Freud - Complete Works (597 page)

  
¹
A possible subsidiary explanation, namely
that the veil represented the hymen which is torn at the moment of
intercourse with a man, does not harmonize completely with the
necessary condition for his recovery. Moreover it has no bearing on
the life of the patient, for whom virginity carried no
significance.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3581

   I will make a final attempt at
re-interpreting the last findings of this analysis in accordance
with the scheme of my opponents. The patient lamented his flight
from the world in a typical womb-phantasy and viewed his recovery
as a typically conceived re-birth. In accordance with the
predominant side of his disposition, he expressed the latter in
anal symptoms. He next concocted, on the model of his anal phantasy
of re-birth, a childhood scene which repeated his wishes in an
archaic symbolic medium of expression. His symptoms were then
strung together as though they had been derived from a primal scene
of that kind. He was driven to embark on this long backward course
either because he had come up against some task in life which he
was too lazy to perform, or because he had every reason to be aware
of his own inferiority and thought he could best protect himself
from being slighted by elaborating such contrivances as these.

   All this would be very nice, if
only the unlucky wretch had not had a dream when he was no more
than four years old, which signalized the beginning of his
neurosis, which was instigated by his grandfather’s story of
the tailor and the wolf, and the interpretation of which
necessitates the assumption of this primal scene. All the
alleviations which the theories of Jung and Adler seek to afford us
come to grief, alas, upon such paltry but unimpeachable facts as
these. As things stand, it seems to me more probable that the
phantasy of re-birth was a derivative of the primal scene than
that, conversely, the primal scene was a reflection of the phantasy
of re-birth. And we may perhaps suppose, too, that the patient, at
a time only four years after his birth, may after all have been too
young to be already wishing to be born again. But no, I must take
this last argument back; for my own observations show that we have
rated the powers of children too low and that there is no knowing
what they cannot be given credit for.¹

  
¹
I admit that this is the most delicate
question in the whole domain of psycho-analysis. I did not require
the contributions of Adler or Jung to induce me to consider the
matter with a critical eye, and to bear in mind the possibility
that what analysis puts forward as being forgotten experiences of
childhood (and of an improbably early childhood) may on the
contrary be based upon phantasies created on occasions occurring
late in life. According to this view, wherever we seemed in
analyses to see traces of the after-effects of an infantile
impression of the kind in question, we should rather have to assume
that we were faced by the manifestation of some constitutional
factor or of some disposition that had been phylogenetically
maintained. On the contrary, no doubt has troubled me more; no
other uncertainty has been more decisive in holding me back from
publishing my conclusions. I was the first - a point to which none
of my opponents have referred - to recognize both the part played
by phantasies in symptom-formation and also the
‘retrospective phantasying’ of late impressions into
childhood and their sexualization after the event. (See my
Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
), First Edition,
p. 559
, and
‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’,
(1909
d
).) If, in spite of this, I have held to the more
difficult and more improbable view, it has been as a result of
arguments such as are forced upon the investigator by the case
described in these pages or by any other infantile neurosis -
arguments which I once again lay before my readers for their
decision.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3582

IX

RECAPITULATIONS AND PROBLEMS

I do not know if the reader of this report of
an analysis will have succeeded in forming a clear picture of the
origin and development of the patient’s illness. I fear that,
on the contrary, this will not have been the case. But though on
other occasions I have said very little on behalf of my powers in
the art of exposition, I should like in the present instance to
plead mitigating circumstances. The description of such early
phases and of such deep strata of mental life has been a task which
has never before been attacked; and it is better to perform that
task badly than to take flight before it - a proceeding which would
moreover (or so we are told) involve the coward in risks of a
certain kind. I prefer, therefore, to put a bold face on it and
show that I have not allowed myself to be held back by a sense of
my own inferiority.

   The case itself was not a
particularly favourable one. The advantage of having a wealth of
information about the patient’s childhood (an advantage which
was made possible by the fact that the child could be studied
through the medium of the adult) had to be purchased at the expense
of the analysis being most terribly disjointed and of the
exposition showing corresponding gaps. Personal peculiarities in
the patient and a national character that was foreign to ours made
the task of feeling one’s way into his mind a laborious one.
The contrast between the patient’s agreeable and affable
personality, his acute intelligence and his nice-mindedness on the
one hand, and his completely unbridled instinctual life on the
other, necessitated an excessively long process of preparatory
education, and this made a general perspective more difficult. But
the patient himself has no responsibility for that feature of the
case which put the severest obstacles in the way of any description
of it. In the psychology of adults we have fortunately reached the
point of being able to divide mental processes into conscious and
unconscious and of being able to give a clearly-worded description
of both. With children this distinction leaves us almost completely
in the lurch. It is often embarrassing to decide what one would
choose to call conscious and what unconscious. Processes which have
become the dominant ones, and which from their subsequent behaviour
must be equated with conscious ones, have nevertheless not been
conscious in the child. It is easy to understand why. In children
the conscious has not yet acquired all its characteristics; it is
still in process of development, and it does not as yet fully
possess the capacity for transposing itself into verbal images. We
are constantly guilty of making a confusion between the phenomenon
of emergence as a perception in consciousness and the fact of
belonging to a hypothetical psychical system to which we ought to
assign some conventional name, but which we in fact also call
‘consciousness’ (the system
Cs.
). This confusion
does no harm when we are giving a psychological description of an
adult, but it is misleading when we are dealing with that of a
young child. Nor should we be much assisted here if we introduced
the ‘preconscious’; for a child’s preconscious
may, in just the same way, fail to coincide with an adult’s.
We must be content, therefore, with having clearly recognized the
obscurity.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3583

   It is obvious that a case such as
that which is described in these pages might be made an excuse for
dragging into the discussion every one of the findings and problems
of psycho-analysis. But this would be an endless and unjustifiable
labour. It must be recognized that everything cannot be learnt from
a single case and that everything cannot be decided by it; we must
content ourselves with exploiting whatever it may happen to show
most clearly. There are in any case narrow limits to what a
psycho-analysis is called upon to explain. For, while it is its
business to explain the striking symptoms by revealing their
genesis, it is not its business to explain but merely to describe
the psychical mechanisms and instinctual processes to which one is
led by that means. In order to derive fresh generalizations from
what has thus been established with regard to the mechanisms and
instincts, it would be essential to have at one’s disposal
numerous cases as thoroughly and deeply analysed as the present
one. But they are not easily to be had, and each one of them
requires years of labour. So that advances in these spheres of
knowledge must necessarily be slow. There is no doubt a great
temptation to content oneself with ‘scratching’ the
mental surface of a number of people and of replacing what is left
undone by speculation - the latter being put under the patronage of
some school or other of philosophy. Practical requirements may also
be adduced in favour of this procedure; but no substitute can
satisfy the requirements of science.

   I shall now attempt to sketch out
a synthetic survey of my patient’s sexual development,
beginning from its earliest indications. The first that we hear of
it is in the disturbance of his appetite; for, taking other
observations into account, I am inclined, though with due
reservations, to regard that as a result of some process in the
sphere of sexuality. I have been driven to regard as the earliest
recognizable sexual organization the so-called
‘cannibalistic’ or ‘oral’ phase, during
which the original attachment of sexual excitation to the
nutritional instinct still dominates the scene. It is not to be
expected that we should come upon direct manifestations of this
phase, but only upon indications of it where disturbances have been
set up. Impairment of the nutritional instinct (though this can of
course have other causes) draws our attention to a failure on the
part of the organism to master its sexual excitation. In this phase
the sexual aim could only be cannibalism - devouring; it makes its
appearance with our present patient through regression from a
higher stage, in the form of fear of ‘being eaten by the
wolf’. We were, indeed, obliged to translate this into a fear
of being copulated with by his father. It is well known that there
is a neurosis in girls which occurs at a much later age, at the
time of puberty or soon afterwards, and which expresses aversion to
sexuality by means of anorexia. This neurosis will have to be
brought into relation with the oral phase of sexual life. The
erotic aim of the oral organization further makes its appearance at
the height of a lover’s paroxysm (in such phrases as ‘I
could eat you up with love’) and in affectionate relations
with children, when the grown-up person is pretending to be a child
himself. I have elsewhere given voice to a suspicion that the
father of our present patient used himself to indulge in
‘affectionate abuse’, and may have played at wolf or
dog with the little boy and have threatened as a joke to gobble him
up (
p. 3524
). The patient confirmed
this suspicion by his curious behaviour in the transference.
Whenever he shrank back on to the transference from the
difficulties of the treatment, he used to threaten me with eating
me up and later with all kinds of other ill-treatment - all of
which was merely an expression of affection.

   Permanent marks have been left by
this oral phase of sexuality upon the usages of language. People
commonly speak for instance, of an ‘appetizing’
love-object, and describe persons they are fond of as
‘sweet’. It will be remembered, too, that our little
patient would only eat sweet things. In dreams sweet things and
sweetmeats stand regularly for caresses or sexual
gratifications.

   It appears, moreover, that there
is an anxiety belonging to this phase (only, of course, where some
disturbance has arisen) which manifests itself as a fear of death
and may be attached to anything that is pointed out to the child as
being suitable for the purpose. With our patient it was employed to
induce him to overcome his loss of appetite and indeed to
overcompensate for it. A possible origin of this disturbance of his
appetite will be found, if we bear in mind (basing ourselves on the
hypothesis that we have so often discussed) that his observation of
copulation at the age of one and a half, which produced so many
deferred effects, certainly occurred before the time of these
difficulties in his eating. So we may perhaps suppose that it
accelerated the processes of sexual maturing and consequently did
in fact also produce
immediate
effects, though these were
insignificant in appearance.

   I am of course aware that it is
possible to explain the symptoms of this period (the wolf anxiety
and the disturbance of appetite) in another and simpler manner,
without any reference to sexuality or to a pregenital stage of its
organization. Those who like to neglect the indications of neurosis
and the interconnections between events will prefer this other
explanation, and I shall not be able to prevent their doing so. It
is hard to discover any cogent evidence in regard to these
beginnings of sexual life except by such roundabout paths as I have
indicated.

   In the scene with Grusha (at the
age of two and a half) we see the little boy at the beginning of a
development which, except perhaps for its prematureness, deserves
to be considered normal; thus we find in it identification with his
father, and urethral erotism representing masculinity. It was also
completely under the sway of the primal scene. We have hitherto
regarded his identification with his father as being narcissistic;
but if we take the content of the primal scene into account we
cannot deny that it had already reached the stage of genital
organization. His male genital organ had begun to play its part and
it continued to do so under the influence of his seduction by his
sister.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3584

   But his seduction gives the
impression not merely of having encouraged his sexual development
but of having, to an even greater extent, disturbed and diverted
it. It offered him a passive sexual aim, which was ultimately
incompatible with the action of his male genital organ. At the
first external obstacle, the threat of castration from his Nanya,
his genital organization, half-hearted as it still was, broke down
(at the age of three and a half) and regressed to the stage which
had preceded it, namely to that of the sadistic-anal organization,
which he might otherwise have passed through, perhaps, with as
slight indications as other children.

   The sadistic-anal organization
can easily be regarded as a continuation and development of the
oral one. The violent muscular activity, directed upon the object,
by which it is characterized, is to be explained as an action
preparatory to eating. The eating then ceases to be a sexual aim,
and the preparatory action becomes a sufficient aim in itself. The
essential novelty, as compared with the previous stage, is that the
receptive passive function becomes disengaged from the oral zone
and attached to the anal zone. In this connection we can hardly
fail to think of biological parallels or of the theory that the
pregenital organizations in man should be regarded as vestiges of
conditions which have been permanently retained in several classes
of animals. The building up of the instinct for research out of its
various components is another characteristic feature of this stage
of development.

   The boy’s anal erotism was
not particularly noticeable. Under the influence of his sadism the
affectionate significance of faeces gave place to an aggressive
one. A part was played in the transformation of his sadism into
masochism by a sense of guilt, the presence of which points to
developmental processes in spheres other than the sexual one.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3585

   His seduction continued to make
its influence felt, by maintaining the passivity of his sexual aim.
It transformed his sadism to a great extent into the masochism
which was its passive counterpart. But it is questionable whether
the seduction can be made entirely responsible for this
characteristic of passivity, for the child’s reaction to his
observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half was already
preponderantly a passive one. His sympathetic sexual excitement
expressed itself by his passing a stool, though it is true that in
this behaviour an active element is also to be distinguished. Side
by side with the masochism which dominated his sexual impulsions
and also found expression in phantasies, his sadism, too, persisted
and was directed against small animals. His sexual researches had
set in from the time of the seduction and had been concerned, in
essence, with two problems: the origin of children and the
possibility of losing the genitals. These researches wove
themselves into the manifestations of his instinctual impulses, and
directed his sadistic propensities on to small animals as being
representatives of small children.

   We have now carried our account
down to about the time of the boy’s fourth birthday, and it
was at that point that the dream brought into deferred operation
his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half. It is
not possible for us completely to grasp or adequately to describe
what now ensued. The activation of the picture, which, thanks to
the advance in his intellectual development, he was now able to
understand, operated not only like a fresh event, but like a new
trauma, like an interference from outside analogous to the
seduction. The genital organization which had been broken off was
re-established at a single blow; but the advance that was achieved
in the dream could not be maintained. On the contrary, there came
about, by means of a process that can only be equated with a
repression, a repudiation of the new element and its replacement by
a phobia.