Freud - Complete Works (568 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   The only impression we gain is
that these events of childhood are somehow demanded as a necessity,
that they are among the essential elements of a neurosis. If they
have occurred in reality, so much to the good; but if they have
been withheld by reality, they are put together from hints and
supplemented by phantasy. The outcome is the same, and up to the
present we have not succeeded in pointing to any difference in the
consequences, whether phantasy or reality has had the greater share
in these events of childhood. Here we simply have once again one of
the complemental relations that I have so often mentioned; moreover
it is the strangest of all we have met with. Whence comes the need
for these phantasies and the material for them? There can be no
doubt that their sources lie in the instincts; but it has still to
be explained why the same phantasies with the same content are
created on every occasion. I am prepared with an answer which I
know will seem daring to you. I believe these
primal
phantasies
, as I should like to call them, and no doubt a few
others as well, are a phylogenetic endowment. In them the
individual reaches beyond his own experience into primaeval
experience at points where his own experience as been too
rudimentary. It seems to me quite possible that all the things that
are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy - the seduction of
children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental
intercourse, the threat of castration (or rather castration itself)
- were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human
family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in
the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth. I have
repeatedly been led to suspect that the psychology of the neuroses
has stored up in it more of the antiquities of human development
than any other source.

   The things I have just been
discussing, Gentlemen, compel me to enter more closely into the
origin and significance of the mental activity which is described
as ‘phantasy’. As you are aware, it enjoys a
universally high reputation, without its position in mental life
having become clear. I have the following remarks to make about it.
The human ego is, as you know, slowly educated by the pressure of
external necessity to appreciate reality and obey the reality
principle; in the course of this process it is obliged to renounce,
temporarily or permanently, a variety of the objects and aims at
which its striving for pleasure, and not only for sexual pleasure,
is directed. But men have always found it hard to renounce
pleasure; they cannot bring themselves to do it without some kind
of compensation. They have therefore retained a mental activity in
which all these abandoned sources of pleasure and methods of
achieving pleasure are granted a further existence - a form of
existence in which they are left free from the claims of reality
and of what we call ‘reality-testing’. Every desire
takes before long the form of picturing its own fulfilment; there
is no doubt that dwelling upon imaginary wish-fulfilments brings
satisfaction with it, although it does not interfere with a
knowledge that what is concerned is not real. Thus in the activity
of phantasy human beings continue to enjoy the freedom from
external compulsion which they have long since renounced in
reality. They have contrived to alternate between remaining an
animal of pleasure and being once more a creature of reason.
Indeed, they cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction which they
can extort from reality. ‘We cannot do without auxiliary
constructions’, as Theodor Fontane once said. The creation of
the mental realm of phantasy finds a perfect parallel in the
establishment of ‘reservations’ or ‘nature
reserves’ in places where the requirements of agriculture,
communications and industry threaten to bring about changes in the
original face of the earth which will quickly make it
unrecognizable. A nature reserve preserves its original state which
everywhere else has to our regret been sacrificed to necessity.
Everything, including what is useless and even what is noxious, can
grow and proliferate there as it pleases. The mental realm of
phantasy is just such a reservation withdrawn from the reality
principle.

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   The best-known productions of
phantasy are the so-called ‘day-dreams’, which we have
already come across, imagined satisfactions of ambitious,
megalomanic, erotic wishes, which flourish all the more exuberantly
the more reality counsels modesty and restraint. The essence of the
happiness of phantasy - making the obtaining of pleasure free once
more from the assent of reality - is shown in them unmistakably. We
know that such day-dreams are the nucleus and prototype of
night-dreams. A night-dream is at bottom nothing other than a
day-dream that has been made utilizable owing the liberation of the
instinctual impulses at night, and that has been distorted by the
form assumed by mental activity at night. We have already become
familiar with the idea that even a day-dream is not necessarily
conscious - that there are unconscious day-dreams, as well. Such
unconscious day-dreams are thus the source not only of night-dreams
but also of neurotic symptoms.

   The importance of the part played
by phantasy in the formation of symptoms will be made clear to you
by what I have to tell you. I have explained how in the case of
frustration the libido cathects regressively the positions which it
has given up but to which some quotas of it have remained adhering.
I shall not withdraw this or correct it, but I have to insert a
connecting link. How does the libido find its way to these points
of fixation? All the objects and trends which the libido has given
up have not yet been given up in every sense. They or their
derivatives are still retained with a certain intensity in
phantasies. Thus the libido need only withdraw on to phantasies in
order to find the path open to every repressed fixation. These
phantasies have enjoyed a certain amount of toleration: they have
not come into conflict with the ego, however sharp the contrasts
between them may have been, so long as a particular condition is
observed. This condition is of a
quantitative
nature and it
is now upset by the backward flow of libido on to the phantasies.
As a result of this surplus, the energic cathexis of the phantasies
is so much increased that they begin to raise claims, that they
develop a pressure in the direction of becoming realized. But this
makes a conflict between them and the ego inevitable. Whether they
were previously preconscious or conscious, they are now subjected
to repression from the direction of the ego and are at the mercy of
attraction from the direction of the unconscious. From what are now
unconscious phantasies the libido travels back to their origins in
the unconscious - to its own points of fixation.

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   The libido’s retreat to
phantasy is an intermediate stage on the path to the formation of
symptoms and it seem to call for a special name. C. G. Jung coined
the very appropriate one of ‘introversion’, but then
most inexpediently gave it another meaning as well. We will
continue to take it that introversion denotes the turning away of
the libido from the possibilities of real satisfaction and the
hypercathexis of phantasies which have hitherto been tolerated as
innocent. An introvert is not yet a neurotic, but he is in an
unstable situation: he is sure to develop symptoms at the next
shift of forces, unless he finds some other outlets for his
dammed-up libido. The unreal character of neurotic satisfaction and
the neglect of the distinction between phantasy and reality are on
the other hand already determined by the fact of lingering at the
stage of introversion.

   You will no doubt have observed
that in these last discussions I have introduced a fresh factor
into the structure of the aetiological chain - namely the quantity,
the magnitude, of the energies concerned. We have still to take
this factor into account everywhere. A purely qualitative analysis
of the aetiological determinants is not enough. Or, to put it
another way, a merely
dynamic
view of these mental processes
is insufficient; an
economic
line of approach is also
needed. We must tell ourselves that the conflict between two trends
does not break out till certain intensities of cathexis have been
reached, even though the determinants for it have long been present
so far as their subject-matter is concerned. In the same way, the
pathogenic significance of the constitutional factors must be
weighed according to how much
more
of one component instinct
than of another is present in the inherited disposition. It may
even be supposed that the disposition of all human beings is
qualitatively alike and that they differ only owing to these
quantitative conditions. The quantitative factor is no less
decisive as regards capacity to resist neurotic illness. It is a
matter of
what quota
of unemployed libido a person is able
to hold in suspension and of
how large a fraction
of his
libido he is able to divert from sexual to sublimated aims. The
ultimate aim of mental activity, which may be described
qualitatively as an endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid
unpleasure, emerges, looked at from the economic point of view, as
the task of mastering the amounts of excitation (mass of stimuli)
operating in the mental apparatus and of keeping down their
accumulation which creates unpleasure.

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   This, then, is what I wanted to
tell you about the formation of symptoms in the neuroses. But I
must not fail to lay emphasis expressly once again on the fact that
everything I have said here applies only to the formation of
symptoms in hysteria. Even in obsessional neurosis there is much -
apart from fundamentals, which remain unaltered - that will be
found different. The anticathexes opposing the demands of the
instincts (which we have already spoken of in the case of hysteria
as well) become prominent in obsessional neurosis and dominate the
clinical picture in the form of what are known as ‘reaction
formations’. We discover similar and even more far-reaching
divergences in the other neuroses, where our researches into the
mechanisms of symptom-formation are not yet concluded at any
point.

   Before I let you go to-day,
however, I should like to direct your attention a little longer to
a side of the life of phantasy which deserves the most general
interest. For there is a path that leads back from phantasy to
reality - the pat, that is, of art. An artist is once more in
rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is
oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to
win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks
the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any
other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all
his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of
his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis. There
must be, no doubt, a convergence of all kinds of things if this is
not to be the complete outcome of his development; it is well
known, indeed, how often artists in particular suffer from a
partial inhibition of their efficiency owing to neurosis. Their
constitution probably includes a strong capacity for sublimation
and a certain degree of laxity in the repressions which are
decisive for a conflict. An artist, however, finds a path back to
reality in the following manner. To be sure, he is not the only on
who leads a life of phantasy. Access to the half-way region of
phantasy is permitted by the universal assent of mankind, and
everyone suffering from privation expects to derive alleviation and
consolation from it. But for those who are not artists the yield of
pleasure to be derived from the sources of phantasy is very
limited. The ruthlessness of their repressions force them to be
content with such meagre day-dreams as are allowed to become
conscious. A man who is a true artist has more at his disposal. In
the first place, he understands how to work over his day-dreams in
such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them and
repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in
the enjoyment of them. He understands, too, how to tone them down
so that they do not easily betray their origin from proscribed
sources. Furthermore, he possesses the mysterious power of shaping
some particular material until it has become a faithful image of
his phantasy; and he knows, moreover, how to link so large a yield
of pleasure to this representation of his unconscious phantasy
that, for the time being at least, repressions are outweighed and
lifted by it. If he is able to accomplish all this, he makes it
possible for other people once more to derive consolation and
alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious
which have become inaccessible to them; he earns their gratitude an
admiration and he has thus achieved
through
his phantasy
what originally he had achieved only
in
his phantasy -
honour, power and the love of women.

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LECTURE XXIV

THE COMMON NEUROTIC STATE

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - Now that we have disposed of such a difficult
piece of work in our last discussions, I propose for a time to
leave the subject and turn to you yourselves.

   For I am aware that you are
dissatisfied. You pictured an ‘Introduction to
Psycho-Analysis’ very differently. What you expected to hear
were lively examples, not the theory. On one occasion, you say,
when I told you the parable of ‘In the Basement and on the
First Floor’, you grasped something of the way in which
neuroses are caused; the observations should have been real ones,
however, and not made-up stories. Or when at the start I described
two symptoms to you (not invented ones this time, let us hope) and
described their solution and their relation to the patients’
lives, the ‘sense’ of symptoms dawned on you. You hoped
I should go on along those lines. But instead I gave you
long-winded theories, hard to grasp, which were never complete but
were always having something fresh added to them; I worked with
concepts which I had not yet explained to you; I went from a
descriptive account of things to a dynamic one and from that to
what I called an ‘economic’ one; I made it hard for you
to understand how many of the technical terms I used meant the same
thing and were merely being interchanged for reasons of euphony; I
brought up such far-reaching conceptions as those of the pleasure
and reality principles and of phylogenetically inherited
endowments; and, far from introducing you to anything, I paraded
something before your eyes which constantly grew more and more
remote from you.

   Why did I not begin my
introduction to the theory of neuroses with what you yourselves
know of the neurotic state and what has long aroused your interest
- with the peculiar characteristics of neurotic people, their
incomprehensible reactions to human intercourse and external
influences, their irritability, their incalculable and inexpedient
behaviour? Why did I not lead you step by step from an
understanding of the simpler, everyday forms of the neurotic state
to the problems of its enigmatic, extreme manifestations?

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   Indeed, Gentlemen, I cannot even
disagree with you. I am not so enamoured of my skill in exposition
that I can declare each of its artistic faults to be a peculiar
charm. I think myself that it might have been more to your
advantage if I had proceeded otherwise; and that was, indeed, my
intention. But one cannot always carry out one’s reasonable
intentions. There is often something in the material itself which
takes charge of one and diverts one from one’s first
intentions. Even such a trivial achievement as the arrangement of a
familiar piece of material is not entirely subject to an
author’s own choice; it takes what line it likes and all one
can do is to ask oneself after the event why it has happened in
this way and no other.

   One reason is probably that the
title ‘Introduction to Psycho-Analysis’ is no longer
applicable to the present section, which is supposed to deal with
the neuroses. An introduction to psycho-analysis is provided by the
study of parapraxes and dreams; the theory of the neuroses is
psycho-analysis itself. It would not, I believe have been possible
to give you a knowledge of the subject-matter of the theory of the
neuroses in so short a time except in this concentrated form. It
was a question of presenting you with a connected account of the
sense and significance of symptoms and of the external and internal
determinants and mechanism of their formation. That is what I have
tried to do; it is more or less the nucleus of what psycho-analysis
has to teach to-day. It involved saying a great deal about the
libido and its development and a little, too, about that of the
ego. Our introduction had already prepared you in advance for the
premisses of our technique and for the major considerations of the
unconscious and of repression (of resistance). You will discover
from one of the next lectures the points from which the work of
psycho-analysis makes its further organic advance. For the time
being I have made no secret of the fact that everything I have said
is derived from the study of a single group of nervous disorders
what are termed the ‘transference neuroses’. Indeed, I
have traced the mechanism of symptom-formation in the case only of
the hysterical neurosis. Even if you have acquired no thorough
knowledge and have not retained every detail, yet I hope that you
have formed some picture of the methods by which psycho-analysis
works, of the problems which it attacks and of the results at which
it has arrived.

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   I have credited you with a wish
that I might have started my description of the neuroses from the
behaviour of neurotic people, from an account of the manner in
which they suffer under their neurosis, of how they defend
themselves against it and how they come to terms with it. No doubt
that is an interesting topic, worth investigating; nor would it be
very difficult to handle. But it would be of debatable wisdom to
start with it. There would be a risk of not discovering the
unconscious and at the same time of overlooking the great
importance of the libido and of judging everything as it appears to
the ego of the neurotic subject. It is obvious that this ego is not
a trustworthy or impartial agency. The ego is indeed the power
which disavows the unconscious and has degraded it into being
repressed; so how can we trust it to be fair to the unconscious?
The most prominent elements in what is thus repressed are the
repudiated demands of sexuality, and it is quite self-evident that
we should never be able to guess their extent and importance from
the ego’s conceptions. From the moment the notion of
repression dawns on us, we are warned against making one of the two
contesting parties (and the victorious one, at that) into being
judge in the dispute. We are prepared to find that the ego’s
assertions will lead us astray. If we are to believe the ego, it
was active at every point and itself willed and created its
symptoms. But we know that it puts up with a good amount of
passivity, which it afterwards tries to disguise and gloss over. It
is true that it does not always venture on such am attempt; in the
symptoms of obsessional neurosis it is obliged to admit that there
is something alien which is confronting it and against which it can
only defend itself with difficulty.

   Anyone whom these warnings do not
deter from taking the ego’s counterfeits as sterling coin
will have an easy time of it and will avoid all the resistances
which oppose the psycho-analytic emphasis upon the unconscious,
sexuality and the passivity of the ego. He will be able to declare
like Alfred Adler that the ‘neurotic character’ is the
cause of neuroses instead of their consequence; but neither will he
be in a position to explain a single detail of symptom-formation or
a single dream.

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   You will ask whether it may not
be possible, however, to do justice to the part played by the ego
in neurotic states and in the formation of symptoms without at the
same time grossly neglecting the factors revealed by
psycho-analysis. My reply is that that must certainly be possible
and will sooner or later be done; but the road followed by the work
of psycho-analysis does not admit of actually
beginning
with
this. It is of course possible to foresee when psycho-analysis will
be confronted by this task. There are neuroses in which the ego
plays a far more intensive part than in those we have studied
hitherto; we call them the ‘narcissistic’ neuroses. The
investigation of these disorders will enable us to form an
impartial and trustworthy judgement of the share taken by the ego
in the onset of neuroses.

   One of the ways in which the ego
is related to its neuroses is, however, so obvious that it was
possible to take it into account from the first. It seems never to
be absent; but it is most clearly recognizable in a disorder which
we are even to-day far from understanding -
traumatic
neurosis
. For you must know that the same factors always come
into operation in the causation and mechanism of every possible
form of neurosis; but the chief importance in the construction of
the symptoms falls now upon one and now upon another of these
factors. The position is like that among the members of a
theatrical company. Each of them is regularly cast for his own
stock role - hero, confidant, villain, and so on; but each of them
will choose a different piece for his benefit performance. In the
same way phantasies which turn into symptoms are nowhere more
obvious than in hysteria; the anticathexes or reaction-formations
of the ego dominate the picture in obsessional neurosis; what in
the case of dreams we have termed ‘secondary revision’
stands in the forefront in paranoia in the shape of delusions, and
so on.

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   Thus in traumatic neuroses, and
particularly in those brought about by the horrors of war, we are
unmistakably presented with a self-interested motive on the part of
the ego, seeking for protection and advantage - a motive which
cannot, perhaps, create the illness by itself but which assents to
it and maintains it when once it has come about. This motive tries
to preserve the ego from the dangers the threat of which was the
precipitating cause of the illness and it will not allow recovery
to occur until a repetition of these dangers seems no longer
possible or until compensation has been received for the danger
that has been endured.

   The ego takes a similar interest,
however, in the development and maintenance of the neurosis in
every other case. I have already shown that symptoms are supported
by the ego, too, because they have a side with which they offer
satisfaction to the repressing purpose of the ego. Moreover,
settling the conflict by constructing a symptom is the most
convenient way out and the one most agreeable to the pleasure
principle: it unquestionably spares the ego a large amount of
internal work which is felt as distressing. Indeed there are cases
in which even the physician must admit that for a conflict to end
in neurosis is the most harmless and socially tolerable solution.
You must not be surprised to hear that even the physician may
occasionally take the side of the illness he is combating. It is
not his business to restrict himself in every situation in life to
being a fanatic in favour of health. He knows that there is not
only neurotic misery in the world but real, irremovable suffering
as well, that necessity may even require a person to sacrifice his
health; and he learns that a sacrifice of this kind made by a
single person can prevent immeasurable unhappiness for many others.
If we may say, then, that whenever a neurotic is faced by a
conflict he takes flight into illness, yet we must allow that in
some cases that flight is fully justified, and a physician who has
recognized how the situation lies will silently and solicitously
withdraw.

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   But let us disregard these
exceptional cases and proceed with our discussion. In average
circumstances we recognize that by escaping into a neurosis the ego
obtains a certain internal ‘gain from illness’. In some
circumstances of life this is further accompanied by an appreciable
external
advantage bearing a greater or less real value.
Consider the commonest example of this sort. A woman who is roughly
treated and ruthlessly exploited by her husband will fairly
regularly find a way out in neurosis, if her constitution makes it
possible, if she is too cowardly or too moral to console herself
secretly with another man, if she is not strong enough to separate
from her husband in the face of every external deterrent, if she
has no prospect of supporting herself or obtaining a better husband
and if in addition she is till attached to this brutal husband by
her sexual feelings. Her illness now becomes a weapon in her battle
with her dominating husband - a weapon which she can use for her
defence and misuse for her revenge. To complain of her illness is
allowable, though to lament her marriage was probably not. She find
a helper in her doctor, she forces her usually inconsiderate
husband to look after her, to spend money on her, to allow her at
times to be away from home and so free from her married oppression.
When an external or accidental gain from illness like this is
really considerable and no real substitute for it is available, you
must not reckon very high the chances of influencing the neurosis
by your treatment.

   You will now protest that what I
have told you about the gain from illness argues entirely in favour
of the view I have rejected - that the ego itself wills and creates
he neurosis. Not too fast, Gentlemen! It may perhaps mean nothing
more than that the ego puts up with the neurosis, which it cannot,
after all, prevent, and that it makes the best of it, if anything
can be made of it at all. That is only one side of the business,
the pleasant side, it is true. So far as the neurosis has
advantages the ego no doubt accepts it; but it does not only have
advantages. As a rule it soon turns out that the ego has made a bad
bargain by letting itself in for the neurosis. It has paid too
dearly for an alleviation of the conflict, and the sufferings
attached to the symptoms are perhaps an equivalent substitute for
the torments of the conflict, but they probably involve an increase
in unpleasure. The ego would like to free itself from this
unpleasure of the symptoms without giving up the gain from illness,
and this is just what it cannot achieve. This shows, then, that it
was not so entirely active as it thought it was; and we shall bear
this well in mind.