Freud - Complete Works (543 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3292

   But the same subject will suggest
another and far more serious question. ‘Even if,’ you
will say, ‘this death-wish was present at one time and is
confirmed by recollection, that is still no explanation. After all,
it was superseded long ago, and can only be present to-day in the
unconscious as no more than an unemotional memory, not as a
powerful impulse. Nothing speaks in favour of this last
possibility. Why, then, was it recollected at all in the
dream?’ This question may justly be raised. An attempt to
answer it would lead us too far and would necessitate our taking up
a position on one of the most important points in the theory of
dreams. But I am obliged to keep within the framework of our
discussions and to exercise restraint. So prepare yourselves for a
provisional renunciation. Let us content ourselves with the factual
evidence that this superseded wish can be shown to be the
instigator of the dream, and let us pursue our enquiry whether
other evil wishes can be similarly traced back to the past.

   We will keep to wishes forgetting
rid of someone, which may for the most part be attributed to the
dreamer’s unrestricted egoism. A wish of this kind can very
often be pointed to as the constructor of a dream. Whenever anyone
in the course of one’s life gets in one’s way - and how
often this must happen in view of the complication of one’s
relationships in life! - a dream is promptly ready to kill that
person, even if it be father or mother, brother or sister, husband
or wife. This wickedness of human nature came as a great surprise
to us and we were decidedly disinclined to accept this outcome of
dream-interpretation without question. But as soon as we were led
to look for the origin of these wishes in the past, we discovered
the period of the individual’s past in which there was no
longer anything strange in such egoism and such wishful impulses,
directed even against his closest relatives. It is children, and
precisely in those earliest years which are later veiled by
amnesia, who often exhibit this egoism to an extremely marked
degree and who invariably show clear rudiments or, more correctly
speaking, residues of it. Children love themselves first, and it is
only later that they learn to love others and to sacrifice
something of their own ego to others. Even those people whom a
child seems to love from the beginning are loved by him at first
because he needs them and cannot do without them - once again from
egoistic motives. Not until later does the impulse to love make
itself independent of egoism. It is literally true that
his
egoism has taught him to love
.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   In this connection it will be
interesting to compare the child’s attitude to his brothers
and sisters with that towards his parents. A small child does not
necessarily love his brothers and sisters; often he obviously does
not. There is no doubt that he hates them as his competitors, and
it is a familiar fact that this attitude often persists for long
years, till maturity is reached or even later, without
interruption. Quite often, it is true, it is succeeded, or let us
rather say overlaid, by a more affectionate attitude; but the
hostile one seems very generally to be the earlier. This hostile
attitude can be observed most easily in children between two and a
half and four or five, when a new baby brother or sister appears.
It usually meets with a very unfriendly reception. Such remarks as
‘I don’t like him; the stork can take him away
again!’ are quite common. After this, every opportunity is
taken of disparaging the new arrival and attempts to injure him and
even murderous assaults are not unknown. If the difference in age
is less, by the time the child’s mental activity has awakened
to some degree of intensity he finds his competitor already there
and adjusts himself to him. If the difference is greater, the new
baby may from the first arouse a certain sympathy as an interesting
object, a sort of live doll; and where the difference in age is of
eight or more years, solicitous, maternal impulses may already come
into play, especially in girls. But, honestly speaking, if one
comes upon a wish for the death of a brother or sister behind a
dream, there is seldom need to find it puzzling and one can trace
its prototype without any trouble in early childhood and often
enough in later years of companionship as well.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   There is probably no nursery
without violent conflicts between its inmates. The motives for
these are rivalry for parental love, for common possessions, for
living space. The hostile impulses are directed against older as
well as against younger members of the family. It was, I believe,
Bernard Shaw who remarked: ‘As a rule there is only one
person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and
thats her eldest sister.’ But there is something in this
remark that strikes us as strange. We might at a pinch find hatred
and competition with brothers and sisters intelligible. But how can
we suppose that feelings of hatred can make their way into the
relation between daughter and mother, between parents and
children?

   This relation is undoubtedly a
more favourable one, from the children’s point of view as
well. That is what our expectations demand; we find an absence of
love far more repellent between parents and children than between
brothers and sisters. In the former case we have, as it were, made
something sacred which in the latter we have left profane. Yet
daily observation can show us how frequently the emotional
relations between parents and their grown-up children fall behind
the ideal set up by society, how much hostility is ready to hand
and would be expressed if it were not held back by admixtures of
filial piety and affectionate impulses. The motives for this
hostility are generally known and their tendency is to divide those
of the same sex - the daughter from the mother and the father from
the son. The daughter finds in her mother the authority which
restricts her will and which is entrusted with the task of imposing
on her the renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in
a few instances she even finds in her a competitor who struggles
against being supplanted. The same thing is repeated between the
son and his father still more glaringly. In the son’s eyes
his father embodies every unwillingly tolerated social restraint;
his father prevents him from exercising his will, from early sexual
pleasure and, where there is common property in the family, from
enjoying it. In the case of an heir to the throne this waiting for
a father’s death reaches an almost tragic height. There seems
less danger to the relation between father and daughter or mother
and son. This last provides the purest examples of an unchangeable
affection, unimpaired by any egoistic considerations.

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   Why am I speaking of these
things, which are after all commonplaces and universally known?
Because there is an unmistakable inclination to disavow their
importance in life and to make out that the ideal demanded by
society is fulfilled far more often than it really is. It is
better, however, that the truth should be told by psychologists
rather than that the task should be left to cynics. And,
incidentally, this disavowal applies only to real life. Narrative
and dramatic works of the imagination may freely make play with the
themes that arise from a disturbance of this ideal.

   There is no need to feel
surprised, therefore, if, in a large number of people, dreams
disclose their wish to get rid of their parents and especially of
the parent of their own sex. We may assume that this wish is also
present in waking life and is even conscious sometimes, if it can
be masked by some other motive, as was the case with our dreamer in
Example 3, where it was replaced by pity for his father’s
useless sufferings. It is rarely that the hostility alone dominates
the relationship; far oftener it is in the background of more
affectionate impulses by which it is suppressed, and it must wait
until a dream isolates it, as it were. What seems to us of enormous
size in a dream, on account of this isolation, shrinks up once more
when our interpretation has given it its place in the context of
real life (Hanns Sachs). But we come upon this dream-wish, too,
where it has no relevance in real life, and where the adult need
never confess to it in his waking life. The reason for this is that
the deepest and most invariable motive for estrangement, especially
between two people of the same sex, has already made itself felt in
early childhood.

   What I have in mind is rivalry in
love, with a clear emphasis on the subject’s sex. While he is
still a small child, a son will already begin to develop a special
affection for his mother, whom he regards as belonging to him; he
begins to feel his father as a rival who disputes his sole
possession. And in the same way a little girl looks on her mother
as a person who interferes with her affectionate relation to her
father and who occupies a position which she herself could very
well fill. Observation shows us to what early years these attitudes
go back. We refer to them as the ‘Oedipus complex’,
because the legend of Oedipus realizes, with only a slight
softening, the two extreme wishes that arise from the son’s
situation - to kill his father and take his mother to wife. I do
not wish to assert that the Oedipus complex exhausts the relation
of children to their parents: it can easily be far more
complicated. The Oedipus complex can, moreover, be developed to a
greater or less strength, it can even be reversed; but it is a
regular and very important factor in a child’s mental life,
and there is more danger of our under estimating rather than
over-estimating its influence and that of the developments which
proceed from it. Incidentally, children often react in their
Oedipus attitude to a stimulus coming from their parents, who are
frequently led in their preferences by difference of sex, so that
the father will choose his daughter and the mother her son as a
favourite, or, in case of a cooling-off in the marriage, as a
substitute for a love-object that has lost its value.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   It cannot be said that the world
has shown much gratitude to psycho-analytic research for its
revelation of the Oedipus complex. On the contrary, the discovery
has provoked the most violent opposition among adults; and those
who had neglected to take part in the repudiation of this
proscribed and tabooed emotional relationship made up for their
fault later by depriving the complex of its value through twisted
re-interpretations. It is my unaltered conviction that there is
nothing in this to be disavowed or glossed over. We must reconcile
ourselves to the fact which was recognized by the Greek legend
itself as an inevitable fate. It is once again an interesting fact
that the Oedipus complex, which has been rejected from real life,
has been left to imaginative writing, has been placed freely, as it
were, at its disposal. Otto Rank has shown in a careful study how
the Oedipus complex has provided dramatic authors with a wealth of
themes in endless modifications, softenings and disguises - in
distortions, that is to say, of the kind which we are already
familiar with as the work of a censorship. We may therefore also
ascribe this Oedipus complex to dreamers who have been fortunate
enough to escape conflicts with their parents in later life. And,
intimately linked with it, we find what we call the
‘castration complex’, the reaction to the threats
against the child aimed at putting a stop to his early sexual
activities and attributed to his father.

   What we have already learnt from
our study of the mental life of children will lead us to expect to
find a similar explanation of the other group of forbidden
dream-wishes - the excessive sexual impulses. We are thus
encouraged to make a study of the development of children’s
sexual life and from many sources we arrive at what follows.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   First and foremost, it is an
untenable error to deny that children have a sexual life and to
suppose that sexuality only begins at puberty with the maturation
of the genitals. On the contrary, from the very first children have
a copious sexual life, which differs at many points from what is
later regarded as normal. What in adult life is described as
‘perverse’ differs from the normal in these respects:
first, by disregarding the barrier of species (the gulf between men
and animals), secondly, by overstepping the barrier against
disgust, thirdly that against incest (the prohibition against
seeking sexual satisfaction from near blood-relations), fourthly
that against members of one’s own sex and fifthly the
transferring of the part played by the genitals to other organs and
areas of the body. None of these barriers existed from the
beginning; they were only gradually erected in the course of
development and education. Small children are free from them. They
recognize no frightful gulf between human beings and animals; the
arrogance with which men separate themselves from animals does not
emerge until later. To begin with, children exhibit no disgust at
excreta but acquire this slowly under the pressure of education;
they attach no special importance to the distinction between the
sexes, but attribute the same conformation of the genitals to both;
they direct their first sexual lusts and their curiosity to those
who are nearest and for other reasons dearest to them - parents,
brothers and sisters, or nurses; and finally, they show (what later
on breaks through once again at the climax of a love-relation) that
they expect to derive pleasure not only from their sexual organs,
but that many other parts of the body lay claim to the same
sensitivity, afford them analogous feelings of pleasure and can
accordingly play the part of genitals. Children may thus be
described as ‘polymorphously perverse’, and if these
impulses only show
traces
of activity, that is because on
the one hand they are of less intensity compared with those in
later life and on the other hand all a child’s sexual
manifestations are at once energetically suppressed by education.
This suppression is, as it were, extended into theory; for adults
endeavour to overlook one portion of the sexual manifestations of
children and to disguise another portion by misinterpreting its
sexual nature, so that they can then disavow the whole of them. It
is often the very same people who in the nursery are furious with
any sexual naughtinesses of children and afterwards at their
writing-tables defend the sexual purity of the same children. when
children are left to themselves, or under the influence of
seduction, they often bring about quite considerable achievements
in the was of perverse sexual activity. Adults are of course right
not to take this too seriously and to regard it as
‘childishness’, or ‘playfulness’, for
children are not to be condemned as fully capable or fully
responsible either before the judgement-seat of morals or before
the law; but nonetheless these things exist. They have their
importance both as indications of a child’s innate
constitution and as causes and encouragements of later developments
in him; they give us information on the sexual life of children and
so on human sexual life in general. If, therefore, we once more
find all these perverse wishful impulses behind our distorted
dreams, that only means that in this field too dreams have taken a
step backwards into the state of infancy.