Freud - Complete Works (567 page)

   Once again we shall not find it
hard to reach a decision. The assertion that the libidinal cathexis
(and therefore the pathogenic significance) of the infantile
experiences has been largely intensified by the regression of the
libido is undoubtedly correct, but it would lead to error if we
were to regard it alone as decisive. Other considerations must be
allowed weight as well.

   In the first place observation
shows, in a manner that excludes all doubt, that the infantile
experiences have an importance of their own and give evidence of it
already in childhood. Children too have their neuroses, in which
the factor of displacement backwards in time is necessarily very
much reduced or is even completely absent, since the onset of the
illness follows the traumatic experiences immediately. The study of
these infantile neuroses protects us from more than one dangerous
misunderstanding of the neuroses of adults, just as the dreams of
children gave the key to an understanding of adult dreams.
Children’s neuroses are very common, much commoner than is
supposed. They are often overlooked, regarded as signs of a bad or
naughty child, often, too, kept under by the nursery authorities;
but they can always be easily recognized in retrospect. They
usually appear in the form of
anxiety hysteria
. We shall
learn on a later occasion what that means. If a neurosis breaks out
in later life, analysis regularly reveals it as a direct
continuation of the infantile illness which may have emerged as no
more than a veiled hint. As I have said, however, there are cases
in which these signs of neurosis in childhood proceed
uninterruptedly into a lifelong illness. We have been able to
analyse a few examples of these children’s neuroses in
childhood itself - when they were actually present; but far more
often we have had to be content with someone who has fallen ill in
adult life enabling us to obtain a deferred insight into his
childhood neurosis. In such cases we must not fail to make certain
corrections and take certain precautions.

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   In the second place, we must
reflect that it would be inconceivable for the libido to regress so
regularly to the period of childhood unless there were something
there to exercise an attraction on it. The fixation which we have
supposed to be present at particular points in the course of
development can only have a meaning if we regard it as consisting
in the retention of a certain quota of libidinal energy. And
finally I may point out to you that between the intensity and
pathogenic importance of infantile and of later experiences a
complemental relationship exists similar to the series we have
already discussed. There are cases in which the whole weight of
causation falls on the sexual experiences of childhood, cases in
which those impressions exert a definitely traumatic effect and
call for no other support than can be afforded them by an average
sexual constitution and the fact of its incomplete development.
Alongside of these cases there are others in which the whole accent
lies on the later conflicts and the emphasis we find in the
analysis laid on the impressions of childhood appears entirely as
the work of regression. Thus we have extremes of
‘developmental inhibition’ and ‘regression’
and between them every degree of co-operation between the two
factors.

   These facts have a certain
interest from the point of view of education, which plans the
prevention of neuroses by intervening at an early stage in
children’s sexual development. So long as one focuses
attention principally on infantile sexual experiences, one must
suppose that one has done everything for the prophylaxis of nervous
illnesses by taking care that the child’s development is
delayed and that it is spared experiences of the sort. We already
know, however, that the preconditions for the causation of neuroses
are complex and cannot be influenced in general if we take account
of only a single factor. Strict protection of the young loses value
because it is powerless against the constitutional factor. Besides,
it is more difficult to carry out than educationists imagine and it
brings with it two fresh dangers which must not be underestimated:
the fact that it may achieve too much - that it may encourage an
excess of sexual repression, with damaging results, and the fact
that it may send the child out into life without any defence
against the onrush of sexual demands that is to be looked for at
puberty. Thus it remains extremely doubtful how far prophylaxis in
childhood can be carried with advantage and whether an altered
attitude to the immediate situation may not offer a better angle of
approach for the prevention of neuroses.

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   Let us now go back to the
symptoms. They create a substitute, then, for the frustrated
satisfaction by means of a regression of the libido to earlier
times, with which a return to earlier stages of object-choice or of
the organization is inseparably bound up. We discovered some time
ago that neurotics are anchored somewhere in their past; we know
now that it is at a period of their past in which their libido did
not lack satisfaction, in which they were happy. They search about
in the history of their life till they find a period of that sort,
even if they have to go back as far as the time when they were
infants in arms - as they remember it or as they imagine it from
later hints. In some way the symptom repeats this early infantile
kind of satisfaction, distorted by the censorship arising from the
conflict, turned as a rule to a feeling of suffering, and mingled
with elements from the precipitating cause of the illness. The kind
of satisfaction which the symptom brings has much that is strange
about it.

   We may disregard the fact that it
is unrecognizable to the subject, who, on the contrary, feels the
alleged satisfaction as suffering and complains of it. This
transformation is a function of the psychical conflict under
pressure of which the symptom had to be formed. What was once a
satisfaction to the subject is, indeed, bound to arouse his
resistance or his disgust to-day. We are familiar with a trivial
but instructive model of this change of mind. The same child who
once eagerly sucked the milk from his mother’s breast is
likely a few years later to display a strong dislike to drinking
milk, which his upbringing has difficulties in overcoming. This
dislike increases to disgust if a skin forms on the milk or the
drink containing it. We cannot exclude the possibility, perhaps,
that the skin conjures up a memory of the mother’s breast,
once so ardently desired. Between the two situations, however,
there lies the experience of weaning, with its traumatic
effects.

   It is something else besides that
makes symptoms seem strange to us and incomprehensible as a means
of libidinal satisfaction. They do not remind us in the very least
of anything from which we are in the habit of normally expecting
satisfaction. Usually they disregard objects and in so doing
abandon their relation to external reality. We can see that this is
a consequence of turning away from the reality principle and of
returning to the pleasure principle. But it is also a return to a
kind of extended auto-erotism, of the sort that offered the sexual
instinct its first satisfactions. In place of a change in the
external world these substitute a change in the subject’s own
body: they set an internal act in place of an external one, an
adaptation in place of an action - once again, something that
corresponds, phylogenetically, to a highly significant regression.
We shall only understand this in connection with something new that
we have still to learn from the analytic researches into the
formation of symptoms. We must further remember that the same
processes belonging to the unconscious play a part in the formation
of symptoms as in the formation of dreams - namely, condensation
and displacement. A symptom, like a dream, represents something as
fulfilled: a satisfaction in the infantile manner. But by means of
extreme condensation that satisfaction can be compressed into a
single sensation or innervation, and by means of extreme
displacement it can be restricted to one small detail of the entire
libidinal complex. It is not to be wondered at if we, too, often
have difficulty in recognizing in a symptom the libidinal
satisfaction whose presence we suspect and which is invariably
confirmed.

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   I have warned you that we still
have something new to learn; it is indeed something surprising and
perplexing. By means of analysis, as you know, starting from the
symptoms, we arrive at a knowledge of the infantile experiences to
which the libido is fixated and out of which the symptoms are made.
Well, the surprise lies in the fact that these scenes from infancy
are not always true. Indeed, they are not true in the majority of
cases, and in a few of them they are the direct opposite of the
historical truth. As you will see, this discovery is calculated
more than any other to discredit either analysis, which has led to
this result, or the patients, on whose statements the analysis and
our whole understanding of the neuroses are founded. But there is
something else remarkably perplexing about it. If the infantile
experiences brought to light by analysis were invariably real, we
should feel that we were standing on firm ground; if they were
regularly falsified and revealed as inventions, as phantasies of
the patient, we should be obliged to abandon this shaky ground and
look for salvation elsewhere. But neither of these things is the
case: the position can be shown to be that the childhood
experiences constructed or remembered in analysis are sometimes
indisputably false and sometimes equally certainly correct, and in
most cases compounded of truth and falsehood. Sometimes, then,
symptoms represent events which really took place and to which we
may attribute an influence on the fixation of the libido, and
sometimes they represent phantasies of the patient’s which
are not, of course, suited to playing an aetiological role. It is
difficult to find one’s way about in this. We can make a
first start, perhaps, with a similar discovery - namely, that the
isolated childhood memories that people have possessed consciously
from time immemorial and before there was any such thing as
analysis may equally be falsified or at least may combine truth and
falsehood in plenty. In their case there is seldom any difficulty
in showing their incorrectness; so we at least have the reassurance
of knowing that the responsibility for this unexpected
disappointment lies, not with analysis, but in some way with the
patients.

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   After a little reflection we
shall easily understand what it is about this state of things that
perplexes us so much. It is the low valuation of reality, the
neglect of the distinction between it and phantasy. We are tempted
to feel offended at the patient’s having taken up our time
with invented stories. Reality seems to us something worlds apart
from invention, and we set a very different value on it. Moreover
the patient, too, looks at things in this light in his normal
thinking. When he brings up the material which leads from behind
his symptoms to the wishful situations modelled on his infantile
experiences, we are in doubt to begin with whether we are dealing
with reality or phantasies. Later, we are enabled by certain
indications to come to a decision and we are faced by the task of
conveying it to the patient. This, however, invariably gives rise
to difficulties. If we begin by telling him straight away that he
is now engaged in bringing to light the phantasies with which he
has disguised the history of his childhood just as every nation
disguises its forgotten prehistory by constructing legends), we
observe that his interest in pursuing the subject further suddenly
diminishes in an undesirable fashion. He too wants to experience
realities and despises everything that is merely
‘imaginary’. If; however, we leave him, till this piece
of work is finished, in the belief that we are occupied in
investigating the real events of his childhood, we run the risk of
his later on accusing us of being mistaken and laughing at us for
our apparent credulity. It will be a long time before he can take
in our proposal that we should equate phantasy and reality and not
bother to begin with whether the childhood experiences under
examination are the one or the other. Yet this is clearly the only
correct attitude to adopt towards these mental productions. They
too possess a reality of a sort. It remains a fact that the patient
has created these phantasies for himself, and this fact is of
scarcely less importance for his neurosis than if he had really
experienced what the phantasies contain. The phantasies possess
psychical
as contrasted with
material
reality, and we
gradually learn to understand that
in the world of the neuroses
it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind
.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3426

   Among the occurrences which recur
again and again in the youthful history of neurotics - which are
scarcely ever absent - there are a few of particular importance,
which also deserve, on that account, I think, to be brought into
greater prominence than the rest. As specimens of this class I will
enumerate these: observation of parental intercourse, seduction by
an adult and threat of being castrated. It would be a mistake to
suppose that they are never characterized by material reality; on
the contrary, this is often established incontestably through
enquiries from older members of the patient’s family. It is
by no means a rare thing, for instance, for a little boy, who is
beginning to play with his penis in a naughty way and is not yet
aware that one must conceal such activities, to be threatened by a
parent or nurse with having his penis or his sinful hand cut off.
Parents will often admit this when they are asked, since they think
they have done something useful in making such a threat; a number
of people have a correct conscious memory of such a threat,
especially if it was made at a somewhat later period. If the threat
is delivered by the mother or some other female she usually shifts
its performance on to the father or the doctor. In
Struwwelpeter
, the famous work of the Frankfurt
paediatrician Hoffmann (which owes its popularity precisely to an
understanding of the sexual and other complexes of childhood), you
will find castration softened into a cutting-off of the thumbs as a
punishment for obstinate sucking. But it is highly improbable that
children are threatened with castration as often as it appears in
the analyses of neurotics. We shall be satisfied by realizing that
the child puts a threat of this kind together in his imagination on
the basis of hints, helped out by a knowledge that auto-erotic
satisfaction is forbidden and under the impression of his discovery
of the female genitals. Nor is it only in proletarian families that
it is perfectly possible for a child, while he is not yet credited
with possessing an understanding or a memory, to be a witness of
the sexual act between his parents or other grown-up people; and
the possibility cannot be rejected that he will be able to
understand and react to the impression
in retrospect
. If,
however, the intercourse is described with the most minute details,
which would be difficult to observe, or if, as happens most
frequently, it turns out to have been intercourse from behind
more ferarum
[in the manner of animals], there can be no
remaining doubt that the phantasy is based on an observation of
intercourse between animals (such as dogs) and that its motive was
the child’s unsatisfied scopophilia during puberty. The
extreme achievement on these lines is a phantasy of observing
parental intercourse while one is still an unborn baby in the womb.
Phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so
often they are not phantasies but real memories. Fortunately,
however, they are nevertheless not real as often as seemed at first
to be shown by the findings of analysis. Seduction by an older
child or by one of the same age is even more frequent than by an
adult; and if in the case of girls who produce such an event in the
story of their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as
the seducer, there can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature
of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it. A phantasy
of being seduced when no seduction has occurred is usually employed
by a child to screen the auto-erotic period of his sexual activity.
He spares himself shame about masturbation by retrospectively
phantasying a desired object into these earliest times. You must
not suppose, however, that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest
male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phantasy. Most
analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and
could be unimpeachably established; but even so they related to the
later years of childhood and had been transposed into earlier
times.