Freud - Complete Works (556 page)

   If, however, the recognition of
resistance has become so important, we should do well to find room
for a cautious doubt whether we have not been too light-heartedly
assuming resistances. Perhaps there really are cases of neurosis in
which associations fail for other reasons, perhaps the arguments
against our hypotheses really deserve to have their content
examined, and perhaps we are doing patients an injustice in so
conveniently setting aside their intellectual criticisms as
resistance. But, Gentlemen, we did not arrive at this judgement
lightly. We have had occasion to observe all these critical
patients at the moment of the emergence of a resistance and after
its disappearance. For resistance is constantly altering its
intensity during the course of a treatment; it always increases
when we are approaching a new topic, it is at its most intense
while we are at the climax of dealing with that topic, and it dies
away when the topic has been disposed of. Nor do we ever, unless we
have been guilty of special clumsiness in our technique, have to
meet the full amount of resistance of which a patient is capable.
We have therefore been able to convince ourselves that on countless
occasions in the course of his analysis the same man will abandon
his critical attitude and then take it up again. If we are on the
point of bringing a specially distressing piece of unconscious
material to his consciousness, he is extremely critical; he may
previously have understood and accepted a great deal, but now it is
just as though those acquisitions have been swept away; in his
efforts for opposition at any price, he may offer a complete
picture of someone who is an emotional imbecile. But if we succeed
in helping him to overcome this new resistance, he recovers his
insight and understanding. Thus his critical faculty is not an
independent function, to be respected as such, it is the tool of
his emotional attitudes and is directed by his resistance. If there
is something he does not like, he can put up a shrewd fight against
it and appear highly critical; but if something suits his book, he
can, on the contrary, show himself most credulous. Perhaps none of
us are very different; a man who is being analysed only reveals
this dependence of the intellect upon emotional life so clearly
because in analysis we are putting such great pressure on him.

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   How, then, do we account for our
observation that the patient fights with such energy against the
removal of his symptoms and the setting of his mental processes on
a normal course? We tell ourselves that we have succeeded in
discovering powerful forces here which oppose any alteration of the
patient’s condition; they must be the same ones which in the
past brought this condition about. During the construction of his
symptoms something must have taken place which we can now
reconstruct from our experiences during the
resolution
of
his symptoms. We already know from Breuer’s observation that
there is a precondition for the existence of a symptom: some mental
process must not have been brought to an end normally - so that it
could become conscious. The symptom is a substitute for what did
not happen at that point. We now know the point at which we must
locate the operation of the force which we have surmised. A violent
opposition must have started against the entry into consciousness
of the questionable mental process, and for that reason it remained
unconscious. As being something unconscious, it had the power to
construct a symptom. This same opposition, during psycho. analytic
treatment, sets itself up once more against our effort to transform
what is unconscious into what is conscious. This is what we
perceive as resistance. We have proposed to give the pathogenic
process which is demonstrated by the resistance the name of
repression
.

   We must now form more definite
ideas about this process of repression. It is the precondition for
the construction of symptoms; but it is also something to which we
know nothing similar. Let us take as our model an impulse, a mental
process that endeavours to turn itself into an action. We know that
it can be repelled by what we term a rejection or condemnation.
When this happens, the energy at its disposal is withdrawn from it;
it becomes powerless, though it can persist as a memory. The whole
process of coming to a decision about it runs its course within the
knowledge of the ego. It is a very different matter if we suppose
that the same impulse is subjected to repression. In that case it
would retain its energy and no memory of it would remain behind;
moreover the process of repression would be accomplished unnoticed
by the ego. This comparison, therefore, brings us no nearer to the
essential nature of repression.

   I will put before you the only
theoretical ideas which have proved of service for giving a more
definite shape to the concept of repression. It is above all
essential for this purpose that we should proceed from the purely
descriptive meaning of the word ‘unconscious’ to the
systematic meaning of the same word. That is, we will decide to say
that the fact of a psychical process being conscious or unconscious
is only one of its attributes and not necessarily an unambiguous
one. If a process of this kind has remained unconscious, its being
kept away from consciousness may perhaps only be an indication of
some vicissitude it has gone through, and not that vicissitude
itself. In order to form a picture of this vicissitude, let us
assume that every mental process - we must admit one exception,
which we shall mention at a later stage exists to begin with in an
unconscious stage or phase and that it is only from there that the
process passes over into the conscious phase, just as a
photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a
picture after being turned into a positive. Not every negative,
however, necessarily becomes a positive; nor is it necessary that
every unconscious mental process should turn into a conscious one.
This may be advantageously expressed by saying that an individual
process belongs to begin with to the system of the unconscious and
can then, in certain circumstances, pass over into the system of
the conscious.

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   The crudest idea of these systems
is the most convenient for us - a spatial one. Let us therefore
compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in
which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate
individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there is a second,
narrower, room - a kind of drawing-room - in which consciousness,
too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a
watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental
impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the
drawing-room if they displease him. You will see at once that it
does not make much difference if the watchman turns away a
particular impulse at the threshold itself or if he pushes it back
across the threshold after it has entered the drawing-room. This is
merely a question of the degree of his watchfulness and of how
early he carries out his act of recognition. If we keep to this
picture, we shall be able to extend our nomenclature further. The
impulses in the entrance hall of the unconscious are out of sight
of the conscious, which is in the other room; to begin with they
must remain unconscious. If they have already pushed their way
forward to the threshold and have been turned back by the watchman,
then they are inadmissible to consciousness; we speak of them as
repressed
. But even the impulses which the watchman has
allowed to cross the threshold are not on that account necessarily
conscious as well; they can only become so if they succeed in
catching the eye of consciousness. We are therefore justified in
calling this second room the system of the
preconscious
. In
that case becoming conscious retains its purely descriptive sense.
For any particular impulse, however, the vicissitude of repression
consists in its not being allowed by the watchman to pass from the
system of the unconscious into that of the preconscious. It is the
same watchman whom we get to know as resistance when we try to lift
the repression by means of the analytic treatment.

   Now I know you will say that
these ideas are both crude and fantastic and quite impermissible in
a scientific account. I know that they are crude: and, more than
that, I know that they are incorrect, and, if I am not very much
mistaken, I already have something better to take their place.
Whether it will seem to you equally fantastic I cannot tell. They
are preliminary working hypotheses, like Ampère’s
manikin swimming in the electric current, and they are not to be
despised in so far as they are of service in making our
observations intelligible. I should like to assure you that these
crude hypotheses of the two rooms, the watchman at the threshold
between them and consciousness as a spectator at the end of the
second room, must nevertheless be very far-reaching approximations
to the real facts. And I should like to hear you admit that our
terms, ‘unconscious’, ‘preconscious’ and
‘conscious’, prejudge things far less and are far
easier to justify than others which have been proposed or are in
use, such as ‘subconscious’,
‘paraconscious’, ‘intraconscious’ and the
like.

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   It will therefore be of greater
importance to me if you warn me that an arrangement of the mental
apparatus, such as I have here assumed in order to explain neurotic
symptoms, must necessarily claim general validity and must give us
information about normal functioning as well. You will, of course,
be quite right in this. At the moment we cannot pursue this
implication further; but our interest in the psychology of the
forming of symptoms cannot but be increased to an extraordinary
extent if there is a prospect, through the study of pathological
conditions, of obtaining access to the normal mental events which
are so well concealed.

   Perhaps you recognize, moreover,
what it is that supports our hypotheses of the two systems, and
their relation to each other and to consciousness? After all, the
watchman between the unconscious and the preconscious is nothing
else than the
censorship
, to which, as we found, the form
taken by the manifest dream is subject. The day’s residues,
which we recognized as the instigators of the dream, were
preconscious material which, at night-time and in the state of
sleep, had been under the influence of unconscious and repressed
wishful impulses; they had been able, in combination with those
impulses and thanks to their energy, to construct the latent dream.
Under the dominance of the unconscious system this material had
been worked over (by condensation and displacement) in a manner
which is unknown or only exceptionally permissible in normal mental
life - that is, in the preconscious system. We came to regard this
difference in their manner of operating as what characterizes the
two systems; the relation which the preconscious has to
consciousness was regarded by us merely as an indication of its
belonging to one of the two systems. Dreams are not pathological
phenomena; they can appear in any healthy person under the
conditions of a state of sleep. Our hypothesis about the structure
of the mental apparatus, which allows us to understand the
formation alike of dreams and of neurotic symptoms, has an
incontrovertible claim to being taken into account in regard to
normal mental life as well.

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   That much is what we have to say
for the moment about repression. But it is only the
precondition
for the construction of symptoms. Symptoms, as
we know, are a substitute for something that is held back by
repression. It is a long step further, however, from repression to
an understanding of this substitutive structure. On this other side
of the problem, these questions arise out of our observation of
repression: what kind of mental impulses are subject to repression?
by what forces is it accomplished? and for what motives? So far we
have only one piece of information on these points. In
investigating resistance we have learnt that it emanates from
forces of the ego, from known and latent character traits. It is
these too, therefore, that are responsible for repression, or at
any rate they have a share in it. We know nothing more at
present.

   At this point the second of the
two observations which I mentioned to you earlier comes to our
help. It is quite generally the case that analysis allows us to
arrive at the intention of neurotic symptoms. This again will be
nothing new to you. I have already demonstrated it to you in two
cases of neurosis. But, after all, what do two cases amount to? You
are right to insist on its being demonstrated to you in two hundred
cases - in countless cases. The only trouble is that I cannot do
that. Once again, your own experience must serve instead, or your
belief, which on this point can appeal to the unanimous reports of
all psycho-analysts.

   You will recollect that, in the
two cases whose symptoms we submitted to a detailed investigation,
the analysis initiated us into these patients’ most intimate
sexual life. In the first case we further recognized with
particular clarity the intention or purpose of the symptom we were
examining; in the second case this was perhaps somewhat concealed
by a factor which will be mentioned later Well, every other case
that we submit to analysis would show us the same thing that we
have found in these two examples. In every instance we should be
introduced by the analysis into the patient’s sexual
experiences and wishes; and in every instance we should be bound to
see that the symptoms served the same intention. We find that this
intention is the satisfaction of sexual wishes; the symptoms serve
for the patients’ sexual satisfaction; they are a substitute
for satisfaction of this kind, which the patients are without in
their lives.