Freud - Complete Works (583 page)

   Here, then, was the explanation
of the phantasies whose existence we had already divined. They were
meant to efface the memory of an event which later on seemed
offensive to the patient’s masculine self-esteem, and they
reached this end by putting an imaginary and desirable converse in
the place of the historical truth. According to these phantasies it
was not he who had played the passive part towards his sister; but,
on the contrary, he had been aggressive, had tried to see his
sister undressed, had been rejected and punished, and had for that
reason got into the rage which the family tradition talked of so
much. It was also appropriate to weave the governess into this
imaginative composition, since the chief responsibility for his
fits of rage had been ascribed to her by his mother and
grandmother. These phantasies, therefore, corresponded exactly to
the legends by means of which a nation that has become great and
proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its
beginnings.

   The governess can actually have
had only a very remote share in the seduction and its consequences.
The scenes with his sister took place in the early part of the same
year in which, at the height of the summer, the Englishwoman
arrived to take the place of his absent parents. The boy’s
hostility to the governess came about, rather, in another way. By
abusing the nurse and slandering her as a witch, she was in his
eyes following in the footsteps of his sister, who had first told
him such monstrous stories about the nurse; and in this way she
enabled him to express openly against herself the aversion which,
as we shall hear, he had developed against his sister as a result
of his seduction.

   But his seduction by his sister
was certainly not a phantasy. Its credibility was increased by some
information which had never been forgotten and which dated from a
later part of his life, when he was grown up. A cousin who was more
than ten years his elder told him in a conversation about his
sister that he very well remembered what a forward and sensual
little thing she had been: once, when she was a child of four or
five, she had sat on his lap and opened his trousers to take hold
of his penis.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3514

   I should like at this point to
break off the story of my patient’s childhood and say
something of this sister, of her development and later fortunes,
and of the influence she had on him. She was two years older than
he was, and had always remained ahead of him. As a child she was
boyish and unmanageable, but she then entered upon a brilliant
intellectual development and distinguished herself by her acute and
realistic powers of mind; she inclined in her studies to the
natural sciences, but also produced imaginative writings of which
her father had a high opinion. She was mentally far superior to her
numerous early admirers, and used to make jokes at their expense.
In her early twenties, however, she began to be depressed,
complained that she was not good-looking enough, and withdrew from
all society. She was sent to travel in the company of an
acquaintance, an elderly lady, and after her return told a number
of most improbable stories of how she had been ill-treated by her
companion, but remained with her affections obviously fixed upon
her alleged tormentor. While she was on a second journey, soon
afterwards, she poisoned herself and died far away from her home.
Her disorder is probably to be regarded as the beginning of a
dementia praecox. She was one of the proofs of the conspicuously
neuropathic heredity in her family, but by no means the only one.
An uncle, her father’s brother, died after long years of life
as an eccentric, with indications pointing to the presence of a
severe obsessional neurosis; while a good number of collateral
relatives were and are afflicted with less serious nervous
complaints.

   Independently of the question of
seduction, our patient, while he was a child, found in his sister
an inconvenient competitor for the good opinion of his parents, and
he felt very much oppressed by her merciless display of
superiority. Later on he especially envied her the respect which
his father showed for her mental capacity and intellectual
achievements, while he, intellectually inhibited as he was since
his obsessional neurosis, had to be content with a lower
estimation. From his fourteenth year onwards the relations between
the brother and sister began to improve; a similar disposition of
mind and a common opposition to their parents brought them so close
together that they got on with each other like the best of friends.
During the tempestuous sexual excitement of his puberty he ventured
upon an attempt at an intimate physical approach. She rejected him
with equal decision and dexterity, and he at once turned away from
her to a little peasant girl who was a servant in the house and had
the same name as his sister. In doing so he was taking a step which
had a determinant influence on his heterosexual choice of object,
for all the girls with whom he subsequently fell in love - often
with the clearest indications of compulsion - were also servants,
whose education and intelligence were necessarily far inferior to
his own. If all of these objects of his love were substitutes for
the figure of the sister whom he had to forgo, then it could not be
denied that an intention of debasing his sister and of putting an
end to her intellectual superiority, which he had formerly found so
oppressive, had obtained the decisive control over his
object-choice.

   Human sexual conduct, as well as
everything else, has been subordinated by Alfred Adler to motive
forces of this kind, which spring from the will to power, from the
individual’s self-assertive instinct. Without ever denying
the importance of these motives of power and prerogative, I have
never been convinced that they play the dominating and exclusive
part that has been ascribed to them. If I had not pursued my
patient’s analysis to the end, I should have been obliged, on
account of my observation of this case, to correct my preconceived
opinion in a direction favourable to Adler. The conclusion of the
analysis unexpectedly brought up new material which, on the
contrary, showed that these motives of power (in this case the
intention to debase) had determined the object-choice only in the
sense of serving as a contributory cause and as a rationalization,
whereas the true underlying determination enabled me to maintain my
former convictions.¹

  
¹
See below,
p. 3575
.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3515

   When the news of his
sister’s death arrived, so the patient told me, he felt
hardly a trace of grief. He had to force himself to show signs of
sorrow, and was able quite coolly to rejoice at having now become
the sole heir to the property. He had already been suffering from
his recent illness for several years when this occurred. But I must
confess that this one piece of information made me for a long time
uncertain in my diagnostic judgement of the case. It was to be
assumed, no doubt, that his grief over the loss of the most dearly
loved member of his family would meet with an inhibition in its
expression, as a result of the continued operation of his jealousy
of her and of the added presence of his incestuous love for her
which had now become unconscious. But I could not do without some
substitute for the missing outbursts of grief. And this was at last
found in another expression of feeling which had remained
inexplicable to the patient. A few months after his sister’s
death he himself made a journey in the neighbourhood in which she
had died. There he sought out the burial-place of a great poet, who
was at that time his ideal, and shed bitter tears upon his grave.
This reaction seemed strange to him himself, for he knew that more
than two generations had passed by since the death of the poet he
admired. He only understood it when he remembered that his father
had been in the habit of comparing his dead sister’s works
with the great poet’s. He gave me another indication of the
correct way of interpreting the homage which he ostensibly paid to
the poet, by a mistake in his story which I was able to detect at
this point. He had repeatedly specified before that his sister had
shot herself; but he was now obliged to make a correction and say
that she had taken poison. The poet, however, had been shot in a
duel.

   I now return to the
brother’s story, but from this point I must proceed for a
little upon thematic lines. The boy’s age at the time at
which his sister began her seductions turned out to be three and a
quarter years. It happened, as has been mentioned, in the spring of
the same year in whose summer the English governess arrived, and in
whose autumn his parents, on their return, found him so
fundamentally altered. It is very natural, then, to connect this
transformation with the awakening of his sexual activity that had
meanwhile taken place.

   How did the boy react to the
allurements of his elder sister? By a refusal, is the answer, but
by a refusal which applied to the person and not to the thing. His
sister was not agreeable to him as a sexual object, probably
because his relation to her had already been determined in a
hostile direction owing to their rivalry for their parents’
love. He held aloof from her, and, moreover, her solicitations soon
ceased. But he tried to win, instead of her, another person of whom
he was fonder; and the information which his sister herself had
given him, and in which the had claimed his Nanya as a model,
turned his choice in that direction. He therefore began to play
with his penis in his Nanya’s presence, and this, like so
many other instances in which children do not conceal their
masturbation, must be regarded as an attempt at seduction. His
Nanya disillusioned him; she made a serious face, and explained
that that wasn’t good; children who did that, she added, got
a ‘wound’ in the place.

   The effect of this intelligence,
which amounted to a threat, is to be traced in various directions.
His dependence upon his Nanya was diminished in consequence. He
might well have been angry with her; and later on, when his fits of
rage set in, it became clear that he really was embittered against
her. But it was characteristic of him that every position of the
libido which he found himself obliged to abandon was at first
obstinately defended by him against the new development. When the
governess came upon the scene and abused his Nanya, drove her out
of the room, and tried to destroy her authority, he, on the
contrary, exaggerated his love for the victim of these attacks and
assumed a brusque and defiant attitude towards the aggressive
governess. Nevertheless, in secret he began to look about for
another sexual object. His seduction had given him the passive
sexual aim of being touched on the genitals; we shall presently
hear in connection with whom it was that he tried to achieve this
aim, and what paths led him to this choice.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3516

   It agrees entirely with our
anticipations when we learn that, after his first genital
excitations, his sexual researches began, and that he soon came
upon the problem of castration. At this time he succeeded in
observing two girls - his sister and a friend of hers - while they
were micturating. His acumen might well have enabled him to gather
the true facts from this spectacle, but he behaved as we know other
male children behave in these circumstances. He rejected the idea
that he saw before him a confirmation of the wound with which his
Nanya had threatened him, and he explained to himself that this was
the girls’ ‘front bottom’. The theme of
castration was not settled by this decision; he found new allusions
to it in everything that he heard. Once when the children were
given some coloured sugar-sticks, the governess, who was inclined
to disordered fancies, pronounced that they were pieces of
chopped-up snakes. He remembered afterwards that his father had
once met a snake while he was walking along a footpath, and had
beaten it to pieces with his stick. He heard the story (out of
Reynard the Fox
) read aloud, of how the wolf wanted to go
fishing in the winter, and used his tail as a bait, and how in that
way his tail was broken off in the ice. He learned the different
names by which horses are distinguished, according to whether their
sexual organs are intact or not. Thus he was occupied with thoughts
about castration, but as yet he had no belief in it and no dread of
it. Other sexual problems arose for him out of the fairy tales with
which he became familiar at this time. In ‘Little Red
Riding-Hood’ and ‘The Seven Little Goats’ the
children were taken out of the wolf’s body. Was the wolf a
female creature, then, or could men have children in their bodies
as well? At this time the question was not yet settled. Moreover,
at the time of these enquiries he had as yet no fear of wolves.

   One of the patient’s pieces
of information will make it easier for us to understand the
alteration in his character which appeared during his
parents’ absence as a somewhat indirect consequence of his
seduction. He said that he gave up masturbating very soon after his
Nanya’s refusal and threat.
His sexual life, therefore,
which was beginning to come under the sway of the genital zone,
gave way before an external obstacle, and was thrown back by its
influence into an earlier phase of pregenital organization
. As
a result of the suppression of his masturbation, the boy’s
sexual life took on a sadistic-anal character. He became irritable
and a tormentor, and gratified himself in this way at the expense
of animals and humans. His principal object was his beloved Nanya,
and he knew how to torment her till she burst into tears. In this
way he revenged himself on her for the refusal he had met with, and
at the same time gratified his sexual lust in the form which
corresponded to his present regressive phase. He began to be cruel
to small animals, to catch flies and pull off their wings, to crush
beetles underfoot; in his imagination he liked beating large
animals (horses) as well. All of these, then, were active and
sadistic proceedings; we shall discuss his anal impulses at this
period in a later connection.