Freud - Complete Works (582 page)

   I shall begin, then, by giving a
picture of the child’s world, and by telling as much of the
story of his childhood as could be learnt without any exertion; it
was not, indeed, for several years that the story became any less
incomplete and obscure.

   His parents had been married
young, and were still leading a happy married life, upon which
their ill-health was soon to throw the first shadows. His mother
began to suffer from abdominal disorders, and his father from his
first attacks of depression, which led to his absence from home.
Naturally the patient only came to understand his father’s
illness very much later on, but he was aware of his mother’s
weak health even in his early childhood. As a consequence of it she
had relatively little to do with the children. One day, certainly
before his fourth year, while his mother was seeing off the doctor
to the station and he himself was walking beside her, holding her
hand, he overheard her lamenting her condition. Her words made a
deep impression upon him, and later on he applied them to himself.
He was not the only child; he had a sister, about two years his
elder, lively, gifted, and precociously naughty, who was to play an
important part in his life.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3509

   As far back as he could remember
he was looked after by a nurse, an uneducated old woman of peasant
birth, with an untiring affection for him. He served her as a
substitute for a son of her own who had died young. The family
lived on a country estate, from which they used to move to another
for the summer. The two estates were not far from a large town.
There was a break in his childhood when his parents sold the
estates and moved into the town. Near relatives used often to pay
them long visits upon one estate or the other - brothers of his
father, sisters of his mother and their children, and his
grandparents on his mother’s side. During the summer his
parents used to be away for a few weeks. In a screen memory he saw
himself with his nurse looking after the carriage which was driving
off with his father, mother and sister, and then going peaceably
back into the house. He must have been very small at that
time.¹ Next summer his sister was left at home, and an English
governess was engaged, who became responsible for the supervision
of the children.

   In his later years he was told
many stories about his childhood.² He knew a great deal
himself, but it was naturally disconnected both as regards date and
subject-matter. One of these traditions, which was repeated over
and over again in his presence on the occasion of his later
illness, introduces us to the problem with whose solution we shall
be occupied. He seems at first to have been a very good-natured,
tractable, and even quiet child, so that they used to say of him
that he ought to have been the girl and his elder sister the boy.
But once, when his parents came back from their summer holiday,
they found him transformed. He had become discontented, irritable
and violent, took offence on every possible occasion, and then flew
into a rage and screamed like a savage; so that, when this state of
things continued, his parents expressed their misgivings as to
whether it would be possible to send him to school later on. This
happened during the summer while the English governess was with
them. She turned out to be an eccentric and quarrelsome person,
and, moreover, to be addicted to drink. The boy’s mother was
therefore inclined to ascribe the alteration in his character to
the influence of this Englishwoman, and assumed that she had
irritated him by her treatment. His sharp-sighted grandmother, who
had spent the summer with the children, was of opinion that the
boy’s irritability had been provoked by the dissensions
between the Englishwoman and the nurse. The Englishwoman had
repeatedly called the nurse a witch, and had obliged her to leave
the room; the little boy had openly taken the side of his beloved
‘Nanya’ and let the governess see his hatred. However
it may have been, the Englishwoman was sent away soon after the
parents’ return, without there being any consequent change in
the child’s unbearable behaviour.

  
¹
Two and a half years old. It was possible
later on to determine almost all the dates with
certainty.

  
²
Information of this kind may, as a rule, be
employed as absolutely authentic material. So it may seem tempting
to take the easy course of filling up the gaps in a patient’s
memory by making enquiries from the older members of his family;
but I cannot advise too strongly against such a technique. Any
stories that may be told by relatives in reply to enquiries and
requests are at the mercy of every critical misgiving that can come
into play. One invariably regrets having made oneself dependent
upon such information; at the same time confidence in the analysis
is shaken and a court of appeal is set up over it. Whatever can be
remembered at all will anyhow come to light in the further course
of analysis.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3510

   The patient had preserved his
memory of this naughty period. According to his belief he made the
first of his scenes one Christmas, when he was not given a double
quantity of presents - which were his due, because Christmas Day
was at the same time his birthday. He did not spare even his
beloved Nanya with his importunity and touchiness, and even
tormented her more remorselessly perhaps than anyone. But the phase
which brought with it his change in character was inextricably
connected in his memory with many other strange and pathological
phenomena which he was unable to arrange in chronological sequence.
He threw all the incidents that I am now about to relate (which
cannot possibly have been contemporaneous, and which are full of
internal contradictions) into one and the same period of time, to
which he gave the name ‘still on the first estate’. He
thought they must have left that estate by the time he was five
years old. Thus he could recollect how he had suffered from a fear,
which his sister exploited for the purpose of tormenting him. There
was a particular picture-book, in which a wolf was represented,
standing upright and striding along. Whenever he caught sight of
this picture he began to scream like a lunatic that he was afraid
of the wolf coming and eating him up. His sister, however, always
succeeded in arranging so that he was obliged to see this picture,
and was delighted at his terror. Meanwhile he was also frightened
at other animals as well, big and little. Once he was running after
a beautiful big butterfly, with striped yellow wings which ended in
points, in the hope of catching it. (It was no doubt a
‘swallow-tail’) He was suddenly seized with a terrible
fear of the creature, and, screaming, gave up the chase. He also
felt fear and loathing of beetles and caterpillars. Yet he could
also remember that at this very time he used to torment beetles and
cut caterpillars to pieces. Horses, too, gave him an uncanny
feeling. If a horse was beaten he began to scream, and he was once
obliged to leave a circus on that account. On other occasions he
himself enjoyed beating horses. Whether these contradictory sorts
of attitudes towards animals were really in operation
simultaneously, or whether they did not more probably replace one
another, but if so in what order and when - to all these questions
his memory could offer no decisive reply. He was also unable to say
whether his naughty period was
replaced
by a phase of
illness or whether it persisted right through the latter. But, in
any case, the statements of his that follow justified the
assumption that during these years of his childhood he went through
an easily recognizable attack of obsessional neurosis. He related
how during a long period he was very pious. Before he went to sleep
he was obliged to pray for a long time and to make an endless
series of signs of the cross. In the evening, too, he used to make
the round of all the holy pictures that hung in the room, taking a
chair with him, upon which he climbed, and used to kiss each one of
them devoutly. It was utterly inconsistent with this pious
ceremonial - or, on the other hand, perhaps it was quite consistent
with it - that he should recollect some blasphemous thoughts which
used to come into his head like an inspiration from the devil. He
was obliged to think ‘God-swine’ or
‘God-shit’. Once while he was on a journey to a health
resort in Germany he was tormented by the obsession of having to
think of the Holy Trinity whenever he saw three heaps of horse-dung
or other excrement lying in the road. At that time he used to carry
out another peculiar ceremonial when he saw people that he felt
sorry for, such as beggars, cripples, or very old men. He had to
breathe out noisily, so as not to become like them; and under
certain conditions he had to draw in his breath vigorously. I
naturally assumed that these obvious symptoms of an obsessional
neurosis belonged to a somewhat later time and stage of development
than the signs of anxiety and the cruel treatment of animals.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3511

   The patient’s maturer years
were marked by a very unsatisfactory relation to his father, who,
after repeated attacks of depression, was no longer able to conceal
the pathological features of his character. In the earliest years
of the patient’s childhood this relation had been a very
affectionate one, and the recollection of it had remained in his
memory. His father was very fond of him, and liked playing with
him. From an early age he was proud of his father, and was always
declaring that he would like to be a gentleman like him. His Nanya
told him that his sister was his mother’s child, but that he
was his father’s - which had very much pleased him. Towards
the end of his childhood there was an estrangement between him and
his father. His father had an unmistakable preference for his
sister, and he felt very much slighted by this. Later on fear of
his father became the dominating factor.

   All of the phenomena which the
patient associated with the phase of his life that began with his
naughtiness disappeared in about his eighth year. They did not
disappear at a single blow, and made occasional reappearances, but
finally gave way, in the patient’s opinion, before the
influence of the masters and tutors, who then took the place of the
women who had hitherto looked after him. Here, then, in the
briefest outline, are the riddles for which the analysis had to
find a solution. What was the origin of the sudden change in the
boy’s character? What was the significance of his phobia and
of his perversities? How did he arrive at his obsessive piety? And
how are all these phenomena interrelated? I will once more recall
the fact that our therapeutic work was concerned with a subsequent
and recent neurotic illness, and that light could only be thrown
upon these earlier problems when the course of the analysis led
away for a time from the present, and forced us to make a
détour
through the prehistoric period of
childhood.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3512

III

THE
SEDUCTION AND ITS IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES

It is easy to understand that the first
suspicion fell upon the English governess, for the change in the
boy made its appearance while she was there. Two screen memories
had persisted, which were incomprehensible in themselves, and which
related to her. On one occasion, as she was walking along in front
of them, she said: ‘Do look at my little tail!’ Another
time, when they were on a drive, her hat flew away, to the two
children’s great satisfaction. This pointed to the castration
complex, and might permit of a construction being made to the
effect that a threat uttered by her against the boy had been
largely responsible for originating his abnormal conduct. There is
no danger at all in communicating constructions of this kind to the
person under analysis; they never do any damage to the analysis if
they are mistaken; but at the same time they are not put forward
unless there is some prospect of reaching a nearer approximation to
the truth by means of them. The first effect of this supposition
was the appearance of some dreams, which it was not possible to
interpret completely, but all of which seemed to centre around the
same material. As far as they could be understood, they were
concerned with aggressive actions on the boy’s part against
his sister or against the governess and with energetic reproofs and
punishments of account of them. It was as
though . . . after her bath . . . he
had tried . . . to undress his
sister . . . to tear off her
coverings . . . or veils - and so on. But it was not
possible to get at any firm content from the interpretation; and
since these dreams gave an impression of always working over the
same material in various different ways, the correct reading of
these ostensible reminiscences became assured: it could only be a
question of phantasies, which the dreamer had made on the subject
of his childhood at some time or other, probably at the age of
puberty, and which had now come to the surface again in this
unrecognizable form.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3513

   The explanation came at a single
blow, when the patient suddenly called to mind the fact that, when
he was still very small, ‘on the first estate’, his
sister had seduced him into sexual practices. First came a
recollection that in the lavatory, which the children used
frequently to visit together, she had made this proposal:
‘Let’s show our bottoms’, and had proceeded from
words to deeds. Subsequently the more essential part of the
seduction came to light, with full particulars as to time and
place. It was in spring, at a time when his father was away; the
children were in one room playing on the floor, while their mother
was working in the next. His sister had taken hold of his penis and
played with it, at the same time telling him incomprehensible
stories about his Nanya, as though by way of explanation. His
Nanya, she said, used to do the same thing with all kinds of people
- for instance, with the gardener: she used to stand him on his
head, and then take hold of his genitals.