Freud - Complete Works (600 page)
¹
(
Footnote added
1923:) I will once
more set out here the chronology of the events mentioned in this
case history.
Born
on Christmas Day.
1
½
years old
: Malaria. Observation of his parents
copulating; or observation of them when they were together, into
which he later introduced a phantasy of them copulating.
Just before
2 ½: Scene with Grusha.
2
½: Screen memory of his parents’ departure with his
sister. This showed him alone with his Nanya and so disowned Grusha
and his sister.
Before
3 ¼: His mother’s laments to the
doctor.
3
¼: Beginning of his seduction by his sister. Soon afterwards
the threat of castration from his Nanya.
3
½: The English governess. Beginning of the change in his
character.
4:
The wolf dream. Origin of the phobia.
4
½: Influence of the Bible story. Appearance of the
obsessional symptoms.
Just before
5: Hallucination of the loss of his
finger.
5:
Departure from the first estate.
After
6: Visit to his sick father.
8
and
10: Final outbreaks of the obsessional
neurosis.
It
will have been easy to guess from my account that the patient was a
Russian. I parted from him, regarding him as cured, a few weeks
before the unexpected outbreak of the Great War; and I did not see
him again until the shifting chances of the war had given the
Central European Powers access to South Russia. He then came to
Vienna and reported that immediately after the end of the treatment
he had been seized with a longing to tear himself free from my
influence. After a few months’ work, a piece of the
transference which had not hitherto been overcome was successfully
dealt with. Since then the patient has felt normal and has behaved
unexceptionably, in spite of the war having robbed him of his home,
his possessions, and all his family relationships. It may be that
his very misery, by gratifying his sense of guilt, contributed to
the consolidation of his recovery.
3597
ON TRANSFORMATIONS OF INSTINCT AS EXEMPLIFIED IN ANAL EROTISM
(1917)
3598
Intentionally left blank
3599
ON TRANSFORMATIONS OF INSTINCT AS EXEMPLIFIED IN ANAL EROTISM
Some years ago, observations made during
psycho-analysis led me to suspect that the constant co-existence in
any one of the three character-traits of
orderliness
,
parsimony
and
obstinacy
indicated an intensification
of the anal-erotic components in his sexual constitution, and that
these modes of reaction, which were favoured by his ego, had been
established during the course of his development through the
assimilation of his anal erotism.¹
In that publication my main
object was to make known the fact of this established relation; I
was little concerned about its theoretical significance. Since then
there has been a general consensus of opinion that each one of the
three qualities, avarice, pedantry and obstinacy, springs from
anal-erotic sources - or, to express it more cautiously and more
completely - draws powerful contributions from those sources. The
cases in which these defects of character were combined and which
in consequence bore a special stamp (the ‘anal
character’) were merely extreme instances, which were bound
to betray the particular connection that interests us here even to
an unobservant eye.
As a result of numerous
impressions, and in particular of one specially cogent analytical
observation, I came to the conclusion a few years later that in the
development of the libido in man the phase of genital primacy must
be preceded by a ‘pregenital organization’ in which
sadism and anal erotism play the leading parts.²
From that moment we had to face
the problem of the later history of the anal-erotic instinctual
impulses. What becomes of them when, owing to the establishment of
a definitive genital organization, they have lost their importance
in sexual life? Do they preserve their original nature, but in a
state of repression? Are they sublimated or assimilated by
transformation into character-traits? Or do they find a place
within the new organization of sexuality characterized by genital
primacy? Or, since none of these vicissitudes of anal erotism is
likely to be the only one, to what extent and in what way does each
of them share in deciding its fate? For the organic sources of anal
erotism cannot of course be buried as a result of the emergence of
the genital organization.
¹
‘Character and Anal Erotism’
(1908
b
).
²
‘The Predisposition to Obsessional
Neurosis’ (1913
i
).
On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism
3600
One would think that there could
be no lack of material from which to provide an answer, since the
processes of development and transformation in question must have
taken place in everyone undergoing analysis. Yet the material is so
obscure, the abundance of ever-recurring impressions so confusing,
that even now I am unable to solve the problem fully and can do no
more than make some contributions to its solution. In making them I
need not refrain from mentioning, where the context allows it,
other instinctual transformations besides anal-erotic ones.
Finally, it scarcely requires to be emphasized that the
developmental events here described - just as the others found in
psycho-analysis - have been inferred from the regressions into
which they had been forced by neurotic processes.
As a starting-point for this
discussion we may take the fact that it appears as if in the
products of the unconscious - spontaneous ideas, phantasies and
symptoms - the concepts
faeces
(money, gift),
baby
and
penis
are ill-distinguished from one another and are
easily interchangeable. We realize, of course, that to express
oneself in this way is incorrectly to apply to the sphere of the
unconscious terms which belong properly to other regions of mental
life, and that we have been led astray by the advantages offered by
an analogy. To put the matter in a form less open to objection,
these elements in the unconscious are often treated as if they were
equivalent and could replace one another freely.
This is most easily seen in the
relation between ‘baby’ and ‘penis’. It
cannot be without significance that in the symbolic language of
dreams, as well as of everyday life, both may be replaced by the
same symbol; both baby and penis are called a ‘little
one’. It is a well-known fact that symbolic speech often
ignores difference of sex. The ‘little one’, which
originally meant the male genital organ, may thus have acquired a
secondary application to the female genitals.
On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism
3601
If we penetrate deeply enough
into the neurosis of a woman, we not infrequently meet with the
repressed wish to possess a penis like a man. We call this wish
‘envy for a penis’ and include it in the castration
complex. Chance mishaps in the life of such a woman, mishaps which
are themselves frequently the result of a very masculine
disposition, have re-activated this infantile wish and, through the
backward flow of libido, made it the chief vehicle of her neurotic
symptoms. In other women we find no evidence of this wish for a
penis; it is replaced by the wish for a baby, the frustration of
which in real life can lead to the outbreak of a neurosis. It looks
as if such women had understood (although this could not possibly
have acted as a motive) that nature has given babies to women as a
substitute for the penis that has been denied them. With other
women, again, we learn that both wishes were present in their
childhood and that one replaced the other. At first they had wanted
a penis like a man; then at a later, though still childish, stage
there appeared instead the wish for a baby. The impression is
forced upon us that this variety in our findings is caused by
accidental factors during childhood (e.g. the presence or absence
of brothers or the birth of a new baby at some favourable time of
life), so that the wish for a penis and the wish for a baby would
be fundamentally identical.
We can say what the ultimate
outcome of the infantile wish for a penis is in women in whom the
determinants of a neurosis in later life are absent: it changes
into the wish for a
man
, and thus puts up with the man as an
appendage to the penis. This transformation, therefore, turns an
impulse which is hostile to the female sexual function into one
which is favourable to it. Such women are in this way made capable
of an erotic life based on the masculine type of object-love, which
can exist alongside the feminine one proper, derived from
narcissism. We already know that in other cases it is only a baby
that makes the transition from narcissistic self-love to
object-love possible. So that in this respect too a baby can be
represented by the penis.
On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism
3602
I have had occasional
opportunities of being told women’s dreams that had occurred
after their first experience of intercourse. They revealed an
unmistakable wish in the woman to keep for herself the penis which
she had felt. Apart from their libidinal origin, then, these dreams
indicated a temporary regression from man to penis as the object of
her wish. One would certainly be inclined to trace back the wish
for a man in a purely rationalistic way to the wish for a baby,
since a woman is bound to understand sooner or later that there can
be no baby without the co-operation of a man. It is, however, more
likely that the wish for a man arises independently of the wish for
a baby, and that when it arises - from understandable motives
belonging entirely to ego-psychology - the original wish for a
penis becomes attached to it as an unconscious libidinal
reinforcement. The importance of the process described lies in the
fact that a part of the young woman’s narcissistic
masculinity is thus changed into femininity, and so can no longer
operate in a way harmful to the female sexual function.
Along another path, a part of the
erotism of the pregenital phase, too, becomes available for use in
the phase of genital primacy. The baby is regarded as
‘lumf’ (cf. the analysis of ‘Little Hans’),
as something which becomes detached from the body by passing
through the bowel. A certain amount of libidinal cathexis which
originally attached to the contents of the bowel can thus be
extended to the baby born through it. Linguistic evidence of this
identity of baby and faeces is contained in the expression
‘to give someone a baby’. For its faeces are the
infant’s first gift, a part of his body which he will give up
only on persuasion by someone he loves, to whom indeed, he will
make a spontaneous gift of it as a token of affection; for, as a
rule, infants do not dirty strangers. (There are similar if less
intense reactions with urine.) Defaecation affords the first
occasion on which the child must decide between a narcissistic and
an object-loving attitude. He either parts obediently with his
faeces, ‘sacrifices’ them to his love, or else retains
them for purposes of auto-erotic satisfaction and later as a means
of asserting his own will. If he makes the latter choice we are in
the presence of defiance (obstinacy) which, accordingly, springs
from a narcissistic clinging to anal erotism.
On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism
3603
It is probable that the first
meaning which a child’s interest in faeces develops is that
of ‘gift’ rather than ‘gold’ or
‘money’. The child knows no money apart from what is
given him - no money acquired and none inherited of his own. Since
his faeces are his first gift, the child easily transfers his
interest from that substance to the new one which he comes across
as the most valuable gift in life. Those who question this
derivation of gifts should consider their experience of
psycho-analytic treatment, study the gifts they receive as doctors
from their patients, and watch the storms of transference which a
gift from them can rouse in their patients.
Thus the interest in faeces is
continued partly as interest in money, partly as a wish for a baby,
in which latter an anal-erotic and a genital impulse (‘envy
for a penis’) converge. But the penis has another anal-erotic
significance apart from its relation to the interest in a baby. The
relationship between the penis and the passage lined with mucous
membrane which it fills and excites already has its prototype in
the pregenital, anal-sadistic phase. The faecal mass, or as one
patient called it, the faecal ‘stick’, represents as it
were the first penis, and the stimulated mucous membrane of the
rectum represents that of the vagina. There are people whose anal
erotism remains vigorous and unmodified up to the age preceding
puberty (ten to twelve years); we learn from them that during the
pregenital phase they had already developed in phantasy and in
perverse play an organization analogous to the genital one, in
which penis and vagina were represented by the faecal stick and the
rectum. In other people - obsessional neurotics - we can observe
the result of a regressive debasement of the genital organization.
This is expressed in the fact that every phantasy originally
conceived on the genital level is transposed to the anal level -
the penis being replaced by the faecal mass and the vagina by the
rectum.
As the interest in faeces recedes
in a normal way, the organic analogy we have described here has the
effect of transferring the interest on to the penis. When, later,
in the course of the child’s researches he discovers that
babies are born from the bowel, they inherit the greater part of
his anal erotism; they have, however, been preceded by the penis in
this as well as in another sense.
On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism
3604
I feel sure that by this time the
manifold interrelations of the series - faeces, penis, baby - have
become totally unintelligible; so I will try to remedy the defect
by presenting them diagramatically, and in considering the diagram
we can review the same material in a different order.
Unfortunately, this technical device is not sufficiently pliable
for our purpose, or possibly we have not yet learned to use it with
effect. In any case I hope the reader will not expect too much from
it.
