Freud - Complete Works (589 page)

   I may here venture to point out
that the antagonistic views which are to be found in the
psycho-analytic literature of to-day are usually arrived at on the
principle of
pars pro toto
. From a highly composite
combination one part of the operative factors is singled out and
proclaimed as the truth; and in its favour the other part, together
with the whole combination, is then contradicted. If we look a
little closer, to see which group of factors it is that has been
given the preference, we shall find that it is the one that
contains material already known from other sources or what can be
most easily related to that material. Thus, Jung picks out
actuality and regression, and Adler, egoistic motives. What is left
over, however, and rejected as false, is precisely what is new in
psycho-analysis and peculiar to it. This is the easiest method of
repelling the revolutionary and inconvenient advances of
psycho-analysis.

  
¹
I have good reasons for preferring to say
‘the diversion of
libido
from current
conflicts
’.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3541

   It is worth while remarking that
none of the factors which are adduced by the opposing view in order
to explain these scenes from infancy had to wait for recognition
until Jung brought them forward as novelties. The notion of a
current conflict, of a turning away from reality, of a substitutive
satisfaction obtained in phantasy, of a regression to material from
the past - all of this (employed, moreover, in the same context,
though perhaps with a slightly different terminology) had for years
formed an integral part of my own theory. It was not the whole of
it, however. It was only one part of the causes leading to the
formation of neuroses - that part which, starting from reality,
operates in a regressive direction. Side by side with this I left
room for another influence which, starting from the impressions of
childhood, operates in a forward direction, which points a path for
the libido that is shrinking away from life, and which makes it
possible to understand the otherwise inexplicable regression to
childhood. Thus on my view the two factors co-operate in the
formation of symptoms. But an earlier co-operation seems to me to
be of equal importance. I am of opinion that
the influence of
childhood makes itself felt already in the situation at the
beginning of the formation of a neurosis, since it plays a decisive
part in determining whether and at what point the individual shall
fail to master the real problems of life
.

   What is in dispute, therefore, is
the significance of the infantile factor. The problem is to find a
case which can establish that significance beyond any doubt. Such,
however, is the case which is being dealt with so exhaustively in
these pages and which is distinguished by the characteristic that
the neurosis in later life was preceded by a neurosis in early
childhood. It is for that very reason, indeed, that I have chosen
it to report upon. Should any one feel inclined to reject it
because the animal phobia strikes him as not sufficiently serious
to be recognized as an independent neurosis, I may mention that the
phobia was succeeded without any interval by an obsessional
ceremonial, and by obsessional acts and thoughts, which will be
discussed in the following sections of this paper.

   The occurrence of a neurotic
disorder in the fourth and fifth years of childhood proves, first
and foremost, that infantile experiences are by themselves in a
position to produce a neurosis, without there being any need for
the addition of a flight from some task which has to be faced in
real life. It may be objected that even a child is constantly being
confronted with tasks which it would perhaps be glad to evade. That
is so; but the life of a child under school age is easily
observable, and we can examine it to see whether any
‘tasks’ are to be found in it capable of determining
the causation of a neurosis. But we discover nothing but
instinctual impulses which the child cannot satisfy and which it is
not old enough to master, and the sources from which these impulses
arise.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3542

   As was to be expected, the
enormous shortening of the interval between the outbreak of the
neurosis and the date of the childhood experiences which are under
discussion reduces to the narrowest limits the regressive part of
the causation, while it brings into full view the portion of it
which operates in a forward direction, the influence of earlier
impressions. The present case history will, I hope, give a clear
picture of this position of things. But there are other reasons why
neuroses of childhood give a decisive answer to the question of the
nature of primal scenes - the earliest experiences of childhood
that are brought to light in analysis.

   Let us assume as an
uncontradicted premise that a primal scene of this kind has been
correctly educed technically, that it is indispensable to a
comprehensive solution of all the conundrums that are set us by the
symptoms of the infantile disorder, that all the consequences
radiate out from it, just as all the threads of the analysis have
led up to it. Then, in view of its content, it is impossible that
it can be anything else than the reproduction of a reality
experienced by the child. For a child, like an adult, can produce
phantasies only from material which has been acquired from some
source or other; and with children, some of the means of acquiring
it (by reading, for instance) are cut off, while the space of time
at their disposal for acquiring it is short and can easily be
searched with a view to the discovery of any such sources.

   In the present case the content
of the primal scene is a picture of sexual intercourse between the
boy’s parents in a posture especially favourable for certain
observations. Now it would be no evidence whatever of the reality
of such a scene if we were to find it in a patient whose symptoms
(the effects of the scene, that is) had appeared at some time or
other in the later part of his life. A person such as this might
have acquired the impressions, the ideas, and the knowledge on a
great number of different occasions in the course of the long
interval; he might then have transformed them into an imaginary
picture, have projected them back into his childhood, and have
attached them to his parents. If, however, the effects of a scene
of this sort appear in the child’s fourth or fifth year, then
he must have witnessed the scene at an age even earlier than that.
But in that case we are still faced with all the disconcerting
consequences which have arisen from the analysis of this infantile
neurosis. The only way out would be to assume that the patient not
only unconsciously imagined the primal scene, but also concocted
the alteration in his character, his fear of the wolf, and his
religious obsession; but such an expedient would be contradicted by
his otherwise sober nature and by the direct tradition in his
family. It must therefore be left at this (I can see no other
possibility): either the analysis based on the neurosis in his
childhood is all a piece of nonsense from start to finish, or
everything took place just as I have described it above.

   At an earlier stage in the
discussion we were brought up against an ambiguity in regard to the
patient’s predilection for female nates and for sexual
intercourse in the posture in which they are especially prominent.
It seemed necessary to trace this predilection back to the
intercourse which he had observed between his parents, while at the
same time a preference of this kind is a general characteristic of
archaic constitutions which are predisposed to an obsessional
neurosis. But the contradiction is easily resolved if we regard it
as a case of overdetermination. The person who was the subject of
his observation of this posture during intercourse was, after all,
his father in the flesh, and it may also have been from him that he
had inherited this constitutional predilection. Neither his
father’s subsequent illness nor his family history
contradicts this; as has been mentioned already, a brother of his
father’s died in a condition which must be regarded as the
outcome of a severe obsessional disorder.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3543

   In this connection we may recall
that, at the time of his seduction as a boy of three and a quarter,
his sister had uttered a remarkable calumny against his good old
nurse, to the effect that she stood all kinds of people on their
heads and then took hold of them by their genitals. We cannot fail
to be struck by the idea that perhaps the sister, at a similar
tender age, also witnessed the same scene as was observed by her
brother later on, and that it was this that had suggested to her
her notion about ‘standing people on their heads’
during the sexual act. This hypothesis would also give us a hint of
the reason for her own sexual precocity.

   [Originally ¹ I had no
intention of pursuing the discussion of the reality of
‘primal scenes’ any further in this place. Since,
however, I have meanwhile had occasion in my
Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
to treat the subject on more
general lines and with no controversial aim in view, it would be
misleading if I omitted to apply the considerations which
determined my other discussion of the matter to the case that is
now before us. I therefore proceed as follows by way of supplement
and rectification. - There remains the possibility of taking yet
another view of the primal scene underlying the dream - a view,
moreover, which obviates to a large extent the conclusion that has
been arrived at above and relieves us of many of our difficulties.
But the theory which seeks to reduce scenes from infancy to the
level of regressive symbols will gain nothing even by this
modification; and indeed that theory seems to me to be finally
disposed of by this (as it would be by any other) analysis of an
infantile neurosis.

   This other view which I have in
mind is that the state of affairs can be explained in the following
manner. It is true that we cannot dispense with the assumption that
the child observed a copulation, the sight of which gave him a
conviction that castration might be more than an empty threat.
Moreover, the significance which he subsequently came to attach to
the postures of men and women, in connection with the development
of anxiety on the one hand, and as a condition upon which his
falling in love depended on the other hand, leaves us no choice but
to conclude that it must have been a
coitus a tergo
,
more
ferarum
. But there is another factor which is not so
irreplaceable and which may be dropped. Perhaps what the child
observed was not copulation between his parents but copulation
between animals, which he then displaced on to his parents, as
though he had inferred that his parents did things in the same
way.

  
¹
[Freud’s square brackets]

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3544

   Colour is lent to this view above
all by the fact that the wolves in the dream were actually
sheep-dogs and, moreover, appear as such in the drawing. Shortly
before the dream the boy was repeatedly taken to visit the flocks
of sheep, and there he might see just such large white dogs and
probably also observe them copulating. I should also like to bring
into this connection the number three, which the dreamer introduced
without adducing any further motive, and I would suggest that he
had kept in his memory the fact that he had made three such
observations with the sheep-dogs. What supervened during the
expectant excitement of the night of his dream was the transference
on to his parents of his recently acquired memory-picture, with
all
its details, and it was only thus that the powerful
emotional effects which followed were made possible. He now arrived
at a deferred understanding of the impressions which he may have
received a few weeks or months earlier - a process such as all of
us perhaps have been through in our own experiences. The
transference from the copulating dogs on to his parents was
accomplished not by means of his making an inference accompanied by
words but by his searching out in his memory a real scene in which
his parents had been together and which could be coalesced with the
situation of the copulation. All the details of the scene which
were established in the analysis of the dream may have been
accurately reproduced. It was really on a summer’s afternoon
while the child was suffering from malaria, the parents were both
present, dressed in white, when the child woke up from his sleep,
but - the scene was innocent. The rest had been added by the
inquisitive child’s subsequent wish, based on his experiences
with the dogs, to witness his parents too in their love-making; and
the scene which was thus imagined now produced all the effects that
we have catalogued, just as though it had been entirely real and
not fused together out of two components, the one earlier and
indifferent, the other later and profoundly impressive.

   It is at once obvious how greatly
the demands on our credulity are reduced. We need no longer suppose
that the parents copulated in the presence of their child (a very
young one, it is true) - which was a disagreeable idea for many of
us. The period of time during which the effects were deferred is
very greatly diminished; it now covers only a few months of the
child’s fourth year and does not stretch back at all into the
first dark years of childhood. There remains scarcely anything
strange in the child’s conduct in making the transference
from the dogs on to his parents and in being afraid of the wolf
instead of his father. He was in that phase of the development of
his attitude towards the world which I have described in
Totem
and Taboo
as the return of totemism. The theory which
endeavours to explain the primal scenes found in neuroses as
retrospective phantasies of a later date seems to obtain powerful
support from the present observation, in spite of our patient being
of the tender age of four years. Young though he was, he was yet
able to succeed in replacing an impression of his fourth year by an
imaginary trauma at the age of one and a half. This regression,
however, seems neither mysterious nor tendentious. The scene which
was to be made up had to fulfil certain conditions which, in
consequence of the circumstances of the dreamer’s life, could
only be found in precisely this early period; such, for instance,
was the condition that he should be in bed in his parents’
bedroom.