Freud - Complete Works (595 page)

   This was an association which I
could never have arrived at myself, and which gained importance
from a consideration of the thoroughly infantile nature of the
train of association which it revealed. The attention of children,
as I have often noticed, is attracted far more readily by movements
than by forms at rest; and they frequently base associations upon a
similarity of movement which is overlooked or neglected by
adults.

   After this the little problem was
once more left untouched for a long time; but I may mention the
facile suspicion that the points or stick-like projections of the
butterfly’s wings might have had the meaning of genital
symbols.

   One day there emerged, timidly
and indistinctly, a kind of recollection that at a very early age,
even before the time of the nurse, he must have had a nursery-maid
who was very fond of him. Her name had been the same as his
mother’s. He had no doubt returned her affection. It was, in
fact, a first love that had faded into oblivion. But we agreed that
something must have occurred at that time that became of importance
later on.

   Then on another occasion he
emended this recollection. She could not have had the same name as
his mother; that had been a mistake on his part, and it showed, of
course, that in his memory she had become fused with his mother.
Her real name, he went on, had occurred to him in a roundabout way.
He had suddenly thought of a store-room, on the first estate, in
which fruit was kept after it had been picked, and of a particular
sort of pear with a most delicious taste - a big pear with yellow
stripes on its skin. The word for ‘pear’ in his
language was ‘
grusha
’, and that had also been
the name of the nursery-maid.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3573

   It thus became clear that behind
the screen memory of the hunted butterfly the memory of the
nursery-maid lay concealed. But the yellow stripes were not on her
dress, but on the pear whose name was the same as hers. What,
however, was the origin of the anxiety which had arisen when the
memory of her had been activated? The obvious answer to this might
have been the crude hypothesis that it had been this girl whom,
when he was a small child, he had first seen making the movements
with her legs which he had fixed in his mind with the Roman V -
movements which allow access to the genitals. We spared ourselves
such theorizing as this and waited for more material.

   Very soon after this there came
the recollection of a scene, incomplete, but, so far as it was
preserved, definite. Grusha was kneeling on the floor, and beside
her a pail and a short broom made of a bundle of twigs; he was also
there, and she was teasing him or scolding him.

   The missing elements could easily
be supplied from other directions. During the first months of the
treatment he had told me of how he had suddenly fallen in love in a
compulsive manner with a peasant girl from whom, in his eighteenth
year, he had contracted the precipitating cause of his later
illness. When he told me this he had displayed a most extraordinary
unwillingness to give me the girl’s name. It was an entirely
isolated instance of resistance, for apart from it he obeyed the
fundamental rule of analysis unreservedly. He asserted, however,
that the reason for his being so much ashamed of mentioning the
name was that it was a purely peasant name and that no girl of
gentle birth could possibly be called by it. When eventually the
name was produced, it turned out to be Matrona, which has a
motherly ring about it. The shame was evidently displaced. He was
not ashamed of the fact that these love-affairs were invariably
concerned with girls of the humblest origin; he was ashamed only of
the name. If it should turn out that the affair with Matrona had
something in common with the Grusha scene, then the shame would
have to be transferred back to that early episode.

   He had told me another time that
when he heard the story of John Huss he had been greatly moved, and
that his attention had been held by the bundles of firewood that
were dragged up when he was burnt at the stake. Now his sympathy
for Huss created a perfectly definite suspicion in my mind, for I
have often come upon this sympathy in youthful patients and I have
always been able to explain it in the same way. One such patient
even went so far as to produce a dramatized version of Huss’s
career; he began to write his play on the day on which he lost the
object with whom he was secretly in love. Huss perished by fire,
and (like others who possess the same qualification) he becomes the
hero of people who have at one time suffered from enuresis. My
patient himself connected the bundles of firewood used for the
execution of Huss with the nursery-maid’s broom or bundle of
twigs.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3574

   This material fitted together
spontaneously and served to fill in the gaps in the patient’s
memory of the scene with Grusha. When he saw the girl scrubbing the
floor he had micturated in the room and she had rejoined, no doubt
jokingly, with a threat of castration.¹

   I do not know if my readers will
have already guessed why it is that I have given such a detailed
account of this episode from the patient’s early
childhood.² It provides an important link between the primal
scene and the later compulsive love which came to be of such
decisive significance in his subsequent career, and it further
shows us a condition upon which his falling in love depended and
which elucidates that compulsion.

   When he saw the girl on the floor
engaged in scrubbing it, and kneeling down, with her buttocks
projecting and her back horizontal, he was faced once again with
the posture which his mother had assumed in the copulation scene.
She became his mother to him; he was seized with sexual excitement
owing to the activation of this picture;³ and, like his father
(whose action he can only have regarded at the time as
micturition), he behaved in a masculine way towards her. His
micturition on the floor was in reality an attempt at a seduction,
and the girl replied to it with a threat of castration, just as
though she had understood what he meant.

  
¹
It is very remarkable that the reaction of
shame should be so intimately connected with involuntary emptying
of the bladder (whether in the day-time or at night) and not
equally so, as one would have expected, with incontinence of the
bowels. Experience leaves no room for doubt upon the point. The
regular relation that is found to exist between incontinence of the
bladder and fire also provides matter for reflection. It is
possible that these reactions and relations represent precipitates
from the history of human civilization derived from a lower stratum
than anything that is preserved for us in the traces surviving in
myths or folklore.

  
²
It may be assigned to a time at which he
was about two and a half: between his supposed observation of
intercourse and his seduction.

  
³
This was
before
the
dream.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3575

   The compulsion which proceeded
from the primal scene was transferred on to this scene with Grusha
and was carried forward by it. But the condition upon which his
falling in love depended underwent a change which showed the
influence of the second scene: it was transferred from the
woman’s posture to the occupation on which she was engaged
while in that posture. This was clear, for instance, in the episode
of Matrona. He was walking through the village which formed part of
their (later) estate, when he saw a peasant girl kneeling by the
pond and employed in washing clothes in it. He fell in love with
the girl instantly and with irresistible violence, although he had
not yet been able to get even a glimpse of her face. By her posture
and occupation she had taken the place of Grusha for him. We can
now see now it was that the shame which properly related to the
content of the scene with Grusha could become attached to the name
of Matrona.

   Another attack of falling in
love, dating from a few years earlier, shows even more clearly the
compelling influence of the Grusha scene. A young peasant girl, who
was a servant in the house, had long attracted him, but he
succeeded in keeping himself from approaching her. One day, when he
came upon her in a room by herself, he was overwhelmed by his love.
He found her kneeling on the floor and engaged in scrubbing it,
with a pail and a broom beside her - in fact, exactly as he had
seen the girl in his childhood.

   Even his final choice of object,
which played such an important part in his life, is shown by its
details (though they cannot be adduced here) to have been dependent
upon the same condition and to have been an offshoot of the
compulsion which, starting from the primal scene and going on to
the scene with Grusha, had dominated his love-choice. I have
remarked on an earlier page that I recognize in the patient an
endeavour to debase his love-object. This is to be explained as a
reaction against pressure from the sister who was so much his
superior. But I promised at the same time (see
p. 3515
) to show that this
self-assertive motive was not the only determinant, but that it
concealed another and deeper one based on purely erotic motives.
These were brought to light by the patient’s memory of the
nursery-maid scrubbing the floor -
physically
debased too,
by the by. All his later love-objects were surrogates for this one
person, who through the accident of her attitude had herself become
his first mother-surrogate. The patient’s first association
in connection with the problem of his fear of the butterfly can now
easily be explained retrospectively as a distant allusion to the
primal scene (the hour of five). He confirmed the connection
between the Grusha scene and the threat of castration by a
particularly ingenious dream, which he himself succeeded in
deciphering. ‘I had a dream,’ he said, ‘of a man
tearing off the wings of an
Espe
.’
‘
Espe
?’ I asked; ‘what do you mean by
that?’ ‘You know; that insect with yellow stripes on
its body, that stings.’ I could now put him right: ‘So
what you mean is a
Wespe
[wasp].’ ‘Is it called
a
Wespe
? I really thought it was called an
Espe
.’ (Like so many other people, he used his
difficulties with a foreign language as a screen for symptomatic
acts.) ‘But
Espe
, why, that’s myself: S.
P.’ (which were his initials). The
Espe
was of course
a mutilated
Wespe
. The dream said clearly that he was
avenging himself on Grusha for her threat of castration.

   The action of the
two-and-a-half-year-old boy in the scene with Grusha is the
earliest effect of the primal scene which has come to our
knowledge. It represents him as copying his father, and shows us a
tendency towards development in a direction which would later
deserve the name of masculine. His seduction drove him into
passivity - for which, in any case, the way was prepared by his
behaviour when he was a witness of his parents’
intercourse.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3576

   I must here turn for a moment to
the history of the treatment. When once the Grusha scene had been
assimilated - the first experience that he could really remember,
and one which he had remembered without any conjectures or
intervention on my part - the problem of the treatment had every
appearance of having been solved. From that time forward there were
no more resistances; all that remained to be done was to collect
and to co-ordinate. The old trauma theory of the neuroses, which
was after all built up upon impressions gained from psycho-analytic
practice, had suddenly come to the front once more. Out of critical
interest I made one more attempt to force upon the patient another
view of his story, which might commend itself more to sober common
sense. It was true that there could be no doubt about the scene
with Grusha, but, I suggested, in itself that scene meant nothing;
it had been emphasized
ex
post facto
by a regression
from the circumstances of his object choice, which, as a result of
his intention to debase, had been diverted from his sister on to
servant girls. On the other hand, his observation of intercourse, I
argued, was a phantasy of his later years; its historical nucleus
may perhaps have been an observation or an experience by the
patient of the administration of an innocent enema. Some of my
readers will possibly be inclined to think that with such
hypotheses as these I was for the first time beginning to approach
an understanding of the case; but the patient looked at me
uncomprehendingly and a little contemptuously when I put this view
before him, and he never reacted to it again. I have already stated
my own arguments against any such rationalization at their proper
point in the discussion.

   [Thus ¹ the Grusha scene, by
explaining the conditions governing the patient’s
object-choice - conditions which were of decisive importance in his
life - prevents our over-estimating the significance of his
intention to debase women. But it does more than this. It affords
me a justification for having refused on an earlier page (see
p. 3545
) to adopt unhesitatingly, as the
only tenable explanation, the view that the primal scene was
derived from an observation made upon animals shortly before the
dream. The Grusha scene emerged in the patient’s memory
spontaneously and through no effort of mine. His fear of the
yellow-striped butterfly, which went back to that scene, proved
that the scene had had a significant content, or that he had been
able to attach this significance to its content subsequently. By
means of the accompanying associations and the inferences that
followed from them, it was possible with certainty to supply this
significant element which was lacking in the patient’s
memory. It then appeared that his fear of the butterfly was in
every respect analogous to his fear of the wolf; in both cases it
was a fear of castration, which was, to begin with, referred to the
person who had first uttered the threat of castration, but was then
transposed on to another person to whom it was bound to become
attached in accordance with phylogenetic precedent. The scene with
Grusha had occurred when the patient was two and a half, but the
anxiety-episode with the yellow butterfly was certainly subsequent
to the anxiety-dream. It was easy to understand how the
patient’s later comprehension of the possibility of
castration had retrospectively brought out the anxiety in the scene
with Grusha. But that scene in itself contained nothing
objectionable or improbable; on the contrary, it consisted entirely
of commonplace details which gave no grounds for scepticism. There
was nothing in it which could lead one to attribute its origin to
the child’s imagination; such a supposition, indeed, seemed
scarcely possible.