Freud - Complete Works (591 page)

   The boy had some kind of inkling
of the ambivalent feelings towards the father which are an
underlying factor in all religions, and attacked his religion on
account of the slackening which it implied in this relation between
son and father. Naturally his opposition soon ceased to take the
form of doubting the truth of the doctrine, and turned instead
directly against the figure of God. God had treated his son harshly
and cruelly, but he was no better towards men; he had sacrificed
his own son and had ordered Abraham to do the same. He began to
fear God.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3550

   If he was Christ, then his father
was God. But the God which religion forced upon him was not a true
substitute for the father whom he had loved and whom he did not
want to have stolen from him. His love for this father of his gave
him his critical acuteness. He resisted God in order to be able to
cling to his father; and in doing this he was really upholding the
old father against the new. He was faced by a trying part of the
process of detaching himself from his father.

   His old love for his father,
which had been manifest in his earliest period, was therefore the
source of his energy in struggling against God and of his acuteness
in criticizing religion. But on the other hand this hostility to
the new God was not an original reaction either; it had its
prototype in a hostile impulse against his father, which had come
into existence under the influence of the anxiety-dream, and it was
at bottom only a revival of that impulse. The two opposing currents
of feeling, which were to rule the whole of his later life, met
here in the ambivalent struggle over the question of religion. It
followed, moreover, that what this struggle produced in the shape
of symptoms (the blasphemous ideas, the compulsion which came over
him of thinking ‘God-shit’, ‘God-swine’)
were genuine compromise-products, as we shall see from the analysis
of these ideas in connection with his anal erotism.

   Some other obsessional symptoms
of a less typical sort pointed with equal certainty to his father,
while at the same time showing the connection between the
obsessional neurosis and the earlier occurrences.

   A part of the pious ritual by
means of which he eventually atoned for his blasphemies was the
command to breathe in a ceremonious manner under certain
conditions. Each time he made the sign of the cross he was obliged
to breathe in deeply or to exhale forcibly. In his native tongue
‘breath’ is the same word as ‘spirit’, so
that here the Holy Ghost came in. He was obliged to breathe in the
Holy Spirit, or to breathe out the evil spirits which he had heard
and read about.¹ He ascribed too to these evil spirits the
blasphemous thoughts for which he had to inflict such heavy penance
upon himself. He was, however, also obliged to exhale when he saw
beggars, or cripples, or ugly, old, or wretched-looking people; but
he could think of no way of connecting this obsession with the
spirits. The only account he could give to himself was that he did
it so as not to become like such people.

   Eventually, in connection with a
dream, the analysis elicited the information that the breathing out
at the sight of pitiable-looking people had begun only after his
sixth year and was related to his father. He had not seen his
father for many months, when one day his mother said she was going
to take the children with her to the town and show them something
that would very much please them. She then took them to a
sanatorium, where they saw their father again; he looked ill, and
the boy felt very sorry for him. His father was thus the prototype
of all the cripples, beggars, and poor people in whose presence he
was obliged to breathe out; just as a father is the prototype of
the bogies that people see in anxiety states, and of the
caricatures that are drawn to bring derision upon some one. We
shall learn elsewhere that this attitude of compassion was derived
from a particular detail of the primal scene, a detail which only
became operative in the obsessional neurosis at this late
moment.

   Thus his determination not to
become like cripples (which was the motive of his breathing out in
their presence) was his old identification with his father
transformed into the negative. But in so doing he was also copying
his father in the positive sense, for the heavy breathing was an
imitation of the noise which he had heard coming from his father
during the intercourse.² He had derived the Holy Ghost from
this manifestation of male sensual excitement. Repression had
turned this breathing into an evil spirit, which had another
genealogy as well: namely, the malaria from which he had been
suffering at the time of the primal scene.

  
¹
This symptom, as we shall hear, had
developed after his sixth year and when he could already
read.

  
²
Assuming the reality of the primal
scene.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3551

   His repudiation of these evil
spirits corresponded to an unmistakable strain of asceticism in him
which also found expression in other reactions. When he heard that
Christ had once cast out some evil spirits into a herd of swine
which then rushed down a precipice, he thought of how his sister in
the earliest years of her childhood, before he could remember, had
rolled down on to the beach from the cliff-path above the harbour.
She too was an evil spirit and a swine. It was a short road from
here to ‘God-swine’. His father himself had shown that
he was no less of a slave to sensuality. When he was told the story
of the first of mankind he was struck by the similarity of his lot
to Adam’s. In conversation with his Nanya he professed
hypocritical surprise that Adam should have allowed himself to be
dragged into misfortune by a woman, and promised her that he would
never marry. A hostility towards women, due to his seduction by his
sister, found strong expression at this time. And it was destined
to disturb him often enough in his later erotic life. His sister
came to be the permanent embodiment for him of temptation and sin.
After he had been to confession he seemed to himself pure and free
from sin. But then it appeared to him as though his sister were
lying in wait to drag him again into sin, and in a moment he had
provoked a quarrel with her which made him sinful once more. Thus
he was obliged to keep on reproducing the event of his seduction
over and over again. Moreover, he had never given away his
blasphemous thoughts at confession, in spite of their being such a
weight on his mind.

   We have been led unawares into a
consideration of the symptoms of the later years of the obsessional
neurosis; and we shall therefore pass over the occurrences of the
intervening period and shall proceed to describe its termination.
We already know that, apart from its permanent strength, it
underwent occasional intensifications: once - though the episode
must for the present remain obscure to us - at the time of the
death of a boy living in the same street, with whom he was able to
identify himself. When he was ten years old he had a German tutor,
who very soon obtained a great influence over him. It is most
instructive to observe that the whole of his strict piety dwindled
away, never to be revived, after he had noticed and had learnt from
enlightening conversations with his tutor that this father
surrogate attached no importance to piety and set no store by the
truth of religion. His piety sank away along with his dependence
upon his father, who was now replaced by a new and more sociable
father. This did not take place, however, without one last flicker
of the obsessional neurosis; and from this he particularly
remembered the obsession of having to think of the Holy Trinity
whenever he saw three heaps of dung lying together in the road. In
fact he never gave way to fresh ideas without making one last
attempt at clinging to what had lost its values for him. When his
tutor discouraged him from his cruelties to small animals he did
indeed put an end to those misdeeds, but not until he had again cut
up caterpillars for a last time to his thorough satisfaction. He
still behaved in just the same way during the analytic treatment,
for he showed a habit of producing transitory ‘negative
reactions’; every time something had been conclusively
cleared up, he attempted to contradict the effect for a short while
by an aggravation of the symptom which had been cleared up. It is
quite the rule, as we know, for children to treat prohibitions in
the same kind of way. When they have been rebuked for something
(for instance, because they are making an unbearable din), they
repeat it once more after the prohibition before stopping it. In
this way they gain the point of apparently stopping of their own
accord and of disobeying the prohibition.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3552

   Under the German tutor’s
influence there arose a new and better sublimation of the
patient’s sadism which, with the approach of puberty, had
then gained the upper hand over his masochism. He developed an
enthusiasm for military affairs, for uniforms, weapons and horses,
and used them as food for continual day-dreams. Thus, under a
man’s influence, he had got free from his passive attitudes,
and found himself for the time being on fairly normal lines. It was
as an after-effect of his affection for the tutor, who left him
soon afterwards, that in his later life he preferred German things
(as, for instance, physicians, sanatoria, women) to those belonging
to his native country (representing his father) - a fact which was
incidentally of great advantage to the transference during the
treatment.

   There was another dream, which
belongs to the period before his emancipation by the tutor, and
which I mention because it was forgotten until its appearance
during the treatment. He saw himself riding on a horse and pursued
by a gigantic caterpillar. He recognized in this dream an allusion
to an earlier one from the period before the tutor, which we had
interpreted long before. In this earlier dream he saw the Devil
dressed in black and in the upright posture with which the wolf and
the lion had terrified him so much in their day. He was pointing
with his out-stretched finger at a gigantic snail. The patient had
soon guessed that this Devil was the Demon out of a well-known
poem, and that the dream itself was a version of a very popular
picture representing the Demon in a love-scene with a girl. The
snail was in the woman’s place, as being a perfect female
sexual symbol. Guided by the Demon’s pointing gesture, we
were soon able to give as the dream’s meaning that the
patient was longing for some one who should give him the last
pieces of information that were still missing upon the riddle of
sexual intercourse, just as his father had given him the first in
the primal scene long before.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3553

   In connection with the later
dream, in which the female symbol was replaced by the male one, he
remembered a particular event which had occurred a short time
before the dream. Riding on the estate one day, he passed a peasant
who was lying asleep with his little boy beside him. The latter
woke his father and said something to him, whereupon the father
began to abuse the rider and to pursue him till he rode off
hastily. There was also a second recollection, that on the same
estate there were trees that were quite white, spun all over by
caterpillars. We can see that he took flight from the realization
of the phantasy of the son lying with his father, and that he
brought in the white trees in order to make an allusion to the
anxiety dream of the white wolves on the walnut tree. It was thus a
direct outbreak of dread of the feminine attitude towards men
against which he had at first protected himself by his religious
sublimation and was soon to protect himself still more effectively
by the military one.

   It would, however, be a great
mistake to suppose that after the removal of the obsessional
symptoms no permanent effects of the obsessional neurosis remained
behind. The process had led to a victory for the faith of piety
over the rebelliousness of critical research, and had had the
repression of the homosexual attitude as its necessary condition.
Lasting disadvantages resulted from both these factors. His
intellectual activity remained seriously impaired after this first
great defeat. He developed no zeal for learning, he showed no more
of the acuteness with which at the tender age of five he had
criticized and dissected the doctrines of religion. The repression
of his over-powerful homosexuality, which was accomplished during
the anxiety-dream, reserved that important impulse for the
unconscious, kept it directed towards its original aim, and
withdrew it from all the sublimations to which it is susceptible in
other circumstances. For this reason the patient was without all
those social interests which give a content to life. It was only
when, during the analytic treatment, it became possible to liberate
his shackled homosexuality that this state of affairs showed any
improvement; and it was a most remarkable experience to see how
(without any direct advice from the physician) each piece of
homosexual libido which was set free sought out some application in
life and some attachment to the great common concerns of
mankind.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3554

VII

ANAL
EROTISM AND THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

I must beg the reader to bear in mind that I
obtained this history of an infantile neurosis as a by-product, so
to speak, during the analysis of an illness in mature years. I have
therefore been obliged to put it together from even smaller
fragments than are usually at one’s disposal for purposes of
synthesis. This task, which is not difficult in other respects,
finds a natural limit when it is a question of forcing a structure
which is itself in many dimensions on to the two-dimensional
descriptive plane. I must therefore content myself with bringing
forward fragmentary portions, which the reader can then put
together into a living whole. The obsessional neurosis that has
been described grew up, as has been repeatedly emphasized, on the
basis of a sadistic-anal constitution. But we have hitherto
discussed only one of the two chief factors - the patient’s
sadism and its transformations. Everything that concerns his anal
erotism has intentionally been left on one side so that it might be
brought together and discussed at this later stage.