Freud - Complete Works (596 page)

  
¹
[Freud’s square brackets.]

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3577

   The question now arises whether
we are justified in regarding the fact that the boy micturated,
while he stood looking at the girl on her knees scrubbing the
floor, as a proof of sexual excitement on his part. If so, the
excitement would be evidence of the influence of an earlier
impression, which might equally have been the actual occurrence of
the primal scene or an observation made upon animals before the age
of two and a half. Or are we to conclude that the situation as
regards Grusha was entirely innocent, that the child’s
emptying his bladder was purely accidental, and that it was not
until later that the whole scene became sexualized in his memory,
after he had come to recognize the importance of similar
situations?

   On these issues I can venture
upon no decision. I must confess, however, that I regard it as
greatly to the credit of psycho-analysis that it should even have
reached the stage of
raising
such questions as these.
Nevertheless, I cannot deny that the scene with Grusha, the part it
played in the analysis, and the effects that followed from it in
the patient’s life can be most naturally and completely
explained if we consider that the primal scene, which may in other
cases be a phantasy, was a reality in the present one. After all,
there is nothing impossible about it; and the hypothesis of its
reality is entirely compatible with the inciting action of the
observations upon animals which are indicated by the sheep-dogs in
the dream-picture.

   I will now turn from this
unsatisfactory conclusion to a consideration of the problem which I
have attempted in my
Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis
. I should myself be glad to know whether the
primal scene in my present patient’s case was a phantasy or a
real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account, I
must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter
of very great importance. These scenes of observing parental
intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened
with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a
phylogenetic heritage, but they may just as easily be acquired by
personal experience. With my patient, his seduction by his elder
sister was an indisputable reality; why should not the same have
been true of his observation of his parents’ intercourse?

   All that we find in the
prehistory of neuroses is that a child catches hold of this
phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He
fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he
replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of
his ancestors. I fully agree with Jung ¹ in recognizing the
existence of this phylogenetic heritage; but I regard it as a
methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before
the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted. I cannot see any
reason for obstinately disputing the importance of infantile
prehistory while at the same time freely acknowledging the
importance of ancestral prehistory. Nor can I overlook the fact
that phylogenetic motives and productions themselves stand in need
of elucidation, and that in quite a number of instances this is
afforded by factors in the childhood of the individual. And,
finally, I cannot feel surprised that what was originally produced
by certain circumstances in prehistoric times and was then
transmitted in the shape of a predisposition to its re-acquirement
should, since the same circumstances persist, emerge once more as a
concrete event in the experience of the individual.]

  
¹
Die Psychologie der unbewussten
Prozesse
, 1917. This was published too late for it to have
influenced my
Introductory Lectures
.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3578

   Room must also be found in the
interval between the primal scene and the seduction (from the age
of one and a half to the age of three and a quarter) for the dumb
water-carrier. He served the patient as a father-surrogate just as
Grusha served him as a mother-surrogate. I do not think there is
any justification for regarding this as an example of the intention
to debase, even though it is true that both parents have come to be
represented by servants. A child pays no regard to social
distinctions, which have little meaning for him as yet; and he
classes people of inferior rank with his parents if such people
love him as his parents do. Nor is the intention to debase any more
responsible for the substitution of animals for a child’s
parents, for children are very far indeed from taking a disparaging
view of animals. Uncles and aunts are used as parent-surrogates
without any regard to the question of debasing, and this was in
fact done by our present patient, as many of his recollections
showed.

   There also belongs in this period
a phase, which was obscurely remembered, in which he would not eat
anything except sweet things, until alarm was felt on the score of
his health. He was told about one of his uncles who had refused to
eat in the same way and had wasted away to death while he was still
young. He was also informed that when he himself was three months
old he had been so seriously ill (with pneumonia?) that his
winding-sheet had been got ready for him. In this way they
succeeded in alarming him, so that he began eating again; and in
the later years of his childhood he used actually to overdo this
duty, as though to guard himself against the threat of death The
fear of death, which was evoked at that time for his own
protection, made its reappearance later when his mother warned him
of the danger of dysentery. Later still, it brought on an attack of
his obsessional neurosis (see
p. 3551
). We shall try below to go into
its origins and meanings.

   I am inclined to the opinion that
this disturbance of appetite should be regarded as the very first
of the patient’s neurotic illnesses. If so, the disturbance
of appetite, the wolf phobia, and the obsessional piety would
constitute the complete series of infantile disorders which laid
down the predisposition for his neurotic break-down after he had
passed the age of puberty. It will be objected that few children
escape such disorders as a temporary loss of appetite or an animal
phobia. But this argument is exactly what I should wish for. I am
ready to assert that every neurosis in an adult is built upon a
neurosis which has occurred in his childhood but has not invariably
been severe enough to strike the eye and be recognized as such.
This objection only serves to emphasize the theoretical importance
of the part which infantile neuroses must play in our view of those
later disorders which we treat as neuroses and endeavour to
attribute entirely to the effects of adult life. If our present
patient had not suffered from obsessional piety in addition to his
disturbance of appetite and his animal phobia, his story would not
have been noticeably different from that of other children, and we
should have been the poorer by the loss of precious material which
may guard us against certain plausible errors.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3579

   The analysis would be
unsatisfactory if it failed to explain the phrase used by the
patient for summing up the troubles of which he complained. The
world, he said, was hidden from him by a veil; and our
psycho-analytic training forbids our assuming that these words can
have been without significance or have been chosen at haphazard.
The veil was torn, strange to say, in one situation only; and that
was at the moment when, as a result of an enema, he passed a motion
through his anus. He then felt well again, and for a very short
while he saw the world clearly. The interpretation of this
‘veil’ progressed with as much difficulty as we met
with in clearing up his fear of the butterfly. Nor did he keep to
the veil. It became still more elusive, as a feeling of twilight,
‘
ténèbres
’, and of other
impalpable things,

   It was not until just before
taking leave of the treatment that he remembered having been told
that he was born with a caul. He had for that reason always looked
on himself as a special child of fortune whom no ill could befall.
He did not lose that conviction until he was forced to realize that
his gonorrhoeal infection constituted a serious injury to his body.
The blow to his narcissism was too much for him and he went to
pieces. It may be said that in so doing he was repeating a
mechanism that he had already brought into play once before. For
his wolf phobia had broken out when he found himself faced by the
fact that such a thing as castration was possible; and he clearly
classed his gonorrhoea as castration.

   Thus the caul was the veil which
hid him from the world and hid the world from him. The complaint
that he made was in reality a fulfilled wishful phantasy: it
exhibited him as back once more in the womb, and was, in fact, a
wishful phantasy of flight from the world. It can be translated as
follows: ‘Life makes me so unhappy! I must get back into the
womb!’

   But what can have been the
meaning of the fact that this veil, which was now symbolic but had
once been real, was torn at the moment at which he evacuated his
bowels after an enema, and that under this condition his illness
left him? The context enables us to reply. If this birth-veil was
torn, then he saw the world and was re-born. The stool was the
child, as which he was born a second time, to a happier life. Here,
then, we have the phantasy of re-birth, to which Jung has recently
drawn attention and to which he has assigned such a dominating
position in the imaginative life of neurotics.

   This would be all very well, if
it were the whole story. But certain details of the situation, and
a due regard for the connection between it and this particular
patient’s life-history, compel us to pursue the
interpretation further. The necessary condition of his re-birth was
that he should have an enema administered to him by a man. (It was
not until later on that he was driven by necessity to take this
man’s place himself.) This can, only have meant that he had
identified himself with his mother, that the man was acting as his
father, and that the enema was repeating the act of copulation, as
the fruit of which the excrement-baby (which was once again
himself) would be born. The phantasy of re-birth was therefore
bound up closely with the necessary condition of sexual
satisfaction from a man. So that the translation now runs to this
effect: only on condition that he took the woman’s place and
substituted himself for his mother, and thus let himself be
sexually satisfied by his father and bore him a child - only on
that condition would his illness leave him. Here, therefore, the
phantasy of re-birth was simply a mutilated and censored version of
the homosexual wishful phantasy.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3580

   If we look into the matter more
closely we cannot help remarking that in this condition which he
laid down for his recovery the patient was simply repeating the
state of affairs at the time of the ‘primal scene’. At
that moment he had wanted to substitute himself for his mother;
and, as we assumed long ago, it was he himself who, in the scene in
question, had produced the excrement-baby. He still remained
fixated, as though by a spell, to the scene which had such a
decisive effect on his sexual life, and the return of which during
the night of the dream brought the onset of his illness. The
tearing of the veil was analogous to the opening of his eyes and to
the opening of the window. The primal scene had become transformed
into the necessary condition for his recovery.

   It is easy to make a unified
statement of what was expressed on the one hand by the complaint he
made and on the other hand by the single exceptional condition
under which the complaint no longer held good, and thus to make
clear the whole meaning that underlay the two factors: he wished he
could be back in the womb, not simply in order that he might then
be re-born, but in order that he might be copulated with there by
his father, might obtain sexual satisfaction from him, and might
bear him a child.

   The wish to be born of his father
(as he had at first believed was the case), the wish to be sexually
satisfied by him, the wish to present him with a child - and all of
this at the price of his own masculinity, and expressed in the
language of anal erotism - these wishes complete the circle of his
fixation upon his father. In them homosexuality has found its
furthest and most intimate expression.¹

   This instance, I think, throws
light on the meaning and origin of the womb-phantasy as well as
that of re-birth. The former, the womb-phantasy, is frequently
derived (as it was in the present case) from an attachment to the
father. There is a wish to be inside the mother’s womb in
order to replace her during intercourse - in order to take her
place in regard to the father. The phantasy of re-birth, on the
other hand, is in all probability regularly a softened substitute
(a euphemism, one might say) for the phantasy of incestuous
intercourse with the mother; to make use of Silberer’s
expression, it is an
anagogic
abbreviation of it. There is a
wish to be back in a situation in which one was in the
mother’s genitals; and in this connection the man is
identifying himself with his own penis and is using it to represent
himself. Thus the two phantasies are revealed as each other’s
counterparts: they give expression, according as the
subject’s attitude is feminine or masculine, to his wish for
sexual intercourse with his father or with his mother. We cannot
dismiss the possibility that in the complaint made by our present
patient and in the necessary condition laid down for his recovery
the two phantasies, that is to say the two incestuous wishes, were
united.