Freud - Complete Works (573 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   I have said that transformation
into anxiety - it would be better to say discharge in the form of
anxiety - is the immediate vicissitude of libido which is subjected
to repression. I must add that that vicissitude is not the only or
the definitive one. In the neuroses processes are in action which
endeavour to bind this generating of anxiety and which even succeed
in doing so in various ways. In phobias, for instance, two phases
of the neurotic process can be clearly distinguished. The first is
concerned with repression and the changing of libido into anxiety,
which is then bound to an external danger. The second consists in
the erection of all the precautions and guarantees by means of
which any contact can be avoided with this danger, treated as it is
like an external thing. Repression corresponds to an attempt at
flight by the ego from libido which is felt as a danger. A phobia
may be compared to an entrenchment against an external danger which
now represents the dreaded libido. The weakness of the defensive
system in phobias lies, of course, in the fact that the fortress
which has been so greatly strengthened towards the outside remains
assailable from within. A projection outwards of the danger of
libido can never succeed thoroughly. For that reason, in other
neuroses other systems of defence are in use against the possible
generation of anxiety. That is a most interesting part of the
psychology of the neuroses; but unluckily it would lead us too far
and it presupposes a deeper specialized knowledge. I will only add
one thing more. I have already spoken to you of the
‘anticathexis’ which is employed by the ego in the
process of repression and which must be permanently maintained in
order that the repression may have stability. This anticathexis has
the task of carrying through the various forms of defence against
the generating of anxiety after repression.

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   Let us return to the phobias. I
can safely say that you now see how inadequate it is merely to seek
to explain their content, to take no interest in anything but how
it comes about that this or that object or some particular
situation or other has been made into the object of the phobia. The
content of a phobia has just about as much importance in relation
to it as the manifest façade of a dream has in relation to
the dream. It must be admitted, subject to the necessary
qualifications, that among the contents of phobias there are a
number which, as Stanley Hall insists, are adapted to serve as
objects of anxiety owing to phylogenetic inheritance. It tallies
with this, indeed, that many of these anxiety-objects can only
establish their connection with danger by a symbolic tie.

   We thus find ourselves convinced
that the problem of anxiety occupies a place in the question of the
psychology of the neuroses which may rightly be described as
central. We have received a strong impression of the way in which
the generation of anxiety is linked to the vicissitudes of the
libido and the system of the unconscious. There is only a single
point that we have found disconnected - a gap in our views: the
single, yet scarcely disputable, fact that realistic anxiety must
be regarded as a manifestation of the ego’s self-preservative
instincts.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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LECTURE XXVI

THE
LIBIDO THEORY AND NARCISSISM

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - We have repeatedly (and only recently once
again) had to deal with the distinction between the ego-instincts
and the sexual instincts. In the first place, repression showed us
that the two can come into opposition to each other, that the
sexual instincts are then ostensibly subdued and are obliged to
find satisfaction for themselves along regressive and roundabout
paths, and that in doing so they are able to find compensation for
their defeat in their indomitability. We next learnt that the two
kinds of instincts are from the first differently related to
Necessity the educator, so that their course of development is not
the same and they do not enter into the same connection with the
reality principle. Lastly, we seem to have found that the sexual
instincts are linked by much closer bonds than the ego-instincts to
the affective state of anxiety - a conclusion which seems
incomplete in only one important respect. In order to establish it
more firmly, therefore, I will bring forward the further noteworthy
fact that if hunger and thirst (the two most elementary
self-preservative instincts) are unsatisfied, the result is never
their transformation into anxiety, whereas the changing of
unsatisfied libido into anxiety is, as we have seen, among the best
known and most frequently observed of phenomena.

   Our right to separate the
ego-instincts from the sexual ones cannot, no doubt, be shaken: it
is implied in the existence of sexual life as a distinct activity
of the individual. The only question is what importance we
attribute to this separation, how deep-going we wish to consider
it. The answer to this question, however, will be guided by how far
we are able to establish the extent to which the sexual instincts
behave differently in their somatic and mental manifestations from
the others which we are contrasting with them, and how important
the consequences are which arise from those differences. Moreover,
we have, of course, no motive for asserting an essential difference
between the two groups of instincts which is not plainly
appreciable. Both of them come before us merely as designations of
sources of energy in the individual, and the discussion as to
whether they are fundamentally one or essentially different and as
to when, if they are one, they became separate from each other -
this discussion cannot be conducted on the basis of the connotation
of the terms but must keep to the biological facts lying behind
them. At the moment we know too little about these, and even if we
knew more it would have no relevance for our analytic task.

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   It is obvious, too, that we shall
profit very little if, following Jung’s example, we insist
upon the original unity of all the instincts and give the name of
‘libido’ to the energy manifested in all of them. Since
no device whatever will make it possible to eliminate the sexual
function from mental life, we shall in that case find ourselves
obliged to speak of sexual and asexual libido. But the name of
libido is properly reserved for the instinctual forces of sexual
life, as has hitherto been our practice.

   In my opinion, therefore, the
question of how we are to carry the undoubtedly justifiable
separation between the sexual and self-preservative instincts is
not of much importance for psycho-analysis. Nor is psycho-analysis
competent answer the question. Biology, however, offers a number of
suggestive possibilities which speak in favour of the distinction
having some importance. Sexuality is, indeed, the single function
of the living organism which extends beyond the individual and is
concerned with his relation to the species. It is an unmistakable
fact that it does not always, like the individual organism’s
other functions, bring it advantages, but, in return for an
unusually high degree of pleasure, brings dangers which threaten
the individual’s life and often enough destroy it. It is
probable, too, that quite special metabolic processes are
necessary, differing from all others, in order to maintain a
portion of the individual life as a disposition for its
descendants. And finally, the individual organism, which regards
itself as the main thing and its sexuality as a means, like any
other, for its own satisfaction, is from the point of view of
biology only an episode in a succession of generations, a
short-lived appendage to a germ-plasm endowed with virtual
immortality - like the temporary holder of an entail which will
outlast him.

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   The psycho-analytic explanation
of the neuroses does not, however, call for such far-ranging
considerations. The separate following-up of the sexual and
ego-instincts has helped us to find the key to an understanding of
the group of transference neuroses. We have been able to trace them
back to the basic situation in which the sexual instincts have come
into a dispute with the self-preservative instincts, or, to put it
in biological (though less precise) terms, a situation in which one
aspect of the ego, as an independent individual organism, comes
into conflict with its other aspect, as a member of a succession of
generations. A dissension of this kind may perhaps only occur in
human beings, and on that account neurosis may, generally speaking,
constitute their prerogative over the animals. The excessive
development of their libido and - what is perhaps made possible
precisely by that - their development of a richly articulated
mental life seem to have created the determinants for the
occurrence of such a conflict. It is at once obvious that these are
also the determinants for the great advances that human beings have
made beyond what they have in common with the animals; so that
their susceptibility to neurosis would only be the reverse side of
their other endowments. But these too are only speculations, which
are diverting us from our immediate task.

   Hitherto it has been a premiss of
our work that we can distinguish the ego-instincts from the sexual
ones by their manifestations. With the transference neuroses this
could be done without difficulty. We termed the cathexes of energy
which the ego directs towards the objects of its sexual desires
‘libido’; all the others, which are sent out by the
self-preservative instincts, we termed ‘interest’. By
tracing the course of the libidinal cathexes, their transformations
and final vicissitudes, we were able to obtain a first insight into
the machinery of the mental forces. For this purpose the
transference neuroses offered us the most favourable material. But
the ego, its composition out of various organizations and their
construction and mode of functioning, remained hidden from us; and
we were driven to suspect that only the analysis of other neurotic
disorders would be able to bring us the necessary insight.

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   We began at an early date to
extend psycho-analytic observations to these other illnesses.
Already in 1908 Karl Abraham, after an exchange of thoughts with
me, pronounced the main characteristic of dementia praecox (which
was reckoned among the psychoses) to be that
in it the libidinal
cathexis of objects was lacking
. But the question then arose of
what happened to the libido of dementia praecox patients which was
turned away from objects. Abraham did not hesitate to give the
answer: it is turned back on to the ego and
this reflexive
turning-back is the source of the megalomania
in dementia
praecox. Megalomania is in every way comparable to the familiar
sexual overvaluation of the object in erotic life. In this way for
the first time we learnt to understand a trait in a psychotic
illness by relating it to normal erotic life.

   I may tell you at once that these
first explanations of Abraham’s have been accepted in
psycho-analysis and have become the basis of our attitude to the
psychoses. We thus slowly became familiar with the notion that the
libido, which we find attached to objects and which is the
expression of an effort to obtain satisfaction in connection with
those objects, can also leave the objects and set the
subject’s own ego in their place; and this notion was
gradually built up more and more consistently. The name for this
way of allocating the libido - ‘narcissism’ - was
borrowed by us from a perversion described by Paul Näcke in
which an adult treats his own body with all the caresses that are
usually devoted to an outside sexual object.

   Reflection will quickly suggest
that if any such fixation of the libido to the subject’s own
body and personality, instead of to an object does occur, it cannot
be an exception or a trivial event. On the contrary it is probable
that this narcissism is the universal and original state of things,
from which object-love is only later developed, without the
narcissism necessarily disappearing on that account. Indeed we had
to recall from the history of the development of object-libido that
many sexual instincts begin by finding satisfaction in the
subject’s own body -
auto-erotically
, as we say - and
that this capacity for auto-erotism is the basis of the
lagging-behind of sexuality in the process of education in the
reality principle. Auto-erotism would thus be the sexual activity
of the narcissistic stage of allocation of the libido.

   To put the matter shortly, we
pictured the relation of ego libido to object-libido in a way which
I can make plain to you by an analogy from zoology. Think of those
simplest of living organisms which consist of a
little-differentiated globule of protoplasmic substance. They put
out protrusions, known as pseudopodia, into which they cause the
substance of their body to flow over. They are able, however, to
withdraw the protrusions once more and form themselves again into a
globule. We compare the putting-out of these protrusions, then, to
the emission of libido on to objects while the main mass of libido
can remain in the ego; and we suppose that in normal circumstances
ego-libido can be transformed unhindered into object-libido and
that this can once more be taken back into the ego.