Freud - Complete Works (608 page)

   My male cases with an infantile
beating-phantasy comprised only a few who did not exhibit some
other gross injury to their sexual activities; again they included
a fairly large number of persons who would have to be described as
true masochists in the sense of being sexual perverts. They were
either people who obtained their sexual satisfaction exclusively
from masturbation accompanied by masochistic phantasies; or they
were people who had succeeded in combining masochism with their
genital activity in such a way that, along with masochistic
performances and under similar conditions, they were able to bring
about erection and emission or to carry out normal intercourse. In
addition to this there was the rarer case in which a masochist is
interfered with in his perverse activities by the appearance of
obsessional ideas of unbearable intensity. Now perverts who can
obtain satisfaction do not often have occasion to come for
analysis. But as regards the three classes of masochists that have
been mentioned there may be strong motives to induce them to go to
an analyst. The masochist masturbator finds that he is absolutely
impotent if after all he does attempt intercourse with a woman; and
the man who has hitherto effected intercourse with the help of a
masochistic idea or performance may suddenly make the discovery
that the alliance which was so convenient for him has broken down,
his genital organs no longer reacting to the masochistic stimulus.
We are accustomed confidently to promise recovery to psychically
impotent patients who come to us for treatment; but we ought to be
more guarded in making this prognosis so long as the dynamics of
the disturbance are unknown to us. It comes as a disagreeable
surprise if the analysis reveals the cause of the ‘merely
psychical’ impotence to be a typically masochistic attitude,
perhaps deeply embedded since infancy.

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   As regards these masochistic men,
however, a discovery is made at this point which warns us not to
pursue the analogy between their case and that of women any further
at present, but to judge each independently. For the fact emerges
that in their masochistic phantasies, as well as in the
performances they go through for their realization, they invariably
transfer themselves into the part of a woman; that is to say, their
masochistic attitude coincides with a
feminine
one. This can
easily be demonstrated from details of the phantasies; but many
patients are even aware of it themselves, and give expression to it
as a subjective conviction. It makes no difference if in a fanciful
embellishment of the masochistic scene they keep up the fiction
that a mischievous boy, or page, or apprentice is going to be
punished. On the other hand the persons who administer chastisement
are always women, both in the phantasies and the performances. This
is confusing enough; and the further question must be asked whether
this feminine attitude already forms the basis of the masochistic
element in the
infantile
beating-phantasy.¹

   Let us therefore leave aside
consideration of the state of things in cases of adult masochism,
which it is so hard to clear up, and turn to the infantile
beating-phantasy in the male sex. Analysis of the earliest years of
childhood once more allows us to make a surprising discovery in
this field. The phantasy which has as its content being beaten by
the mother, and which is conscious or can become so, is not a
primary one. It possesses a preceding stage which is invariably
unconscious and has as its content: ‘
I am being beaten by
my father
.’ This preliminary stage, then, really
corresponds to the second phase of the phantasy in the girl. The
familiar and conscious phantasy: ‘I am being beaten by my
mother’, takes the place of the third phase in the girl, in
which, as has been mentioned already, unknown boys are the objects
that are being beaten. I have not been able to demonstrate among
boys a preliminary stage of a sadistic nature that could be set
beside the first phase of the phantasy in girls, but I will not now
express any final disbelief in its existence, for I can readily see
the possibility of meeting with more complicated types.

   In the male phantasy - as I shall
call it briefly, and, I hope, without any risk of being
misunderstood - the being beaten also stands for being loved (in a
genital sense), though this has been debased to a lower level owing
to regression. So the original form of the unconscious male
phantasy was not the provisional one that we have hitherto given:
‘I am being beaten by my father’, but rather:
‘
I am loved by my father
’. The phantasy has been
transformed by the processes with which we are familiar into the
conscious phantasy: ‘
I am being beaten by my
mother
’. The boy’s beating-phantasy is therefore
passive from the very beginning, and is derived from a feminine
attitude towards his father. It corresponds with the Oedipus
complex just as the female one (that of the girl) does; only the
parallel relation which we expected to find between the two must be
given up in favour of a common character of another kind.
In
both cases the beating-phantasy has its origin in an incestuous
attachment to the father
.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] Further
remarks on this subject will be found in ‘The Economic
Problem of Masochism’ (1924
c
).

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   It will help to make matters
clearer if at this point I enumerate the other similarities and
differences between beating phantasies in the two sexes. In the
case of the girl the unconscious masochistic phantasy starts from
the normal Oedipus attitude; in that of the boy it starts from the
inverted attitude, in which the father is taken as the object of
love. In the case of the girl the phantasy has a preliminary stage
(the first phase), in which the beating bears no special
significance and is performed upon a person who is viewed with
jealous hatred. Both of these features are absent in the case of
the boy, but this particular difference is one which might be
removed by more fortunate observation. In her transition to the
conscious phantasy which takes the place of the unconscious one,
the girl retains the figure of her father, and in that way keeps
unchanged the sex of the person beating; but she changes the figure
and sex of the person being beaten, so that eventually a man is
beating male children. The boy, on the contrary, changes the figure
and sex of the person beating, by putting his mother in the place
of his father; but he retains his own figure, with the result that
the person beating and the person being beaten are of opposite
sexes. In the case of the girl what was originally a masochistic
(passive) situation is transformed into a sadistic one by means of
repression, and its sexual quality is almost effaced. In the case
of the boy the situation remains masochistic, and shows a greater
resemblance to the original phantasy with its genital significance,
since there is a difference of sex between the person beating and
the person being beaten. The boy evades his homosexuality by
repressing and remodelling his unconscious phantasy: and the
remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy is that it has
for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual
object-choice. By the same process, on the other hand, the girl
escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether.
She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming
active in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a
spectator of the event which takes the place of a sexual act.

   We are justified in assuming that
no great change is effected by the
repression
of the
original unconscious phantasy. Whatever is repressed from
consciousness or replaced in it by something else remains intact
and potentially operative in the unconscious. The effect of
regression
to an earlier stage of the sexual organization is
quite another matter. As regards this we are led to believe that
the state of things changes in the unconscious as well. Thus in
both sexes the masochistic phantasy of being beaten by the father,
though not the passive phantasy of being loved by him, lives on in
the unconscious after repression has taken place. There are,
besides, plenty of indications that the repression has only very
incompletely attained its object. The boy, who has tried to escape
from a homosexual object-choice, and who has not changed his sex,
nevertheless feels like a woman in his conscious phantasies, and
endows the women who are beating him with masculine attributes and
characteristics. The girl, who has even renounced her sex, and who
has on the whole accomplished a more thoroughgoing work of
repression, nevertheless does not become freed from her father; she
does not venture to do the beating herself; and since she has
herself become a boy, it is principally boys whom she causes to be
beaten.

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   I am aware that the differences
that I have here described between the two sexes in regard to the
nature of the beating-phantasy have not been cleared up
sufficiently. But I shall not attempt to unravel these
complications by tracing out their dependence on other factors, as
I do not consider that the material for observation is exhaustive.
So far as it goes, however, I should like to make use of it as a
test for two theories. These theories stand in opposition to each
other, though both of them deal with the relation between
repression and sexual character, and each, according to its own
view, represents the relation as a very intimate one. I may say at
once that I have always regarded both theories as incorrect and
misleading.

   The first of these theories is
anonymous. It was brought to my notice many years ago by a
colleague with whom I was at that time on friendly terms. The
theory is so attractive on account of its bold simplicity that the
only wonder is that it should not have found its way into the
literature of the subject except in a few scattered allusions. It
is based on the fact of the bisexual constitution of human beings,
and asserts that the motive force of repression in each individual
is a struggle between the two sexual characters. The dominant sex
of the person, that which is the more strongly developed, has
repressed the mental representation of the subordinated sex into
the unconscious. Therefore the nucleus of the unconscious (that is
to say, the repressed) is in each human being that side of him
which belongs to the opposite sex. Such a theory as this can only
have an intelligible meaning if we assume that a person’s sex
is to be determined by the formation of his genitals; for otherwise
it would not be certain which is a person’s stronger sex and
we should run the risk of reaching from the results of our enquiry
the very fact which has to serve as its point of departure. To put
the theory briefly: with men, what is unconscious and repressed can
be brought down to feminine instinctual impulses; and conversely
with women.

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   The second theory is of more
recent origin. It is in agreement with the first one in so far as
it too represents the struggle between the two sexes as being the
decisive cause of repression. In other respects it comes into
conflict with the former theory; moreover, it looks for support to
sociological rather than biological sources. According to this
theory of the ‘masculine protest’, formulated by Alfred
Adler, every individual makes efforts not to remain on the inferior
‘feminine line’ and struggles towards the
‘masculine line’, from which satisfaction can alone be
derived. Adler makes the masculine protest responsible for the
whole formation both of character and of neuroses. Unfortunately he
makes so little distinction between the two processes, which
certainly have to be kept separate, and sets altogether so little
store in general by the fact of repression, that to attempt to
apply the doctrine of the masculine protest to repression brings
with it the risk of misunderstanding. In my opinion such an attempt
could only lead us to infer that the masculine protest, the desire
to break away from the feminine line, was in every case the motive
force of repression. The repressing agency, therefore, would always
be a masculine instinctual impulse, and the repressed would be a
feminine one. But symptoms would also be the result of a feminine
impulse, for we cannot discard the characteristic feature of
symptoms - that they are substitutes for the repressed, substitutes
that have made their way out in spite of repression.

   Now let us take these two
theories, which may be said to have in common a sexualization of
the process of repression, and test them by applying them to the
example of the beating phantasies which we have been studying. The
original phantasy, ‘I am being beaten by my father’,
corresponds, in the case of the boy, to a feminine attitude, and is
therefore an expression of that part of his disposition which
belongs to the opposite sex. If this part of him undergoes
repression, the first theory seems shown to be correct; for this
theory set it up as a rule that what belongs to the opposite sex is
identical with the repressed. It scarcely answers to our
expectations, it is true, when we find that the conscious phantasy,
which arises after repression has been accomplished, nevertheless
exhibits the feminine attitude once more, though this time directed
towards the mother. But we will not go into such doubtful points,
when the whole question can be so quickly decided. There can be no
doubt that the original phantasy in the case of the girl, ‘I
am being beaten (i. e. I am loved) by my father’, represents
a feminine attitude, and corresponds to her dominant and manifest
sex; according to the theory, therefore, it ought to escape
repression, and there would be no need for its becoming
unconscious. But as a matter of fact it does become unconscious,
and is replaced by a conscious phantasy which disavows the
girl’s manifest sexual character. The theory is therefore
useless as an explanation of beating-phantasies, and is
contradicted by the facts. It might be objected that it is
precisely in unmanly boys and unwomanly girls that these
beating-phantasies appeared and went through these vicissitudes; or
that it was a trait of femininity in the boy and of masculinity in
the girl which must be made responsible for the production of a
passive phantasy in the boy, and its repression in the girl. We
should be inclined to agree with this view, but it would not be any
the less impossible to defend the supposed relation between
manifest sexual character and the choice of what is destined for
repression. In the last resort we can only see that both in male
and female individuals masculine as well as feminine instinctual
impulses are found, and that each can equally well undergo
repression and so become unconscious.