Freud - Complete Works (592 page)

   Analysts have long been agreed
that the multifarious instinctual impulses which are comprised
under the name of anal erotism play an extraordinarily important
part, which it would be quite impossible to over-estimate, in
building up sexual life and mental activity in general. It is
equally agreed that one of the most important manifestations of the
transformed erotism derived from this source is to be found in the
treatment of money, for in the course of life this precious
material attracts on to itself the psychical interest which was
originally proper to faeces, the product of the anal zone. We are
accustomed to trace back interest in money, in so far as it is of a
libidinal and not of a rational character, to excretory pleasure,
and we expect normal people to keep their relations to money
entirely free from libidinal influences and regulate them according
to the demands of reality.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3555

   In our patient, at the time of
his later illness, these relations were disturbed to a particularly
severe degree, and this fact was not the least considerable element
in his lack of independence and his incapacity for dealing with
life. He had become very rich through legacies from his father and
uncle; it was obvious that he attached great importance to being
taken for rich, and he was liable to feel very much hurt if he was
undervalued in this respect. But he had no idea how much he
possessed, what his expenditure was, or what balance was left over.
It was hard to say whether he ought to be called a miser or a
spendthrift. He behaved now in this way and now in that, but never
in a way that seemed to show any consistent intention. Some
striking traits, which I shall further discuss below, might have
led one to regard him as a hardened plutocrat, who considered his
wealth as his greatest personal advantage, and who would never for
a moment allow emotional interests to weigh against pecuniary ones.
Yet he did not value other people by their wealth, and, on the
contrary, showed himself on many occasions unassuming, helpful, and
charitable. Money, in fact, had been withdrawn from his conscious
control, and meant for him something quite different.

   I have already mentioned that I
viewed with grave suspicion the way in which he consoled himself
for the loss of his sister, who had become his closest companion
during her latter years, with the reflection that now he would not
have to share his parents’ inheritance with her. But what was
perhaps even more striking was the calmness with which he was able
to relate this, as though he had no comprehension of the coarseness
of feeling to which he was thus confessing. It is true that
analysis rehabilitated him by showing that his grief for his sister
had merely undergone a displacement; but it then became quite
inexplicable why he should have tried to find a substitute for his
sister in an increase of wealth.

   He himself was puzzled by his
behaviour in another connection. After his father’s death the
property that was left was divided between him and his mother. His
mother administered it, and, as he himself admitted, met his
pecuniary claims irreproachably and liberally. Yet every discussion
of money matters that took place between them used to end with the
most violent reproaches on his side, to the effect that she did not
love him, that she was trying to economize at his expense, and that
she would probably rather see him dead to as so have sole control
over the money. His mother used then to protect her
disinterestedness with tears, and he would thereupon grow ashamed
of himself and declare with justice that he thought nothing of the
sort of her. But he was sure to repeat the same scene at the first
opportunity.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3556

   Many incidents, of which I will
relate two, show that, for a long time before the analysis, faeces
had had this significance of money for him. At a time when his
bowel as yet played no part in his complaint, he once paid a visit
to a poor cousin of his in a large town. As he left him he
reproached himself for not giving this relative financial support,
and immediately afterwards had what was ‘perhaps the most
urgent need for relieving his bowels that he had experienced in his
life’. Two years later he did in fact settle an annuity upon
this cousin. Here is the other case. At the age of eighteen, while
he was preparing for his leaving-examination at school, he visited
a friend and came to an agreement with him on a plan which seemed
advisable on account of the dread which they shared of failing in
the examination.¹ It had been decided to bribe the school
servant, and the patient’s share of the sum to be provided
was naturally the larger. On the way home he thought to himself
that he should be glad to give even more if only he could succeed
in getting through, if only he could be sure that nothing would
happen to him in the examination - and an accident of another sort
really did happen to him ² before he reached his own front
door.

   We shall be prepared to hear that
during his later illness he suffered from disturbances of his
intestinal function which were very obstinate, though various
circumstances caused them to fluctuate in intensity. When he came
under my treatment he had become accustomed to enemas, which were
given him by an attendant; spontaneous evacuations did not occur
for months at a time, unless a sudden excitement from some
particular direction intervened, as a result of which normal
activity of the bowels might set in for a few days. His principal
subject of complaint was that for him the world was hidden in a
veil, or that he was cut off from the world by a veil. This veil
was torn only at one moment - when, after an enema, the contents of
the bowel left the intestinal canal; and he then felt well and
normal again.³

  
¹
The patient informed me that his native
tongue has no parallel to the familiar German use of
‘
Durchfall
’ as a description for disturbance of
the bowels.

  
²
This expression has the same meaning in the
patient’s native tongue as in German.

  
³
The effect was the same whether he had the
enema given him by some one else or whether he managed it
himself.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3557

   The colleague to whom I referred
the patient for a report upon his intestinal condition was
perspicacious enough to explain it as being a functional one, or
even psychically determined, and to abstain from any active
medicinal treatment. Moreover, neither this nor dieting were of any
use. During the years of analytic treatment there was no
spontaneous motion apart from the sudden influences that I have
mentioned. The patient allowed himself to be convinced that if the
intractable organ received more intensive treatment things would
only be made worse, and contented himself with bringing on an
evacuation once or twice a week by means of an enema or a
purgative.

   In discussing these intestinal
troubles I have given more space to the patient’s later
illness than has been my plan elsewhere in this work, which is
concerned with his infantile neurosis. I have done so for two
reasons: first, because the intestinal symptoms were in point of
fact carried forward from the infantile neurosis into the later one
with little alteration, and secondly, because they played a
principal part in the conclusion of the treatment.

   We know how important doubt is to
the physician who is analysing an obsessional neurosis. It is the
patient’s strongest weapon, the favourite expedient of his
resistance. This same doubt enabled our patient to lie entrenched
behind a respectful indifference and to allow the efforts of the
treatment to slip past him for years together. Nothing changed, and
there was no way of convincing him. At last I recognized the
importance of the intestinal trouble for my purposes; it
represented the small trait of hysteria which is regularly to be
found at the root of an obsessional neurosis. I promised the
patient a complete recovery of his intestinal activity, and by
means of this promise made his incredulity manifest. I then had the
satisfaction of seeing his doubt dwindle away, as in the course of
the work his bowel began, like a hysterically affected organ, to
‘join in the conversation’, and in a few week’s
time recovered its normal functions after their long
impairment.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3558

   I now turn back to the
patient’s childhood - to a time at which it was impossible
that faeces could have had the significance of money for him.

   Intestinal disorders set in very
early with him, and especially in the form which is the most
frequent and, among children, the most normal - namely,
incontinence. We shall certainly be right, however, in rejecting a
pathological explanation of these earliest occurrences, and in
regarding them only as evidence of the patient’s intention
not to let himself be disturbed or checked in the pleasure attached
to the function of evacuation. He found a great deal of enjoyment
(such as would tally with the natural coarseness of many classes of
society, though not of his) in anal jokes and exhibitions, and this
enjoyment had been retained by him until after the beginning of his
later illness.

   During the time of the English
governess it repeatedly happened that he and his Nanya had to share
that obnoxious lady’s bedroom. His Nanya noticed with
comprehension the fact that precisely on those nights he made a
mess in his bed, though otherwise this had ceased to happen a long
time before. He was not in the least ashamed of it; it was an
expression of defiance against the governess.

   A year later (when he was four
and a half), during the anxiety period, he happened to make a mess
in his knickerbockers in the day-time. He was terribly ashamed of
himself, and as he was being cleaned he moaned that he could not go
on living like that. So that in the meantime something had changed;
and by following up his lament we came upon the traces of this
something. It turned out that the words ‘he could not go on
living like that’ were repeated from some one else. His
mother had once ¹ taken him with her when she was walking down
to the station with the doctor who had come to visit her. During
this walk she had lamented over her pains and haemorrhages and had
broken out in the same words, ‘ I cannot go on living like
this’, without imagining that the child whose hand she was
holding would keep them in his memory. Thus his lament (which,
moreover, he was to repeat on innumerable occasions during his
later illness) had the significance of an identification with his
mother.

  
¹
When this happened was not exactly fixed;
but in any case before the anxiety-dream when he was four, and
probably before his parents’ absence from home.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3559

   There soon appeared in his
recollection what was evidently, in respect both of its date and of
its content, a missing intermediate link between these two events.
It once happened at the beginning of his anxiety period that his
apprehensive mother gave orders that precautions were to be taken
to protect the children from dysentery, which had made its
appearance in the neighbourhood of the estate. He made enquiries as
to what that might be; and after hearing that when you have
dysentery you find blood in your stool he became very nervous and
declared that there was blood in his own stool; he was afraid he
would die of dysentery, but allowed himself to be convinced by an
examination that he had made a mistake and had no need to be
frightened. We can see that in this dread he was trying to put into
effect an identification with his mother, whose haemorrhages he had
heard about in the conversation with her doctor. In his later
attempt at identification (when he was four and a half) he had
dropped any mention of the blood; he no longer understood himself,
for he imagined that he was ashamed of himself and was not aware
that he was being shaken by a dread of death, though this was
unmistakably revealed in his lament.

   At that time his mother,
suffering as she was from an abdominal affection, was in general
nervous, both about herself and the children; it is most probable
that his own nervousness, besides its other motives, was based on
an identification with his mother.

   Now what can have been the
meaning of this identification with his mother?

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3560

   Between the impudent use he made
of his incontinence when he was three and a half, and the horror
with which he viewed it when he was four and a half, there lies the
dream with which his anxiety period began - the dream which gave
him a deferred comprehension of the scene he had experienced when
he was one and a half (
p. 3533
), and
an explanation of the part played by women in the sexual act. It is
only another step to connect the change in his attitude towards
defaecation with this same great revulsion. Dysentery was evidently
his name for the illness which he had heard his mother lamenting
about, and which it was impossible to go on living with; he did not
regard his mother’s disease as being abdominal but as being
intestinal. Under the influence of the primal scene he came to the
conclusion that his mother had been made ill by what his father had
done to her;¹ and his dread of having blood in his stool, of
being as ill as his mother, was his repudiation of being identified
with her in this sexual scene - the same repudiation with which he
awoke from the dream. But the dread was also a proof that in his
later elaboration of the primal scene he had put himself in his
mother’s place and had envied her this relation with his
father. The organ by which his identification with women, his
passive homosexual attitude to men, was able to express itself was
the anal zone. The disorders in the function of this zone had
acquired the significance of feminine impulses of tenderness, and
they retained it during the later illness as well.