Freud - Complete Works (549 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3328

   Now you will no doubt conclude
that a rejection such as this of all written discussion argues a
high degree of inaccessibility to objections, of obstinacy, or, to
use the polite colloquial scientific term, of pig-headedness. I
should like to say in reply that when once, after such hard work,
one has arrived at a conviction, one has at the same time acquired
a certain right to retain that conviction with some tenacity. I may
also urge that in the course of my work I have modified my views on
a few important points, changed them and replaced them by fresh
ones - and in each case, of course, I have made this publicly
known. And the outcome of this frankness? Some people have taken no
notice whatever of myself - corrections and continue to this day to
criticize me for hypotheses which have long ceased to have the same
meaning for me. Others reproach me precisely for these changes and
regard me as untrustworthy on their account. Of course! a person
who has occasionally changed his opinions is deserving of no belief
at all, since he has made it all too likely that his latest
assertions may also be mistaken; but a person who has unflinchingly
maintained what he once asserted, or who cannot be quickly enough
persuaded to give it up, must naturally be pig-headed or stubborn!
What can one do, in the face of these contradictory objections by
the critics, but remain as one is and behave in accordance with
one’s own judgement? I am resolved to do that, and I shall
not be deterred from modifying or withdrawing any of my theories,
as my advancing experience may require. In regard to
fundamental
discoveries I have hitherto found nothing to
alter, and I hope this will remain true in the future.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3329

   I am to put before you, then, the
psycho-analytic view of the phenomena of neurosis. In doing so, the
best plan would seem to be to make a start in connection with the
phenomena we have already dealt with, for the sake both of analogy
and contrast; and I will begin with a symptomatic action which I
have seen many people perform during my consulting hours. We
analysts cannot do much for the people who come to us in our
consulting-room to lay before us in a quarter of an hour the
miseries of a long lifetime. Our deeper knowledge makes it
difficult for us to give the kind of opinion another doctor would -
‘There’s nothing wrong with you’ - with the added
advice: ‘You should arrange for a mild hydropathic
treatment.’ One of my colleagues who was asked what he did
with his consultation patients shrugged his shoulders and replied:
‘I fine them so-and-so many
Kronen
for a frivolous
waste of time.’ So you will not be surprised to hear that
even in the case of busy psycho-analysts their consulting hours are
not apt to be very lively. I have had the ordinary door between my
waiting-room and my consulting- and treatment-room doubled and
given a baize lining. There can be no doubt about the purpose of
this arrangement. Now it constantly happens that a person whom I
have brought in from the waiting-room omits to shut the door behind
him and almost always he leaves
both
doors open. As soon as
I notice this I insist in a rather unfriendly tone on his or her
going back and making good the omission even if the person
concerned is a well-dressed gentleman or a fashionable lady. This
makes an impression of uncalled-for pedantry. Occasionally, too, I
have put myself in a foolish position by making this request when
it has turned out to be a person who cannot touch a door-handle
himself and is glad if someone with him spares him the necessity.
But in the majority of cases I have been right; for anyone who
behaves like this and leaves the door open between a doctor’s
waiting-room and consulting-room is ill-mannered and deserves an
unfriendly reception. But do not take sides over this till you have
heard the sequel. For this carelessness on the part of the patient
only occurs when he has been alone in the waiting-room and has
therefore left an empty room behind him; it never happens if other
people, strangers to him, have been waiting with him. In this
latter case he knows quite well that it is in his interest not to
be overheard while he is talking to the doctor, and he never fails
to shut both the doors carefully.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3330

   Thus the patient’s omission
is neither accidentally nor senselessly determined; and indeed it
is not unimportant, for, as we shall see, it throws light on the
newcomer’s attitude to the doctor. The patient is one of the
great multitude who have a craving for mundane authority, who wish
to be dazzled and intimidated. He may have enquired on the
telephone as to the hour at which he could most easily get an
appointment; he had formed a picture of a crowd of people seeking
for help, like the crowd outside one of Julius Meinl’s
branches. He now comes into an empty, and moreover extremely
modestly furnished, waiting-room, and is shocked. He has to make
the doctor pay for the superfluous respect which he had intended to
offer him: so - he omits to shut the door between the waiting-room
and the consulting-room. What he means to say to the doctor by his
conduct is: ‘Ah, so there’s no one here and no
one’s likely to come while I’m here.’ He would
behave equally impolitely and disrespectfully during the
consultation if his arrogance were not given a sharp reprimand at
the very beginning.

   The analysis of this small
symptomatic action tells you no thing you did not know before: the
thesis that it was not a matter of chance but had a motive, a sense
and an intention, that it had a place in an assignable mental
context and that it provided information, by a small indication, of
a more important mental process. But, more than anything else, it
tells you that the process thus indicated was unknown to the
consciousness of the person who carried out the action, since none
of the patients who left the two doors open would have been able to
admit- that by this omission he wanted to give evidence of his
contempt. Some of them would probably have been aware of a sense of
disappointment when they entered the empty waiting room; but the
connection between this impression and the symptomatic action which
followed certainly remained unknown to their consciousness.

   Beside this small analysis of a
symptomatic action we will now place an observation on a patient. I
choose this one because it is fresh in my memory, but also because
it can be reported comparatively briefly A certain amount of detail
is indispensable in any such account.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3331

   A young officer, home on short
leave, asked me to undertake the treatment of his mother-in-law,
who, though in the happiest circumstances, was embittering her own
life and the lives of her relatives through an absurd idea. In this
way I made the acquaintance of a well-preserved lady of
fifty-three, friendly and simple in her nature, who told me the
following story without any reluctance. She lived in the country,
most happily married, with her husband, who was at the head of a
large factory. She could not give enough praise to her
husband’s affectionate solicitude. It had been a love-match
thirty years ago, and since then there had never been any trouble,
discord or cause for jealousy. Her two children were happily
married; her husband (and their father), out of a sense of duty,
was not yet willing to retire. A year before, she had received an
anonymous letter accusing her excellent husband of a love affair
with a young girl; and the incredible - and to herself
unintelligible - result was that she immediately believed it, and
since then her happiness had been destroyed. The course of events,
in greater detail, was something like this. She had a housemaid
with whom she used, perhaps too often, to have intimate talks. This
girl pursued another one with a positively malicious hostility
because she had done so much better for herself in life, though she
was of no higher origin. Instead of going into service, this other
girl had managed to get a commercial training, had entered the
factory and, as a result of shortness of personnel, owing to
members of the staff being called up for military service, she was
promoted to a good position. She now lived in the factory itself,
had social relations with all the gentlemen and was actually
addressed as ’Fräulein’. The girl who had made
less of a success in life was of course ready to repeat all kinds
of bad things of her former schoolmate. One day our lady had a
conversation with the housemaid about a gentleman who had been
staying with them, who was well known not to be living with his
wife but to be having an affair with another woman. She did not
know how it happened, but she suddenly said: ‘The most
dreadful thing that could happen to me would be if I were to learn
that my dear husband was having an affair too.’ The next day
she received an anonymous letter by post which, as though by magic,
gave her this very information, written in a disguised hand. She
decided, probably rightly, that the letter was the work of the
malicious housemaid, since it specified as her husband’s
mistress the girl whom the servant pursued with her hatred. But
although she at once saw through the intrigue and had seen enough
instances where she lived of how little credence such cowardly
denunciations deserved, what happened was that the letter instantly
prostrated her. She became terribly excited, sent for her husband
at once and reproached him violently. Her husband laughed the
accusation off and did the best possible thing. He brought in the
family doctor (who was also the factory doctor) who made efforts to
soothe the unfortunate lady. The further conduct of both of them
was also entirely sensible. The housemaid was dismissed, but the
alleged rival was not. Since then the patient had repeatedly been
pacified to the point of no longer believing the content of the
anonymous letter, but never thoroughly and never for long. It was
enough for her to hear the young lady’s name mentioned or to
meet her in the street and a fresh attack of distrust, pain and
reproaches would burst out in her.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3332

   This, then, is the case history
of this excellent woman. Not much psychiatric experience was needed
to understand that, in contrast to other neurotics, she was giving
too mild an account of her case - that she was, as we say, -
dissimulating and that she had never really got over her belief in
the accusation contained in the anonymous letter.

   What attitude, then, will a
psychiatrist adopt in a case of illness like this? We know already
how he would behave to the symptomatic action of the patient who
fails to shut the consulting-room door. He pronounces it to be a
chance event of no psychological interest with which he has no
further concern. But this procedure cannot be carried over to the
illness of the jealous woman. The symptomatic action seems to be a
matter of indifference; but the symptom forces itself on our
attention as a matter of importance. It is accompanied by intense
subjective suffering and, as an objective fact, it threatens the
communal life of a family; it is thus an undeniable subject of
psychiatric interest. The psychiatrist will start by endeavouring
to characterize the symptom by some essential feature. The idea
with which the woman torments herself cannot in itself be called
absurd; it does, indeed, happen that elderly gentlemen have love
affairs with young girls. But there is something else about it
which
is
absurd and hard to understand. The patient had no
other reason at all for believing that her affectionate and loyal
husband belonged to this otherwise not so rare class of husbands
except what was asserted in the anonymous letter. She knew that
this document had no evidential value and she was able to give a
satisfying explanation of its origin. She ought therefore to have
been able to tell herself that she had no ground whatever for her
jealousy, and she did tell herself so. But in spite of this she
suffered as much as if she regarded this jealousy as completely
justified. Ideas of this kind, which are inaccessible to logical
arguments based on reality, are by general agreement described as
delusions
. The good lady, then, was suffering from
delusions of jealousy
. This is no doubt the essential
feature of this case of illness.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3333

   After this first point has been
established our psychiatric interest will become even livelier. If
a delusion is not to be got rid of by a reference to reality, no
doubt it did not originate from reality either. Where else did it
originate? There are delusions of the most varied content: why in
our case is the content of the delusion jealousy in particular? In
what kind of people do delusions, and especially delusions of
jealousy, come about? We should like to hear what the psychiatrist
has to say about this; but at this point he leaves us in the lurch.
He enters into only a single one of our enquiries. He will
investigate the woman’s family history and will
perhaps
give us this reply: ‘Delusions come about in
people in whose families similar and other psychical disorders have
repeatedly occurred.’ In other words, if this woman developed
a delusion she was predisposed to it by hereditary transmission. No
doubt that is something; but is it all we want to know? Was this
the only thing that contributed to the causation of the illness?
Must we be content to suppose that it is a matter of indifference
or caprice or is inexplicable whether a delusion of jealousy arises
rather than any other sort? And ought we to understand the
assertion of the predominance of the hereditary influence in a
negative sense as well - that no matter what experiences this
woman’s mind encountered she was destined some time or other
to produce a delusion? You will want to know why it is that
scientific psychiatry will give us no further information. But my
reply to you is: ‘he is a rogue who gives more than he
has.’ The psychiatrist knows no way of throwing more light on
a case like this one. He must content himself with a diagnosis and
a prognosis - uncertain in spite of a wealth of experience - of its
future course.