Freud - Complete Works (594 page)

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3566

   When later on I come to
describing the final clearing up of my patient’s symptoms,
the way in which the intestinal disorder had put itself at the
service of the homosexual current and had given expression to his
feminine attitude towards his father will once again become
evident. Meanwhile we shall mention a further meaning of faeces,
which will lead us on to a discussion of the castration
complex.

   Since the column of faeces
stimulates the erotogenic mucous membrane of the bowel, it plays
the part of an active organ in regard to it; it behaves just as the
penis does to the vaginal mucous membrane, and acts as it were as
its forerunner during the cloacal epoch. The handing over of faeces
for the sake of (out of love for) some one else becomes a prototype
of castration; it is the first occasion upon which an individual
parts with a piece of his own body ¹ in order to gain the
favour of some other person whom he loves. So that a person’s
love of his own penis, which is in other respects narcissistic, is
not without an element of anal erotism. ‘Faeces’,
‘baby’ and ‘penis’ thus form a unity, an
unconscious concept (
sit venia verbo
) - the concept, namely,
of ‘a little one’ that can become separated from
one’s body. Along these paths of association the libidinal
cathexis may become displaced or intensified in ways which are
pathologically important and which are revealed by analysis.

   We are already acquainted with
the attitude which our patient first adopted to the problem of
castration. He rejected castration, and held to his theory of
intercourse by the anus. When I speak of his having rejected it,
the first meaning of the phrase is that he would have nothing to do
with it, in the sense of having repressed it. This really involved
no judgement upon the question of its existence, but it was the
same as if it did not exist. Such an attitude, however, could not
have been his final one, even at the time of his infantile
neurosis. We find good subsequent evidence of his having recognized
castration as a fact. In this connection, once again, he behaved in
the manner which was so characteristic of him, but which makes it
so difficult to give a clear account of his mental processes or to
feel one’s way into them. First he resisted and then he
yielded; but the second reaction did not
do away with
the
first. In the end there were to be found in him two contrary
currents side by side, of which one abominated the idea of
castration, while the other was prepared to accept it and console
itself with femininity as a compensation. But beyond any doubt a
third current, the oldest and deepest, which did not as yet even
raise the question of the reality of castration, was still capable
of coming into activity. I have elsewhere ² reported a
hallucination which this same patient had at the age of five and
upon which I need only add a brief commentary here.

  
¹
It is as such that faeces are invariably
treated by children.

  
²
‘
Fausse
Reconnaissance
("
Déjà Raconté
") in
Psycho-Analytic Treatment’ (1914
a
).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3567

   ‘"When I was five
years old, I was playing in the garden near my nurse, and was
carving with my pocket-knife in the bark of one of the walnut-trees
that come into my dream as well.¹ Suddenly, to my unspeakable
terror, I noticed that I had cut through the little finger of my
(right or left?) hand, so that it was only hanging on by its skin.
I felt no pain, but great fear. I did not venture to say anything
to my nurse, who was only a few paces distant, but I sank down on
the nearest seat and sat there incapable of casting another glance
at my finger. At last I calmed down, took a look at the finger, and
saw that it was entirely uninjured."’

   After he had received his
instruction in the Bible story at the age of four and a half he
began, as we know, to make the intense effort of thought which
ended in his obsessional piety. We may therefore assume that this
hallucination belongs to the period in which he brought himself to
recognize the reality of castration and it is perhaps to be
regarded as actually marking this step. Even the small correction
made by the patient is not without interest. If he had a
hallucination of the same dreadful experience which Tasso, in his
Gerusaleme Liberata
, tells of his hero Tancred, we shall
perhaps be justified in reaching the interpretation that the tree
meant a woman to my little patient as well. Here, then, he was
playing the part of his father, and was connecting his
mother’s familiar haemorrhages with the castration of women,
which he now recognized, - with the ‘wound’.

  
¹
‘Cf. "The Occurrence in Dreams
of Material from Fairy Tales". In telling the story again on a
later occasion he made the following correction: "I
don’t believe I was cutting the tree. That was a confusion
with another recollection, which must also have been
hallucinatorily falsified, of having made a cut in a tree with my
knife and of
blood
having come out of the
tree."
’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3568

   His hallucination of the severed
finger was instigated, as he reported later on, by the story that a
female relation of his had been born with six toes and that the
extra one had immediately afterwards been chopped off with an axe.
Women, then, had no penis because it was taken away from them at
birth. In this manner he came, at the period of the obsessional
neurosis, to accept what he had already learned during the dream
but had at the time rejected by repression. He must also have
become acquainted, during the readings and discussions of the
sacred story, with the ritual circumcision of Christ and of the
Jews in general.

   There is no doubt whatever that
at this time his father was turning into the terrifying figure that
threatened him with castration. The cruel God with whom he was then
struggling - who made men sinful, only to punish them afterwards,
who sacrificed his own son and the sons of men - this God threw
back his character on to the patient’s father, though, on the
other hand, the boy was at the same time trying to defend his
father against the God. At this point the boy had to fit into a
phylogenetic pattern, and he did so, although his personal
experiences may not have agreed with it. Although the threats or
hints of castration which had come his way had emanated from women,
¹ this could not hold up the final result for long. In spite
of everything it was his father from whom in the end he came to
fear castration. In this respect heredity triumphed over accidental
experience; in man’s prehistory it was unquestionably the
father who practised castration as a punishment and who later
softened it down into circumcision. The further the patient went in
repressing sensuality during the course of the development of the
obsessional neurosis,² the more natural it must have become to
him to attribute these evil intentions to his father, who was the
true representative of sensual activity.

  
¹
We already know this as regards his Nanya;
and we shall hear of it again in connection with another
woman.

  
²
For evidence of this see
p. 3551
.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3569

   His identification of his father
with the castrator ¹ became important as being the source of
an intense unconscious hostility towards him (which reached the
pitch of a death-wish) and of a sense of guilt which reacted
against it. Up to this point, however, he was behaving normally -
that is to say, like every neurotic who is possessed by a positive
Oedipus complex. But the astonishing thing was that even against
this there was a counter-current working in him, which, on the
contrary, regarded his father as the one who had been castrated and
as calling, therefore, for his sympathy.

   When I analysed his ceremonial of
breathing out whenever he saw cripples, beggars, and such people, I
was able to show that that symptom could also be traced back to his
father, whom he had felt sorry for when he visited him as a patient
in the sanatorium. The analysis made it possible to follow this
thread even further back. At a very early period, probably before
his seduction (at the age of three and a quarter), there had been
on the estate an old day-Iabourer whose business it was to carry
the water into the house. He could not speak, ostensibly because
his tongue had been cut out. (He was probably a deaf mute.) The
little boy was very fond of him and pitied him deeply. When he
died, he looked for him in the sky.² Here, then, was the first
of the cripples for whom he had felt sympathy, and, as was shown by
the context and the point at which the episode came out in the
analysis, an undoubted father-surrogate.

  
¹
Among the most tormenting, though at the
same time the most grotesque, symptoms of his later illness was his
relation to every tailor from whom he ordered a suit of clothes:
his deference and timidity in the presence of this high
functionary, his attempts to get into his good books by giving him
extravagant tips, and his despair over the results of the work
however it might in fact have turned out.

  
²
In this connection I may mention some
dreams which he had, later than the anxiety-dream, but while he was
still on the first estate. These dreams represented the scene of
coition as an event taking place between heavenly
bodies.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3570

   In the analysis this man was
associated with the recollection of other servants whom the patient
had liked and about whom he emphasized the fact that they had been
either sickly or Jews (which implied circumcision). The footman,
too, who had helped to clean him after his accident at four and a
half, had been a Jew and a consumptive and had been an object of
his compassion. All of these figures belong to the period before
his visit to his father at the sanatorium, that is, before the
formation of the symptom; the latter must therefore rather have
been intended to ward off (by means of the breathing out) any
identification with the object of the patient’s pity. Then
suddenly, in connection with a dream, the analysis plunged back
into the prehistoric period, and led him to assert that during the
copulation in the primal scene he had observed the penis disappear,
that he had felt compassion for his father on that account, and had
rejoiced at the reappearance of what he thought had been lost. So
here was a fresh emotional impulse, starting once again from the
primal scene. Moreover, the narcissistic origin of compassion
(which is confirmed by the word itself) is here quite unmistakably
revealed.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3571

VIII

FRESH
MATERIAL FROM THE PRIMAL PERIOD - SOLUTION

It happens in many analyses that as one
approaches their end new recollections emerge which have hitherto
been kept carefully concealed. Or it may be that on one occasion
some unpretentious remark is thrown out in an indifferent tone of
voice as though it were superfluous; that then, on another
occasion, something further is added, which begins to make the
physician prick his ears; and that at last he comes to recognize
this despised fragment of a memory as the key to the weightiest
secrets that the patient’s neurosis has veiled.

   Early in the analysis my patient
had told me of a memory of the period in which his naughtiness had
been in the habit of suddenly turning into anxiety. He was chasing
a beautiful big butterfly with yellow stripes and large wings which
ended in pointed projections - a swallow-tail, in fact. Suddenly,
when the butterfly had settled on a flower, he was seized with a
dreadful fear of the creature, and ran away screaming.

   This memory recurred occasionally
during the analysis, and called for an explanation; but for a long
time none was to be found. Nevertheless it was to be assumed as a
matter of course that a detail like this had not kept its place in
his recollection on its own account, but that it was a
screen-memory, representing something of more importance with which
it was in some way connected. One day he told me that in his
language a butterfly was called ‘
babushka
’,
‘granny’. He added that in general butterflies had
seemed to him like women and girls, and beetles and caterpillars
like boys. So there could be little doubt that in this anxiety
scene a recollection of some female person had been aroused. I will
not hide the fact that at that time I put forward the possibility
that the yellow stripes on the butterfly had reminded him of
similar stripes on a piece of clothing worn by some woman. I only
mention this as an illustration to show how inadequate the
physician’s constructive efforts usually are for clearing up
questions that arise, and how unjust it is to attribute the results
of analysis to the physician imagination and suggestion.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3572

   Many months later, in quite
another connection, the patient remarked that the opening and
shutting of the butterfly’s wings while it was settled on the
flower had given him an uncanny feeling. It had looked, so he said,
like a woman opening her legs, and the legs then made the shape of
a Roman V, which, as we know, was the hour at which, in his
boyhood, and even up to the time of the treatment, he used to fall
into a depressed state of mind.