the thesis intelligible. For a neurosis
to be generated there must be a conflict between a person’s
libidinal wishes and the part of his personality we call his ego,
which is the expression of his instinct of self-preservation and
which also includes his
ideals
of his personality. A
pathogenic conflict of this kind takes place only when the libido
tries to follow paths and aims which the ego has long since
overcome and condemned and has therefore prohibited forever; and
this the libido only does if it is deprived of the possibility of
an ideal ego-syntonic satisfaction. Hence privation, frustration of
a real satisfaction, is the first condition for the generation of a
neurosis, although, indeed, it is far from being the only one.
So much the more surprising, and
indeed bewildering, must it appear when as a doctor one makes the
discovery that people occasionally fall ill precisely when a
deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfilment. It
seems then as though they were not able to tolerate their
happiness; for there can be no question that there is a causal
connection between their success and their falling ill.