Freud - Complete Works (599 page)

   The opposition which he at first
offered to religion had three different points of origin. To begin
with, there was, in general, his characteristic (which we have seen
exemplified already) of fending off all novelties. Any position of
the libido which he had once taken up was obstinately defended by
him from fear of what he would lose by giving it up and from
distrust of the probability of a complete substitute being afforded
by the new position that was in view. This is an important and
fundamental psychological peculiarity, which I described in my
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905
d
) as a
susceptibility to ‘fixation’. Under the name of
psychical ‘inertia’ Jung has attempted to erect it into
the principal cause of all the failures of neurotics. I think he is
wrong in this; for this factor has a far more general application
and plays an important part in the lives of the non-neurotic as
well. Great mobility or sluggishness of libidinal cathexes (as well
as of other kinds of energic cathexes) are special characteristics
which attach to many normal people and by no means to all
neurotics, and which have hitherto not been brought into relation
with other qualities. They are, as it were, like prime numbers, not
further divisible. We only know one thing about them, and that is
that mobility of the mental cathexes is a quality which shows
striking diminution with the advance of age. This has given us one
of the indications of the limits within which psycho-analytic
treatment is effective. There are some people, however, who retain
this mental plasticity far beyond the usual age-limit, and others
who lose it very prematurely. If the latter are neurotics, we make
the unwelcome discovery that it is impossible to undo developments
in them which, in apparently similar circumstances, have been
easily dealt with in other people. So that in considering the
conversion of psychical energy no less than of physical, we must
make use of the concept of an
entropy
, which opposes the
undoing of what has already occurred.

   A second point of attack was
afforded by the circumstance that religious doctrine is itself
based upon a by no means unambiguous relation to God the Father,
and in fact bears the stamp of the ambivalent attitude which
presided over its origin. The patient’s own ambivalence,
which he possessed in a high degree of development, helped him to
detect the same feature in religion, and he brought to bear on that
feature those acute powers of criticism whose presence could not
fail to astonish us in a child of four and a half.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3592

   But there was a third factor at
work, which was certainly the most important of all, and to the
operation of which we must ascribe the pathological products of his
struggle against religion. The truth was that the mental current
which impelled him to turn to men as sexual objects and which
should have been sublimated by religion was no longer free; a
portion of it was cut off by repression and so withdrawn from the
possibility of sublimation and tied to its original sexual aim. In
virtue of this state of things, the repressed portion kept making
efforts to forge its way through to the sublimated portion or to
drag down the latter to itself. The first ruminations which he wove
round the figure of Christ already involved the question whether
that sublime son could also fulfil the sexual relationship to his
father which the patient had retained in his unconscious. The only
result of his repudiation of these efforts was the production of
apparently blasphemous obsessive thoughts, in which his physical
affection for God asserted itself in the form of a debasement. A
violent defensive struggle against these compromises then
inevitably led to an obsessive exaggeration of all the activities
which are prescribed for giving expression to piety and a pure love
of God. Religion won in the end, but its instinctual foundations
proved themselves to be incomparably stronger than the durability
of the products of their sublimation. As soon as the course of
events presented him with a new father-surrogate, who threw his
weight into the scale against religion, it was dropped and replaced
by something else. Let us further bear in mind, as an interesting
complication, that his piety originated under the influence of
women (his mother and his nurse), while it was a masculine
influence that set him free from it.

   The origin of this obsessional
neurosis on the basis of the sadistic-anal organization confirms on
the whole what I have said elsewhere on the predisposition to
obsessional neurosis (1913
i
). The previous existence,
however, of a severe hysteria in the present case makes it more
obscure in this respect.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3593

   I will conclude my survey of the
patient’s sexual development by giving some brief glimpses of
its later vicissitudes. During the years of puberty a markedly
sensual, masculine current, with a sexual aim suitable to the
genital organization, made its appearance in him; it must be
regarded as normal, and its history occupied the period up to the
time of his later illness. It was connected directly with the
Grusha scene, from which it borrowed its characteristic feature - a
compulsive falling in love that came on and passed off by sudden
fits. This current had to struggle against the inhibitions that
were derived from his infantile neurosis. There had been a violent
revulsion in the direction of women, and he had thus won his way to
complete masculinity. From that time forward he retained women as
his sexual object; but he did not enjoy this possession, for a
powerful, and now entirely unconscious, inclination towards men, in
which were united all the forces of the earlier phases of his
development, was constantly drawing him away from his female
objects and compelling him in the intervals to exaggerate his
dependence upon women. He kept complaining during the treatment
that he could not bear having to do with women, and all our labours
were directed towards disclosing to him his unconscious relation to
men. The whole situation might be summarized in the shape of a
formula. His childhood had been marked by a wavering between
activity and passivity, his puberty by a struggle for masculinity,
and the period after he had fallen ill by a fight for the object of
his masculine desires. The precipitating cause of his neurosis was
not one of the types of onset which I have been able to put
together as special cases of ‘frustration,’¹ and
it thus draws attention to a gap in that classification. He broke
down after an organic affection of the genitals had revived his
fear of castration, shattered his narcissism, and compelled him to
abandon his hope of being personally favoured by destiny. He fell
ill, therefore, as the result of a
narcissistic
‘frustration’. This excessive strength of his
narcissism was in complete harmony with the other indications of an
inhibited sexual development: with the fact that so few of his
psychical trends were concentrated in his heterosexual object
choice, in spite of all its energy, and that his homosexual
attitude, standing so much nearer to narcissism, persisted in him
as an unconscious force with such very great tenacity. Naturally,
where disturbances like these are present, psycho-analytic
treatment cannot bring about any instantaneous revolution or put
matters upon a level with a normal development: it can only get rid
of the obstacles and clear the path, so that the influences of life
may be able to further development along better lines.

  
¹
‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’
(1912
c
).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3594

   I shall now bring together some
peculiarities of the patient’s mentality which were revealed
by the psycho-analytic treatment but were not further elucidated
and were accordingly not susceptible to direct influence. Such were
his tenacity of fixation, which has already been discussed, his
extraordinary propensity to ambivalence, and (as a third trait in a
constitution which deserves the name of archaic) his power of
maintaining simultaneously the most various and contradictory
libidinal cathexes, all of them capable of functioning side by
side. His constant wavering between these (a characteristic which
for a long time seemed to block the way to recovery and progress in
the treatment) dominated the clinical picture during his adult
illness, which I have scarcely been able to touch upon in these
pages. This was undoubtedly a trait belonging to the general
character of the unconscious, which in his case had persisted into
processes that had become conscious. But it showed itself only in
the products of affective impulses; in the region of pure logic he
betrayed, on the contrary, a peculiar skill in unearthing
contradictions and inconsistencies. So it was that his mental life
impressed one in much the same way as the religion of Ancient
Egypt, which is so unintelligible to us because it preserves the
earlier stages of its development side by side with the
end-products, retains the most ancient gods and their attributes
along with the most modern ones, and thus, as it were, spreads out
upon a two-dimensional surface what other instances of evolution
show us in the solid.

   I have now come to the end of
what I had to say about this case. There remain two problems, of
the many that it raises, which seem to me to deserve special
emphasis. The first relates to the phylogenetically inherited
schemata, which, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned
with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived
from actual experience. I am inclined to take the view that they
are precipitates from the history of human civilization. The
Oedipus complex, which comprises a child’s relation to his
parents, is one of them - is, in fact, the best known member of the
class. Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary
schema, they become remodelled in the imagination - a process which
might very profitably be followed out in detail. It is precisely
such cases that are calculated to convince us of the independent
existence of the schema. We are often able to see the schema
triumphing over the experience of the individual; as when in our
present case the boy’s father became the castrator and the
menace of his infantile sexuality in spite of what was in other
respects an inverted Oedipus complex. A similar process is at work
where a nurse comes to play the mother’s part or where the
two become fused together. The contradictions between experience
and the schema seem to supply the conflicts of childhood with an
abundance of material.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3595

   The second problem is not far
removed from the first, but it is incomparably more important. If
one considers the behaviour of the four-year-old child towards the
re-activated primal scene,¹ or even if one thinks of the far
simpler reactions of the one-and-a-half-year-old child when the
scene was actually experienced, it is hard to dismiss the view that
some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were,
preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the
time.² We can form no conception of what this may have
consisted in; we have nothing at our disposal but the single
analogy - and it is an excellent one - of the far-reaching
instinctive
knowledge of animals.

   If human beings too possessed an
instinctive endowment such as this, it would not be surprising that
it should be very particularly concerned with the processes of
sexual life, even though it could not be by any means confined to
them. This instinctive factor would then be the nucleus of the
unconscious, a primitive kind of mental activity, which would later
be dethroned and overlaid by human reason, when that faculty came
to be acquired, but which in some people, perhaps in every one,
would retain the power of drawing down to it the higher mental
processes. Repression would be the return to this instinctive
stage, and man would thus be paying for his great new acquisition
with his liability to neurosis, and would be bearing witness by the
possibility of the neuroses to the existence of those earlier,
instinct-like, preliminary stages. The significance of the traumas
of early childhood would lie in their contributing material to this
unconscious which would save it from being worn away by the
subsequent course of development.

  
¹
I may disregard the fact that it was not
possible to put this behaviour into words until twenty years
afterwards; for all the effects that we traced back to the scene
had already been manifested in the form of symptoms, obsessions,
etc., in the patient’s childhood and long before the
analysis. It is also a matter of indifference in this connection
whether we choose to regard it as a primal
scene
or as a
primal
phantasy
.

  
²
I must once more emphasize the fact that
these reflections would be vain if the dream and the neurosis had
not themselves occurred in infancy.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3596

   I am aware that expression has
been given in many quarters to thoughts like these, which emphasize
the hereditary, phylogenetically acquired factor in mental life. In
fact, I am of opinion that people have been far too ready to find
room for them and ascribe importance to them in psycho-analysis. I
consider that they are only admissible when psycho-analysis
strictly observes the correct order of precedence, and, after
forcing its way through the strata of what has been acquired by the
individual, comes at last upon traces of what has been
inherited.¹