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Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3408

   In further pursuing the
discussion of this thesis, are we to consider the nature of the
frustration or the peculiar character of those who are affected by
it? It is extremely seldom, after all, that frustration is
universal and absolute. In order to operate pathogenically it must
no doubt affect the mode of satisfaction which alone the subject
desires, of which alone he is capable. There are in general very
many ways of tolerating deprivation of libidinal satisfaction
without falling ill as a result. In the first place, we know people
who are able to put up with a deprivation of this kind without
being injured: they are not happy, they suffer from longing, but
they do not fall ill. Next, we must bear in mind that the sexual
instinctual impulses in particular are extraordinarily
plastic
, if I may so express it. One of them can take the
place of another, one of them can take over another’s
intensity; if the satisfaction of one of them is frustrated by
reality, the satisfaction of another can afford complete
compensation. They are related to one another like a network of
intercommunicating channels filled with a liquid; and this is so in
spite of their being subject to the primacy of the genitals - a
state of affairs that is not at all easily combined in a single
picture. Further, the component instincts of sexuality, as well as
the sexual current which is compounded from them, exhibit a large
capacity for changing their object, for taking another in its place
- and one, therefore, that is more easily attainable. This
displaceability and readiness to accept a substitute must operate
powerfully against the pathogenic effect of a frustration. Among
these protective processes against falling ill owing to deprivation
there is one which has gained special cultural significance. It
consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim of obtaining a
component or a reproductive pleasure and taking on another which is
related genetically to the abandoned one but is itself no longer
sexual and must be described as social. We call this process
‘sublimation’, in accordance with the general estimate
that places social aims higher than the sexual ones, which are at
bottom self-interested. Sublimation is, incidentally, only a
special case of the way in which sexual trends are attached to
other, non-sexual ones. We shall have to discuss it again in
another connection.

   You may now have an impression
that deprivation has been reduced to insignificance owing to all
these methods of tolerating it. But no, it retains its pathogenic
power. The counter-measures are on the whole insufficient. There is
a limit to the amount of unsatisfied libido that human beings on
the average can put up with. The plasticity or free mobility of the
libido is by no means fully preserved in everyone, and sublimation
is never able to deal with more than a certain fraction of libido,
quite apart from the fact that many people are gifted with only a
small amount of capacity to sublimate. The most important of these
limitations is evidently that upon the mobility of the libido,
since it makes a person’s satisfaction depend on the
attainment of only a very small number of aims and objects. You
have only to recall that an imperfect development of the libido
leaves behind it very fertile and perhaps, too, very numerous
libidinal fixations to early phases of the organization and of the
finding of objects, which are for the most part incapable of real
satisfaction, and you will recognize in libidinal fixation the
second powerful factor which combines with frustration as the cause
of illness. You can declare, as a schematic abbreviation, that
libidinal fixation represents the predisposing, internal factor in
the aetiology of the neuroses, while frustration represents the
accidental, external one.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3409

   I take the opportunity here of
warning you against taking sides in a quite unnecessary dispute. In
scientific matters people are very fond of selecting one portion of
the truth, putting it in the place of the whole and of then
disputing the rest, which is no less true, in favour of this one
portion. In just this way a number of schools of opinion have
already split off from the psycho-analytic movement, some of which
recognize the egoistic instincts while disavowing the sexual ones,
and others attribute importance to the influence of the real tasks
of life while overlooking the individual’s past - and others
besides. Now here we have a similar occasion for pointing a
contrast and starting a controversy. Are neuroses
exogenous
or
endogenous
illnesses? Are they the inevitable result of a
particular constitution or the product of certain detrimental
(traumatic) experiences in life? More particularly, are they
brought about by fixation of the libido (and the other features of
the sexual constitution) or by the pressure of frustration? This
dilemma seems to me no more sensible on the whole than another that
I might put to you: does a baby come about through being begotten
by its father or conceived by its mother? Both determinants are
equally in dispensable, as you will justly reply. In the matter of
the causation of the neuroses the relation, if not precisely the
same, is very similar. As regards their causation, instances of
neurotic illness fall into a series within which the two factors -
sexual constitution and experience, or, if you prefer it, fixation
of the libido and frustration - are represented in such a manner
that if there is more of the one there is less of the other. At one
end of the series are the extreme cases of which you could say with
conviction: these people, in consequence of the singular
development of their libido, would have fallen ill in any case,
whatever they had experienced and however carefully their lives had
been sheltered. At the other end there are the cases, as to which,
on the contrary, you would have had to judge that they would
certainly have escaped falling ill if their lives had not brought
them into this or that situation. In the cases lying within the
series a greater or lesser amount of predisposition in the sexual
constitution is combined with a lesser or greater amount of
detrimental experience in their lives. Their sexual constitution
would not have led them into a neurosis if they had not had these
experiences, and these experiences would not have had a traumatic
effect on them if their libido had been otherwise disposed. In this
series I can perhaps allow a certain preponderance in significance
to the predisposing factors; but even that admission depends on how
far you choose to extend the frontiers of neurotic illness.

   I propose, Gentlemen, that we
should name a series of this kind a ‘complemental
series’, and I forewarn you that we shall have occasion to
construct others of the same kind.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3410

   The tenacity with which the
libido adheres to particular trends and objects - what may be
described as the ‘adhesiveness’ of the libido - makes
its appearance as an independent factor, varying from individual to
individual, whose determinants are quite unknown to us, but whose
significance for the aetiology of the neuroses we shall certainly
no longer underestimate. We should not, on the other hand,
over-estimate the intimacy of this connection. For a similar
‘adhesiveness’ of the libido occurs (for unknown
reasons) under numerous conditions in normal people, and it is
found as a determining factor in people who are in one sense the
contrary of neurotics - in perverts. It was known even before the
days of psycho-analysis (cf. Binet) that in the anamnesis of
perverts a very early impression of an abnormal instinctual trend
or choice of object was quite often found, to which the
subject’s libido remained attached all through his life. It
is often impossible to say what it is that enabled this impression
to exercise such an intense attraction on the libido. I will
describe a case of this sort which I myself observed.

   The subject was a man who is
to-day quite indifferent to the genitals and other attractions of
women, but who can be plunged into irresistible sexual excitement
only by a foot of a particular form wearing a shoe. He can recall
an event from his sixth year which was decisive for the fixation of
his libido. He was sitting on a stool beside the governess who was
to give him lessons in English. The governess, who was an elderly,
dried-up, plain-looking spinster, with pale-blue eyes and a snub
nose, had something wrong with her foot that day, and on that
account kept it, wearing a velvet slipper, stretched out on a
cushion. Her leg itself was most decently concealed. A thin,
scraggy foot, like the one he had then seen belonging to his
governess, thereupon became (after a timid attempt at normal sexual
activity at puberty) his only sexual object; and the man was
irresistibly attracted if a foot of this kind was associated with
other features besides which recalled the type of the English
governess. This fixation of his libido, however, made him, not into
a neurotic, but into a pervert - what we call a foot-fetishist. You
see, then, that although an excessive, and moreover premature,
fixation of the libido is indispensable for the causation of
neuroses, the area of its effects extends far beyond the field of
the neuroses. This determinant, too, is as little decisive in
itself as is the frustration which we have already talked
about.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3411

   Thus the problem of the causation
of the neuroses seems to grow more complicated. In fact,
psycho-analytic investigation makes us acquainted with a fresh
factor, which is not taken into account in our aetiological series
and which we can recognize easiest in cases in which what has
hitherto been a healthy condition is suddenly disturbed by an onset
of neurotic illness. In such people we regularly and indications of
a contention between wishful impulses or, as we are in the habit of
saying, a psychical conflict. One part of the personality champions
certain wishes while another part opposes them and fends them off.
Without such a conflict there is no neurosis. There would not seem
to be anything peculiar in this. Our mental life is, as you know,
perpetually agitated by conflicts which we have to settle. No
doubt, therefore, special conditions must be fulfilled if such a
conflict is to become pathogenic. We must ask what these conditions
are, between what mental powers these pathogenic conflicts are
played out, and what the relation is between the conflict and the
other causative factors.

   I hope to be able to give you
adequate replies to these questions, even though the replies may be
reduced to schematic dimensions. The conflict is conjured up by
frustration, as a result of which the libido, deprived of
satisfaction, is driven to look for other objects and paths. The
necessary precondition of the conflict is that these other paths
and objects arouse displeasure in one part of the personality, so
that a veto is imposed which makes the new method of satisfaction
impossible as it stands. From this point the construction of
symptoms pursues its course, which we shall follow later. The
repudiated libidinal trends nevertheless succeed in getting their
way by certain roundabout paths, though not, it is true, without
taking the objection into account by submitting to some distortions
and mitigations. The roundabout paths are those taken by the
construction of symptoms; the symptoms are the fresh or substitute
satisfaction which has become necessary owing to the fact of
frustration.

   The meaning of psychical conflict
can be adequately expressed in another way by saying that for an
external
frustration to become pathogenic an
internal
frustration must be added to it. In that case, of course, the
external and internal frustration relate to different paths and
objects. The external frustration removes one possibility of
satisfaction and the internal frustration seeks to exclude
another
possibility, about which the conflict then breaks
out. I prefer this way of representing the matter because it has a
secret content. For it hints at the probability that the internal
impediments arose from real external obstacles during the
prehistoric periods of human development.

   But what are the powers from
which the objection to the libidinal trend arises? What is the
other party to the pathogenic conflict? These powers, to put it
quite generally, are the non sexual instinctual forces. We class
them together as the ‘ego instincts’. The
psycho-analysis of the transference-neuroses gives us no easy
access to a further dissecting of them; at most we come to know
them to some extent by the resistances which oppose analysis. The
pathogenic conflict is thus one between the ego-instincts and the
sexual instincts. In a whole number of cases, it looks as though
there might also be a conflict between different purely sexual
trends. But in essence that is the same thing; for, of the two
sexual trends that are in conflict, one is always, as we might say,
‘ego-syntonic’, while the other provokes the
ego’s defence. It therefore still remains a conflict between
the ego and sexuality.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3412

   Over and over again, Gentlemen,
when psycho-analysis has claimed that some mental event is the
product of the sexual instincts, it has been angrily pointed out to
it by way of defence that human beings do not consist only of
sexuality, that there are instincts and interests in mental life
other than sexual ones, that it ought not to derive
‘everything’ from sexuality, and so on. Well, it is
most gratifying for once in a way to find ourselves in agreement
with our opponents. Psycho-analysis has never forgotten that there
are instinctual forces as well which are not sexual. It was based
on a sharp distinction between the sexual instincts and the
ego-instincts, and, in spite of all objections, it has maintained
not that the neuroses are derived from sexuality but that their
origin is due to a conflict between the ego and sexuality. Nor has
it any conceivable reason for disputing the existence or
significance of the ego-instincts while it pursues the part played
by the sexual instincts in illness and in ordinary life. It has
simply been its fate to begin by concerning itself with the sexual
instincts because the transference neuroses made them the most
easily accessible to examination and because it was incumbent on it
to study what other people had neglected.