Freud - Complete Works (593 page)

   At this point we must consider an
objection, the discussion of which may contribute much to the
elucidation of the apparent confusion of the circumstances. We have
been driven to assume that during the process of the dream he
understood that women are castrated, that instead of a male organ
they have a wound which serves for sexual intercourse, and that
castration is the necessary condition of femininity; we have been
driven to assume that the threat of this loss induced him to
repress his feminine attitude towards men, and that he awoke from
his homosexual enthusiasm in anxiety. Now how can this
comprehension of sexual intercourse, this recognition of the
vagina, be brought into harmony with the selection of the bowel for
the purpose of identification with women? Are not the intestinal
symptoms based on what is probably an older notion, and one which
in any case completely contradicts the dread of castration - the
notion, namely, that sexual intercourse takes place at the
anus?

   To be sure, this contradiction is
present; and the two views are entirely inconsistent with each
other. The only question is whether they need be consistent. Our
bewilderment arises only because we are always inclined to treat
unconscious mental processes like conscious ones and to forget the
profound differences between the two psychical systems.

  
¹
A conclusion which was probably not far
from the truth.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3561

   When his Christmas dream, with
its excitement and expectancy, conjured up before him the picture
of the sexual intercourse of his parents as it had once been
observed (or construed) by him, there can be no doubt that the
first view of it to come up was the old one, according to which the
part of the female body which received the male organ was the anus.
And, indeed, what else could he have supposed when at the age of
one and a half he was a spectator of the scene?¹ But now came
the new event that occurred when he was four years old. What he had
learnt in the meantime, the allusions which he had heard to
castration, awoke and cast a doubt on the ‘cloacal
theory’; they brought to his notice the difference between
the sexes and the sexual part played by women. In this contingency
he behaved as children in general behave when they are given an
unwished for piece of information - whether sexual or of any other
kind. He rejected what was new (in our case from motives connected
with his fear of castration) and clung fast to what was old. He
decided in favour of the intestine and against the vagina, just as,
for similar motives, he later on took his father’s side
against God. He rejected the new information and clung to the old
theory. The latter must have provided the material for his
identification with women, which made its appearance later as a
dread of death in connection with the bowels, and for his first
religious scruples, about whether Christ had had a behind, and so
on. It is not that his new insight remained without any effect;
quite the reverse. It developed an extraordinarily powerful effect,
for it became a motive for keeping the whole process of the dream
under repression and for excluding it from being worked over later
in consciousness. But with that its effect was exhausted; it had no
influence in deciding the sexual problem. That it should have been
possible from that time onwards for a fear of castration to exist
side by side with an identification with women by means of the
bowel admittedly involved a contradiction. But it was only a
logical contradiction - which is not saying much. On the contrary,
the whole process is characteristic of the way in which the
unconscious works. A repression is something very different from a
condemning judgement.

  
¹
Or so long as he did not grasp the sense of
the copulation between the dogs.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3562

   When we were studying the genesis
of the wolf phobia, we followed the effect of his new insight into
the sexual act; but now that we are investigating the disturbances
of the intestinal function, we find ourselves working on the basis
of the old cloacal theory. The two points of view remained
separated from each other by a stage of repression. His feminine
attitude towards men, which had been repudiated by the act of
repression, drew back, as it were, into the intestinal symptoms,
and expressed itself in the attacks of diarrhoea, constipation, and
intestinal pain, which were so frequent during the patient’s
childhood. His later sexual phantasies, which were based on a
correct sexual knowledge, were thus able to express themselves
regressively as intestinal troubles. But we cannot understand them
until we have explained the modifications which take place in the
significance of faeces from the first years of childhood
onward.¹

   I have already hinted at an
earlier point in my story that one portion of the content of the
primal scene has been kept back. I am now in a position to produce
this missing portion. The child finally interrupted his
parents’ intercourse by passing a stool, which gave him an
excuse for screaming. All the considerations which I have raised
above in discussing the rest of the content of the same scene apply
equally to the criticism of this additional piece. The patient
accepted this concluding act when I had constructed it, and
appeared to confirm it by producing ‘transitory
symptoms’. A further additional piece which I had proposed,
to the effect that his father was annoyed at the interruption and
gave vent to his ill-humour by scolding him, had to be dropped. The
material of the analysis did not react to it.

   The additional detail which I
have now brought forward cannot of course be put on a level with
the rest of the content of the scene. Here it is not a question of
an impression from outside, which must be expected to re-emerge in
a number of later indications, but of a reaction on the part of the
child himself. It would make no difference to the story as a whole
if this demonstration had not occurred, or if it had been taken
from a later period and inserted into the course of the scene. But
there can be no question of how we are to regard it. It is a sign
of a state of excitement of the anal zone (in the widest sense). In
other similar cases an observation like this of sexual intercourse
has ended with a discharge of urine; a grown-up man in the same
circumstances would feel an erection. The fact that our little boy
passed a stool as a sign of his sexual excitement is to be regarded
as a characteristic of his congenital sexual constitution. He at
once assumed a passive attitude, and showed more inclination
towards a subsequent identification with women than with men.

  
¹
Cf. ‘On Transformations of Instinct
as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917
c
).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3563

   At the same time, like every
other child, he was making use of the content of the intestines in
one of its earliest and most primitive meanings. Faeces are the
child’s first
gift
, the first sacrifice on behalf of
his affection, a portion of his own body which he is ready to part
with, but only for the sake of some one he loves.¹ To use
faeces as an expression of defiance, as our patient did against the
governess when he was three and a half, is merely to turn this
earlier ‘gift’ meaning into the negative. The
‘
grumus merdae
’ [heap of faeces] left behind by
criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds seems to have both these
meanings: contumely, and a regressive expression of making amends.
It is always possible, when a higher stage has been reached, for
use still to be made of the lower one in its negative and debased
sense. The contrariety is a manifestation of repression.²

  
¹
I believe these can be no difficulty in
substantiating the statement that infants only soil with their
excrement people whom they know and are fond of; they do not
consider strangers worthy of this distinction. In my
Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905
d
) I mentioned
the very first purpose to which faeces are put - namely, the
auto-erotic stimulation of the intestinal mucous membrane. We now
reach a further stage, at which a decisive part in the process of
defaecation is played by the child’s attitude to some object
to whom he thus shows himself obedient or agreeable. This relation
is one that persists; for even older children will only allow
themselves to be assisted in defaecating and urinating by
particular privileged persons, though in this connection the
prospect of other forms of satisfaction is also
involved.

  
²
In the unconscious, as we are aware,
‘No’ does not exist, and there is no distinction
between contraries. Negation is only introduced by the process of
repression.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3564

   At a later stage of sexual
development faeces take on the meaning of a
baby
. For
babies, like faeces, are born through the anus. The
‘gift’ meaning of faeces readily admits of this
transformation. It is a common usage to speak of a baby as a
‘gift’. The more frequent expression is that the woman
has ‘given’ the man a baby; but in the usage of the
unconscious equal attention is justly paid to the other aspect of
the relation, namely, to the woman having ‘received’
the baby as a gift from the man.

   The meaning of faeces as
money
branches off from the ‘gift’ meaning in
another direction.

   The deeper significance of our
patient’s early screen memory, to the effect that he had his
first fit of rage because he was not given enough presents one
Christmas, is now revealed to us. What he was feeling the want of
was sexual satisfaction, which he had taken as being anal. His
sexual researches came during the course of the dream to understand
what they had been prepared for finding before the dream, namely,
that the sexual act solved the problem of the origin of babies.
Even before the dream he had disliked babies. Once, when he had
come upon a small unfledged bird that had fallen out of its nest,
he had taken it for a human baby and been horrified at it. The
analysis showed that all small animals, such as caterpillars and
insects, that he had been so enraged with, had had the meaning of
babies to him.¹ His position in regard to his elder sister had
given him every opportunity for reflecting upon the relation
between elder and younger children. His Nanya had once told him
that his mother was so fond of him because he was the youngest, and
this gave him good grounds for wishing that no younger child might
come after him. His dread of this youngest child was revived under
the influence of the dream which brought up before him his
parents’ intercourse.

   To the sexual currents that are
already known to us we must therefore add a further one, which,
like the rest, started from the primal scene reproduced in the
dream. In his identification with women (that is, with his mother)
he was ready to give his father a baby, and was jealous of his
mother, who had already done so and would perhaps do so again.

  
¹
Just as vermin often stands for babies in
dreams and phobias.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3565

   In a roundabout way, since both
‘money’ and ‘baby’ have the sense of
‘gift’, money can take over the meaning of baby and can
thus become the means of expressing feminine (homosexual)
satisfaction. This was what occurred with our patient when - he and
his sister were staying at a German sanatorium at the time - he saw
his father give his sister two large bank notes. In imagination he
had always had suspicions of his father’s relations with his
sister; and at this his jealousy awoke. He rushed at his sister as
soon as they were alone, and demanded a share of the money with so
much vehemence and such reproaches that his sister, in tears, threw
him the whole of it. What had excited him was not merely the actual
money, but rather the ‘baby’ - anal sexual satisfaction
from his father. And he was able to console himself with this when,
in his father’s lifetime, his sister died. The revolting
thought which occurred to him when he heard the news of her death
in fact meant no more than this: ‘Now I am the only child.
Now Father will have to love me only.’ But though his
reflection was in itself perfectly capable of becoming conscious,
yet its homosexual background was so intolerable that it was
possible for its disguise in the shape of the most sordid avarice
to come as a great relief.

   Similarly, too, when after his
father’s death he reproached his mother so unjustifiably with
wanting to cheat him out of the money and with being fonder of the
money than of him. His old jealousy of her for having loved another
child besides him, the possibility of her having wanted another
child after him, drove him into making charges which he himself
knew were unwarranted.

   This analysis of the meaning of
faeces makes it clear that the obsessive thoughts which obliged him
to connect God with faeces had a further significance beyond the
disparagement which he saw in them himself. They were in fact true
compromise-products, in which a part was played no less by an
affectionate current of devotion than by a hostile current of
abuse. ‘God-shit’ was probably an abbreviation for an
offering that one occasionally hears mentioned in its unabbreviated
form. ‘Shitting on God’ [‘
auf Gott
scheissen
’] or ‘shitting something for God’
[‘
Gott etwas scheissen
’] also means giving him a
baby or getting him to give one a baby. The old ‘gift’
meaning in its negative and debased form and the ‘baby’
meaning that was later developed from it are combined with each
other in the obsessional phrase. In the latter of these meanings a
feminine tenderness finds expression: a readiness to give up
one’s masculinity if in exchange for it one can be loved like
a woman. Here, then, we have precisely the same impulse towards God
which was expressed in unambiguous words in the delusional system
of the paranoic Senatspräsident Schreber.