Freud - Complete Works (640 page)

  
¹
It is by no means rare for a love-relation
to be broken off through a process of identification on the part of
the lover with the loved object, a process equivalent to a kind of
regression to narcissism. After this has been accomplished, it is
easy in making a fresh choice of object to direct the libido to a
member of the sex opposite to that of the earlier
choice.

  
²
The displacements of the libido here
described are doubtless familiar to every analyst from
investigation of the anamneses of neurotics. With the latter,
however, they occur in early childhood, at the time of the early
efflorescence of erotic life; with our patient, who was in no way
neurotic, they took place in the first years following puberty,
though, incidentally, they were just as completely unconscious.
Perhaps one day this temporal factor may turn out to be of great
importance.

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   There was, in addition, a
practical motive for this change, derived from her real relations
with her mother, which served as a gain from her illness. The
mother herself still attached great value to the attentions and the
admiration of men. If, then, the girl became homosexual and left
men to her mother (in other words, ‘retired in favour
of’ her mother), she would remove something which had
hitherto been partly responsible for her mother’s
dislike.¹

   This libidinal position of the
girl’s, thus arrived at, was greatly reinforced as soon as
she perceived how much it displeased her father. After she had been
punished for her over-affectionate attitude to a woman she realized
how she could wound her father and take revenge on him. Henceforth
she remained homosexual out of defiance against her father. Nor did
she scruple to lie to him and to deceive him in every way. Towards
her mother, indeed, she was only so far deceitful as was necessary
to prevent her father from knowing things. I had the impression
that her behaviour followed the principle of the talion:
‘Since you have betrayed me, you must put up with my
betraying you.’ Nor can I come to any other conclusion about
the striking lack of caution displayed by this otherwise
exceedingly shrewd girl. She
wanted
her father to know
occasionally of her relations with the lady, otherwise she would be
deprived of the satisfaction of her keenest desire - namely,
revenge. So she saw to this by showing herself openly in the
company of her adored one, by walking with her in the streets near
her father’s place of business, and the like. This
maladroitness, moreover, was by no means unintentional. It was
remarkable, too, that both parents behaved as if they understood
their daughter’s secret psychology. The mother was tolerant,
as though she appreciated her daughter’s
‘retirement’ as a favour to her; the father was
furious, as though he realized the deliberate revenge directed
against himself.

   The girl’s inversion,
however, received its final reinforcement when she found in her
‘lady’ an object which promised to satisfy not only her
homosexual trends, but also that part of her heterosexual libido
which was still attached to her brother.

  
¹
As ‘retiring in favour of someone
else’ has not previously been mentioned among the causes of
homosexuality, or in the mechanism of libidinal fixation in
general, I will adduce here another analytic observation of the
same kind which has a special feature of interest. I once knew two
twin brothers, both of whom were endowed with strong libidinal
impulses. One of them was very successful with women, and had
innumerable affairs with women and girls. The other went the same
way at first, but it became unpleasant for him to be trespassing on
his brother’s preserves, and, owing to the likeness between
them, to be mistaken for him on intimate occasions; so he got out
of the difficulty by becoming homosexual. He left the women to his
brother, and thus retired in his favour. Another time I treated a
youngish man, an artist, unmistakably bisexual in disposition, in
whom the homosexual trend had come to the fore simultaneously with
a disturbance in his work. He fled from both women and work
together. The analysis, which was able to bring him back to both,
showed that fear of his father was the most powerful psychical
motive for both the disturbances, which were really renunciations.
In his imagination all women belonged to his father, and he sought
refuge in men out of submission, so as to retire from the conflict
with his father. Such a motivation of the homosexual object-choice
must be by no means uncommon; in the primaeval ages of the human
race all women presumably belonged to the father and head of the
primal horde.

  
Among brothers and sisters who are not twins this
‘retiring’ plays a great part in other spheres as well
as in that of erotic choice. For example, an elder brother studies
music and is admired for it; the younger, far more gifted
musically, soon gives up his own musical studies, in spite of his
fondness for it, and cannot be persuaded to touch an instrument
again. This is only one example of a very frequent occurrence, and
investigation of the motives leading to this
‘retirement’ rather than to open rivalry discloses very
complicated conditions in the mind.

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III

   Linear presentation is not a very
adequate means of describing complicated mental processes going on
in different layers of the mind. I am therefore obliged to pause in
the discussion of the case and treat more fully and deeply some of
the points brought forward above.

   I mentioned the fact that in her
behaviour to her adored lady the girl had adopted the
characteristic masculine type of love. Her humility and her tender
lack of pretensions, ‘
che poco spera e nulla
chiede
’, her bliss when she was allowed to accompany the
lady a little way and to kiss her hand on parting, her joy when she
heard her praised as beautiful (while any recognition of her own
beauty by another person meant nothing at all to her), her
pilgrimages to places once visited by the loved one, the silence of
all more sensual wishes - all these little traits in her resembled
the first passionate adoration of a youth for a celebrated actress
whom he regards as far above him, to whom he scarcely dares lift
his bashful eyes. The correspondence with ‘a special type of
choice of object made by men’ that I have described elsewhere
(1910
h
), whose special features I traced to attachment to
the mother, held good even to the smallest details. It may seem
remarkable that she was not in the least repelled by the bad
reputation of her beloved, although her own observations
sufficiently confirmed the truth of such rumours. She was after all
a well-brought-up and modest girl, who had avoided sexual
adventures for herself, and who regarded coarsely sensual
satisfactions as unaesthetic. But already her first passions had
been for women who were not celebrated for specially strict
propriety. The first protest her father made against her
love-choice had been evoked by the pertinacity with which she
sought the company of a film actress at a summer resort. Moreover,
in all these affairs it had never been a question of women who had
any reputation for homosexuality, and who might, therefore, have
offered her some prospect of homosexual satisfaction; on the
contrary, she illogically courted women who were coquettes in the
ordinary sense of the word, and she rejected without hesitation the
willing advances made by a homosexual friend of her own age. For
her, the bad reputation of her ‘lady’, however, was
positively a ‘necessary condition for love’. All that
is enigmatic in this attitude vanishes when we remember that in the
case too of the
masculine
type of object-choice derived from
the mother it is a necessary condition that the loved object should
be in some way or other ‘of bad repute’ sexually -
someone who really may be called a
cocotte
. When the girl
learnt later how far her adored lady deserved this description and
that she lived simply by giving her bodily favours, her reaction
took the form of great compassion and of phantasies and plans for
‘rescuing’ her beloved from these ignoble
circumstances. We were struck by the same urge to
‘rescue’ in the men of the type referred to above, and
in my description of it I have tried to give the analytic
derivation of this urge.

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   We are led into quite another
realm of explanation by the analysis of the attempt at suicide,
which I must regard as seriously intended, and which, incidentally,
considerably improved her position both with her parents and with
the lady she loved. She went for a walk with her one day in a part
of the town and at an hour at which she was not unlikely to meet
her father on his way from his office. So it turned out. Her father
passed them in the street and cast a furious look at her and her
companion, about whom he had by that time come to know. A few
moments later she flung herself into the railway cutting. The
explanation she gave of the immediate reasons determining her
decision sounded quite plausible. She had confessed to the lady
that the man who had given them such an irate glance was her
father, and that he had absolutely forbidden their friendship. The
lady became incensed at this and ordered the girl to leave her then
and there, and never again to wait for her or to address her - the
affair must now come to an end. In her despair at having thus lost
her loved one for ever, she wanted to put an end to herself. The
analysis, however, was able to disclose another and deeper
interpretation behind the one she gave, which was confirmed by the
evidence of her own dreams. The attempted suicide was, as might
have been expected, determined by two other motives besides the one
she gave: it was the fulfilment of a punishment (self-punishment),
and the fulfilment of a wish. As the latter it meant the attainment
of the very wish which, when frustrated, had driven her into
homosexuality - namely, the wish to have a child by her father, for
now she ‘fell’ through her father’s fault.¹
The fact that at that moment the lady had spoken in just the same
terms as her father, and had uttered the same prohibition, forms
the connecting link between this deep interpretation and the
superficial one of which the girl herself was conscious. From the
point of view of self-punishment the girl’s action shows us
that she had developed in her unconscious strong death-wishes
against one or other of her parents - perhaps against her father,
out of revenge for impeding her love, but more probably against her
mother too, when she was pregnant with the little brother. For
analysis has explained the enigma of suicide in the following way:
probably no one finds the mental energy required to kill himself
unless, in the first place, in doing so he is at the same time
killing an object with whom he has identified himself, and, in the
second place, is turning against himself a death-wish which had
been directed against someone else. Nor need the regular discovery
of these unconscious death-wishes in those who have attempted
suicide surprise us (any more than it ought to make us think that
it confirms our deductions), since the unconscious of all human
beings is full enough of such death-wishes, even against those they
love.² Since the girl identified herself with her mother, who
should have died at the birth of the child denied to herself, this
punishment-fulfilment itself was once again a wish-fulfilment.
Finally, the discovery that several quite different motives, all of
great strength, must have co-operated to make such a deed possible
is only in accordance with what we should expect.

  
¹
That the various methods of suicide can
represent sexual wish-fulfilments has long been known to all
analysts. (To poison oneself = to become pregnant; to drown - to
bear a child; to throw oneself from a height = to be delivered of a
child.)

  
²
Cf. ‘Thoughts for the Times on War
and Death’ (1915
b
).

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   In the girl’s account of
her conscious motives the father did not figure at all; there was
not even any mention of fear of his anger. In the motives laid bare
by the analysis, on the other hand, he played the principal part.
Her relation to her father had the same decisive importance for the
course and outcome of the analytic treatment, or rather, analytic
exploration. Behind her pretended consideration for her parents,
for whose sake she had been willing to make the attempt to be
transformed, lay concealed her attitude of defiance and revenge
against her father which held her fast to her homosexuality. Secure
under this cover, the resistance set a considerable region free to
analytic investigation. The analysis went forward almost without
any signs of resistance, the patient participating actively with
her intellect, though absolutely tranquil emotionally. Once when I
expounded to her a specially important part of the theory, one
touching her nearly, she replied in an inimitable tone, ‘How
very interesting’, as though she were a
grande dame
being taken over a museum and glancing through her lorgnon at
objects to which she was completely indifferent. The impression one
had of her analysis was not unlike that of a hypnotic treatment,
where the resistance has in the same way withdrawn to a certain
boundary line, beyond which it proves to be unconquerable. The
resistance very often pursues similar tactics - Russian tactics, as
they might be called - in cases of obsessional neurosis. For a
time, consequently, these cases yield the clearest results and
permit a deep insight into the causation of the symptoms. But
presently one begins to wonder how it is that such marked progress
in analytic understanding can be unaccompanied by even the
slightest change in the patient’s compulsions and
inhibitions, until at last one perceives that everything that has
been accomplished is subject to a mental reservation of doubt, and
that behind this protective barrier the neurosis can feel secure.
‘It would be all very fine’, thinks the patient, often
quite consciously, ‘if I were obliged to believe what the man
says, but there is no question of that, and so long as this is so I
need change nothing.’ Then, when one comes to close quarters
with the motives for this doubt, the fight with the resistances
breaks out in earnest.