Freud - Complete Works (601 page)
Fig. 2.
Anal erotism finds a narcissistic
application in the production of defiance, which constitutes an
important reaction on the part of the ego against demands made by
other people. Interest in faeces is carried over first to interest
in gifts, and then to interest in money. In girls, the discovery of
the penis gives rise to envy for it, which later changes into the
wish for a man as the possessor of a penis. Even before this the
wish for a penis has changed into the wish for a baby, or the
latter wish has taken the place of the former one. An organic
analogy between penis and baby (dotted line) is expressed by the
existence of a symbol (‘little one’) common to both. A
rational wish (double line) then leads from the wish for a baby to
the wish for a man: we have already appreciated the importance of
this instinctual transformation.
On Transformations Of Instinct As Exemplified In Anal Erotism
3605
Another part of the nexus of
relations can be observed much more clearly in the male. It arises
when the boy’s sexual researches lead him to the discovery of
the absence of a penis in women. He concludes that the penis must
be a detachable part of the body, something analogous to faeces,
the first piece of bodily substance the child had to part with.
Thus the old anal defiance enters into the composition of the
castration complex. The organic analogy which enabled the
intestinal contents to be the forerunner of the penis during the
pregenital phase cannot come into account as a motive; but the
boy’s sexual researches lead him to a psychical substitute
for it. When a baby appears on the scene he regards it as
‘lumf’, in accordance with those researches, and he
cathects it with powerful anal-erotic interest. When social
experiences teach that a baby is to be regarded as a love-token, a
gift, the wish for a baby receives a second contribution from the
same source. Faeces, penis and baby are all three solid bodies;
they all three, by forcible entry or expulsion, stimulate a
membranous passage, i.e. the rectum and the vagina, the latter
being as it were ‘taken on lease’ from the rectum, as
Lou Andreas-Salomé aptly remarks.¹ Infantile sexual
researches can only lead to the conclusion that the baby follows
the same route as the faecal mass. The function of the penis is not
usually discovered by those researches. But it is interesting to
note that after so many detours an organic correspondence reappears
in the psychical sphere as an unconscious identity.
¹
In her paper ‘"Anal" und
"Sexual"‘ (1916).
3606
A DIFFICULTY IN THE PATH OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
(1917)
3607
Intentionally left blank
3608
A DIFFICULTY IN THE PATH OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
I will say at once that it is not an
intellectual difficulty I am thinking of, not anything that makes
psycho-analysis hard for the hearer or reader to understand, but an
affective one - something that alienates the feelings of those who
come into contact with it, so that they become less inclined to
believe in it or take an interest in it. As will be observed, the
two kinds of difficulty amount to the same thing in the end. Where
sympathy is lacking, understanding will not come very easily.
My present readers, I take it,
have not so far had anything to do with the subject and I shall be
obliged, therefore, to go back some distance. Out of a great number
of individual observations and impressions something in the nature
of a theory has at last shaped itself in psycho-analysis, and this
is known by the name of the ‘libido theory’. As is well
known, psycho-analysis is concerned with the elucidation and
removal of what are called nervous disorders. A starting-point had
to be found from which to approach this problem, and it was decided
to look for it in the instinctual life of the mind. Hypotheses
about the instincts in man came to form the basis, therefore, of
our conception of nervous disease.
Psychology as it is taught
academically gives us but very inadequate replies to questions
concerning our mental life, but in no direction is its information
so meagre as in this matter of the instincts.
It is open to us to make our
first soundings as we please. The popular view distinguishes
between hunger and love, as being the representatives of the
instincts which aim respectively at the preservation of the
individual and at the reproduction of the species. We accept this
very evident distinction, so that in psycho-analysis too we make a
distinction between the self-preservative or ego-instincts on the
one hand and the sexual instincts on the other. The force by which
the sexual instinct is represented in the mind we call
‘libido’ - sexual desire - and we regard it as
something analogous to hunger, the will to power, and so on, where
the ego-instincts are concerned.
A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis
3609
With this as a starting-point we
go on to make our first important discovery. We learn that, when we
try to understand neurotic disorders, by far the greater
significance attaches to the sexual instincts; that in fact
neuroses are the specific disorders, so to speak, of the sexual
function; that in general whether or not a person develops a
neurosis depends on the quantity of his libido, and on the
possibility of satisfying it and of discharging it through
satisfaction; that the form taken by the disease is determined by
the way in which the individual passes through the course of
development of his sexual function, or, as we put it, by the
fixations his libido has undergone in the course of its
development; and, further, that by a special, not very simple
technique for influencing the mind we are able to throw light on
the nature of some groups of neuroses and at the same time to do
away with them. Our therapeutic efforts have their greatest success
with a certain class of neuroses which proceed from a conflict
between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts. For in human
beings it may happen that the demands of the sexual instincts,
whose reach of course extends far beyond the individual, seem to
the ego to constitute a danger which threatens its
self-preservation or its self-esteem. The ego then assumes the
defensive, denies the sexual instincts the satisfaction they desire
and forces them into those by-paths of substitutive satisfaction
which become manifest as nervous symptoms.
The psycho-analytic method of
treatment is then able to subject this process of repression to
revision and to bring about a better solution of the conflict - one
that is compatible with health. Unintelligent opposition accuses us
of one-sidedness in our estimate of the sexual instincts.
‘Human beings have other interests besides sexual
ones,’ they say. We have not forgotten or denied this for a
moment. Our one-sidedness is like that of the chemist, who traces
all compounds back to the force of chemical attraction. He is not
on that account denying the force of gravity; he leaves that to the
physicist to deal with.
During the work of treatment we
have to consider the distribution of the patient’s libido; we
look for the object presentations to which it is bound and free it
from them, so as to place it at the disposal of the ego. In the
course of this, we have come to form a very curious picture of the
original, primal distribution of libido in human beings. We have
been driven to assume that at the beginning of the development of
the individual all his libido (all his erotic tendencies, all his
capacity for love) is tied to himself - that as we say, it cathects
his own ego. It is only later that, being attached to the
satisfaction of the major vital needs, the libido flows over from
the ego on to external objects. Not till then are we able to
recognize the libidinal instincts as such and distinguish them from
the ego instincts. It is possible for the libido to become detached
from these objects and withdrawn again into the ego.
A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis
3610
The condition in which the ego
retains the libido is called by us ‘narcissism’, in
reference to the Greek legend of the youth Narcissus who was in
love with his own reflection.
Thus in our view the individual
advances from narcissism to object-love. But we do not believe that
the
whole
of the libido ever passes over from the ego to
objects. A certain quantity of libido is always retained in the
ego; even when object-love is highly developed, a certain amount of
narcissism persists. The ego is a great reservoir from which the
libido that is destined for objects flows out and into which it
flows back from those objects. Object-libido was at first
ego-libido and can be transformed back into ego-libido. For
complete health it is essential that the libido should not lose
this full mobility. As an illustration of this state of things we
may think of an amoeba, whose viscous substance puts out
pseudopodia, elongations into which the substance of the body
extends but which can be retracted at any time so that the form of
the protoplasmic mass is restored.
What I have been trying to
describe in this outline is the
libido theory
of the
neuroses, upon which are founded all our conceptions of the nature
of these morbid states, together with our therapeutic measures for
relieving them. We naturally regard the premises of the libido
theory as valid for normal behaviour as well. We speak of the
narcissism of small children, and it is to the excessive narcissism
of primitive man that we ascribe his belief in the omnipotence of
his thoughts and his consequent attempts to influence the course of
events in the external world by the technique of magic.
After this introduction I propose
to describe how the universal narcissism of men, their self-love,
has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the
researches of science.
A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis
3611
(
a
) In the early stages of
his researches, man believed at first that his dwelling-place, the
earth, was the stationary centre of the universe, with the sun,
moon and planets circling round it. In this he was naïvely
following the dictates of his sense perceptions, for he felt no
movement of the earth, and wherever he had an unimpeded view he
found himself in the centre of a circle that enclosed the external
world. The central position of the earth, moreover, was a token to
him of the dominating part played by it in the universe and
appeared to fit in very well with his inclination to regard himself
as lord of the world.
The destruction of this
narcissistic illusion is associated in our minds with the name and
work of Copernicus in the sixteenth century. But long before his
day the Pythagoreans had already cast doubts on the privileged
position of the earth, and in the third century B. C. Aristarchus
of Samos had declared that the earth was much smaller than the sun
and moved round that celestial body. Even the great discovery of
Copernicus, therefore, had already been made before him. When this
discovery achieved general recognition, the self-love of mankind
suffered its first blow, the
cosmological
one.
(
b
) In the course of the
development of civilization man acquired a dominating position over
his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this
supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and
theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself
he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent
which permitted him to break the bond of community between him and
the animal kingdom. Curiously enough, this piece of arrogance is
still foreign to children, just as it is to primitive and primaeval
man. It is the result of a later, more pretentious stage of
development. At the level of totemism primitive man had no
repugnance to tracing his descent from an animal ancestor. In
myths, which contain the precipitate of this ancient attitude of
mind, the gods take animal shapes, and in the art of earliest times
they are portrayed with animals’ heads. A child can see no
difference between his own nature and that of animals. He is not
astonished at animals thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will
transfer an emotion of fear which he feels for his human father
onto a dog or a horse, without intending any derogation of his
father by it. Not until he is grown up does he become so far
estranged from animals as to use their names in vilification of
human beings.
We all know that little more than
half a century ago the researches of Charles Darwin and his
collaborators and forerunners put an end to this presumption on the
part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior
to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more closely
related to some species and more distantly to others. The
acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded in
effacing the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his
mental dispositions, of his parity with them. This was the second,
the
biological
blow to human narcissism.
A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis
3612
(
c
) The third blow, which
is psychological in nature, is probably the most wounding.
Although thus humbled in his
external relations, man feels himself to be supreme within his own
mind. Somewhere in the core of his ego he has developed an organ of
observation to keep a watch on his impulses and actions and see
whether they harmonize with its demands. If they do not, they are
ruthlessly inhibited and withdrawn. His internal perception,
consciousness, gives the ego news of all the important occurrences
in the mind’s working, and the will, directed by these
reports, carries out what the ego orders and modifies anything that
seeks to accomplish itself spontaneously. For this mind is not a
simple thing; on the contrary, it is a hierarchy of superordinated
and subordinated agencies, a labyrinth of impulses striving
independently of one another towards action, corresponding with the
multiplicity of instincts and of relations with the external world,
many of which are antagonistic to one another and incompatible. For
proper functioning it is necessary that the highest of these
agencies should have knowledge of all that is going forward and
that its will should penetrate everywhere, so as to exert its
influence. And in fact the ego feels secure both as to the
completeness and trustworthiness of the reports it receives and as
to the openness of the channels through which it enforces its
commands.
In certain diseases - including
the very neuroses of which we have made special study - things are
different. The ego feels uneasy; it comes up against limits to its
power in its own house, the mind. Thoughts emerge suddenly without
one’s knowing where they come from, nor can one do anything
to drive them away. These alien guests even seem to be more
powerful than those which are at the ego’s command. They
resist all the well-proved measures of enforcement used by the
will, remain unmoved by logical refutation, and are unaffected by
the contradictory assertions of reality. Or else impulses appear
which seem like those of a stranger, so that the ego disowns them;
yet it has to fear them and take precautions against them. The ego
says to itself: ‘This is an illness, a foreign
invasion.’ It increases its vigilance, but cannot understand
why it feels so strangely paralysed.
A Difficulty In The Path Of Psycho-Analysis
3613
Psychiatry, it is true, denies
that such things mean the intrusion into the mind of evil spirits
from without; beyond this, however, it can only say with a shrug:
‘Degeneracy, hereditary disposition, constitutional
inferiority!’ Psycho-analysis sets out to explain these
uncanny disorders; it engages in careful and laborious
investigations, devises hypotheses and scientific constructions,
until at length it can speak thus to the ego:-
‘Nothing has entered into
you from without; a part of the activity of your own mind has been
withdrawn from your knowledge and from the command of your will.
That, too, is why you are so weak in your defence; you are using
one part of your force to fight the other part and you cannot
concentrate the whole of your force as you would against an
external enemy. And it is not even the worst or least important
part of your mental forces that has thus become antagonistic to you
and independent of you. The blame, I am bound to say, lies with
yourself. You over-estimated your strength when you thought you
could treat your sexual instincts as you liked and could utterly
ignore their intentions. The result is that they have rebelled and
have taken their own obscure paths to escape this suppression; they
have established their rights in a manner you cannot approve. How
they have achieved this, and the paths which they have taken, have
not come to your knowledge. All you have learned is the
outcome
of their work - the symptom which you experience as
suffering. Thus you do not recognize it as a derivative of your own
rejected instincts and do not know that it is a substitutive
satisfaction of them.