Freud - Complete Works (649 page)

   It seems to me that we have here
an important discovery - namely, that the qualitative factor, the
presence of certain neurotic formations, has less practical
significance than the quantitative factor, the degree of attention
or, more correctly, the amount of cathexis that these structures
are able to attract to themselves. Our consideration of the first
case, the jealous paranoia, led to a similar estimate of the
importance of the quantitative factor, by showing that there also
the abnormality essentially consisted in the hypercathexis of the
interpretations of someone else’s unconscious. We have long
known of an analogous fact in the analysis of hysteria. The
pathogenic phantasies, derivatives of repressed instinctual
impulses, are for a long time tolerated alongside the normal life
of the mind, and have no pathogenic effect until by a revolution in
the libidinal economy they receive a hypercathexis; not till then
does the conflict which leads to the formation of symptoms break
out. Thus as our knowledge grows we are increasingly impelled to
bring the
economic
point of view into the foreground. I
should also like to throw out the question whether this
quantitative factor that I am now dwelling on does not suffice to
cover the phenomena which Bleuler and others have lately proposed
to name ‘switching’. One need only assume that an
increase in resistance in the course taken by the psychical current
in one direction results in a hypercathexis of another path and
thus causes the flow to be switched into that path.

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   My two cases of paranoia showed
an instructive contrast in the behaviour of their dreams. Whereas
those of the first case were free from delusion, as has already
been said, the other patient produced great numbers of persecutory
dreams, which may be regarded as forerunners of or substitutes for
the delusional ideas. The pursuer, whom he only managed to escape
with great fear, was usually a powerful bull or some other male
symbol which even in the dream itself he sometimes recognized as
representing his father. One day he produced a very characteristic
paranoic transference-dream. He saw me shaving in front of him, and
from the scent he realized that I was using the same soap as his
father had used. I was doing this in order to oblige him to make a
father-transference on to me. The choice of this incident for his
dream quite unmistakably betrays the patient’s depreciatory
attitude to his paranoic phantasies and his disbelief in them; for
his own eyes could tell him every day that I was never in a
position to make use of shaving-soap and that therefore there was
in this respect nothing to which a father-transference could attach
itself.

   A comparison of the dreams of the
two patients shows, however, that the question whether or not
paranoia (or any other psychoneurosis) can penetrate into dreams is
based on a false conception of dreams. Dreams are distinguished
from waking thought by the fact that they can include material
(belonging to the region of the repressed) which must not emerge in
waking thought. Apart from this, dreams are merely a
form of
thinking
, a transformation of preconscious material of thought
by the dream-work and its conditions. Our terminology of the
neuroses is not applicable to repressed material; this cannot be
called hysterical, nor obsessional, nor paranoic. As against this,
the other part of the material which is subjected to the process of
dream-formation - the preconscious thoughts - may be normal or may
bear the character of any neurosis; they may be the products of any
of the pathogenic processes in which the essence of a neurosis lies
There seems to be no reason why any such pathological idea should
not be transformed into a dream. A dream may therefore quite simply
represent a hysterical phantasy, an obsessional idea, or a delusion
- that is, may reveal one or other of these upon interpretation.
Observation of the two paranoics shows that the dreams of the one
were quite normal while he was subject to his delusion, and that
those of the other were paranoic in content while he was treating
his delusional ideas with contempt. In both cases, therefore, the
dream took up the material that was at the time forced into the
background in waking life. This too, however, need not necessarily
be an invariable rule.

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C

  
Homosexuality
. -
Recognition of the organic factor in homosexuality does not relieve
us of the obligation of studying the psychical processes connected
with its origin. The typical process, already established in
innumerable cases, is that a few years after the termination of
puberty a young man, who until this time has been strongly fixated
to his mother, changes his attitude; he identifies himself with his
mother, and looks about for love-objects in whom he can re-discover
himself, and whom he might then love as his mother loved him. The
characteristic mark of this process is that for several years one
of the necessary conditions for his love is usually that the male
object shall be of the same age as he himself was when the change
took place. We have come to know of various factors contributing to
this result, probably in different degrees. First there is the
fixation on the mother, which makes it difficult to pass on to
another woman. Identification with the mother is an outcome of this
attachment, and at the same time in a certain sense it enables the
son to keep true to her, his first object. Then there is the
inclination towards a narcissistic object-choice, which in general
lies readier to hand and is easier to put into effect than a move
towards the other sex. Behind this latter factor there lies
concealed another of quite exceptional strength, or perhaps it
coincides with it: the high value set upon the male organ and the
inability to tolerate its absence in a love-object. Depreciation of
women, and aversion to them, even horror of them, are generally
derived from the early discovery that women have no penis. We
subsequently discovered, as another powerful motive urging towards
homosexual object-choice, regard for the father or fear of him; for
the renunciation of women means that all rivalry with him (or with
all men who may take his place) is avoided. The two last motives -
the clinging to the condition of a penis in the object, as well as
the retiring in favour of the father - may be ascribed to the
castration complex. Attachment to the mother, narcissism, fear of
castration - these are the factors (which incidentally have nothing
specific about them)  that we have hitherto found in the
psychical aetiology of homosexuality; and with these must be
reckoned the effect of seduction, which is responsible for a
premature fixation of the libido, as well as the influence of the
organic factor which favours the passive role in love.

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   We have, however, never regarded
this analysis of the origin of homosexuality as complete. I can now
point to a new mechanism leading to homosexual object-choice,
although I cannot say how large a part it plays in the formation of
the extreme, manifest and exclusive type of homosexuality.
Observation has directed my attention to several cases in which
during early childhood impulses of jealousy, derived from the
mother-complex and of very great intensity, arose against rivals,
usually older brothers. This jealousy led to an exceedingly hostile
and aggressive attitude towards these brothers which might
sometimes reach the pitch of actual death-wishes, but which could
not maintain themselves in the face of the subject’s further
development. Under the influences of upbringing - and certainly not
uninfluenced also by their own continuing powerlessness - these
impulses yielded to repression and underwent a transformation, so
that the rivals of the earlier period became the first homosexual
love-objects. Such an outcome of the attachment to the mother shows
various interesting relations with other processes known to us.
First of all it is a complete contrast to the development of
persecutory paranoia, in which the person who has before been loved
becomes the hated persecutor, whereas here the hated rivals are
transformed into love objects. It represents, too, an exaggeration
of the process which, according to my view, leads to the birth of
social instincts in the individual.¹ In both processes there
is first the presence of jealous and hostile impulses which cannot
achieve satisfaction; and both the affectionate and the social
feelings of identification arise as reactive formations against the
repressed aggressive impulses.

  
¹
Cf. my
Group psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego
(1921
c
).

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   This new mechanism of homosexual
object-choice - its origin in rivalry which has been overcome and
in aggressive impulses which have become repressed - is sometimes
combined with the typical conditions already familiar to us. In the
history of homosexuals one often hears that the change in them took
place after the mother had praised another boy and set him up as a
model. The tendency to a narcissistic object-choice was thus
stimulated, and after a short phase of keen jealousy the rival
became a love-object. As a rule, however, the new mechanism is
distinguished by the change taking place at a much earlier period,
and the identification with the mother receding into the
background. Moreover, in the cases I have observed, it led only to
homosexual attitudes which did not exclude heterosexuality and did
not involve a
horror feminae
.

   It is well known that a good
number of homosexuals are characterized by a special development of
their social instinctual impulses and by their devotion to the
interests of the community. It would be tempting, as a theoretical
explanation of this, to say that the behaviour towards men in
general of a man who sees in other men potential love-objects must
be different from that of a man who looks upon other men in the
first instance as rivals in regard to women. The only objection to
this is that jealousy and rivalry play their part in homosexual
love as well, and that the community of men also includes these
potential rivals. Apart from this speculative explanation, however,
the fact that homosexual object-choice not infrequently proceeds
from an early overcoming of rivalry with men cannot be without a
bearing on the connection between homosexuality and social
feeling.

   In the light of psycho-analysis
we are accustomed to regard social feeling as a sublimation of
homosexual attitudes towards objects. In the homosexuals with
marked social interests, it would seem that the detachment of
social feeling from object choice has not been fully carried
through.

3910

TWO ENCYCLOPAEDIA ARTICLES

(1923)

3911

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3912

TWO ENCYCLOPAEDIA ARTICLES

(A)
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Psycho-analysis is the name (1) of a procedure
for the investigation of mental processes which are almost
inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that
investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a
collection of psychological information obtained along those lines,
which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific
discipline.

  
History
- The best way of
understanding psycho-analysis is still by tracing its origin and
development. In 1880 and 1881 Dr. Josef Breuer of Vienna, a
well-known physician and experimental physiologist, was occupied in
the treatment of a girl who had fallen ill of a severe hysteria
while she was nursing her sick father. The clinical picture was
made up of motor paralyses, inhibitions, and disturbances of
consciousness. Following a hint given him by the patient herself,
who was a person of great intelligence, he put her into a state of
hypnosis and contrived that, by describing to him the moods and
thoughts that were uppermost in her mind, she returned on each
particular occasion to a normal mental condition. By consistently
repeating the same laborious process, he succeeded in freeing her
from all her inhibitions and paralyses, so that in the end he found
his trouble rewarded by a great therapeutic success as well as by
an unexpected insight into the nature of the puzzling neurosis.
Nevertheless, Breuer refrained from following up his discovery or
from publishing anything about the case until some ten years later,
when the personal influence of the present writer (Freud, who had
returned to Vienna in 1886 after studying in the school of Charcot)
prevailed on him to take up the subject afresh and embark upon a
joint study of it. These two, Breuer and Freud, published a
preliminary paper ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical
Phenomena’ in 1893, and in 1895 a volume entitled
Studies
on Hysteria
(which reached its fourth edition in 1922), in
which they described their therapeutic procedure as
‘
cathartic
’.

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Catharsis
. - The
investigations which lay at the root of Breuer and Freud’s
studies led to two chief results, and these have not been shaken by
subsequent experience: first, that hysterical symptoms have sense
and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts; and
secondly, that the uncovering of this unknown meaning is
accompanied by the removal of the symptoms - so that in this case
scientific research and therapeutic effort coincide. The
observations were carried out upon a series of patients who were
treated in the same manner as Breuer’s first patient, that is
to say, put into a state of deep hypnosis; and the results seemed
brilliant, until later their weak side became evident. The
theoretical ideas put forward at that time by Breuer and Freud were
influenced by Charcot’s theories on traumatic hysteria and
could find support in the findings of his pupil Pierre Janet,
which, though they were published earlier than the
Studies
,
were in fact subsequent to Breuer’s first case. From the very
beginning the factor of
affect
was brought into the
foreground: hysterical symptoms, the authors maintained, came into
existence when a mental process with a heavy charge of affect was
in any way prevented from being levelled out along the normal path
leading to consciousness and movement (i. e. was prevented from
being ‘
abreacted
’); as a result of this the
affect, which was in a sense ‘
strangulated
’, was
diverted along wrong paths and flowed off into the somatic
innervation (a process named ‘
conversion
’). The
occasions upon which ‘pathogenic ideas’ of this kind
arose were described by Breuer and Freud as ‘
psychical
traumas
’, and, since these often dated back to the very
remote past, it was possible for the authors to say that hysterics
suffered mainly from reminiscences (which had not been dealt with).
Under the treatment, therefore, ‘
catharsis
’ came
about when the path to consciousness was opened and there was a
normal discharge of affect. It will be seen that an essential part
of this theory was the assumption of the existence of
unconscious
mental processes. Janet too had made use of
unconscious acts in mental life; but, as he insisted in his later
polemics against psycho-analysis, to him the phrase was no more
than a make-shift expression, a ‘
manière de
parler
’, and he intended to suggest no new point of view
by it.

   In a theoretical section of the
Studies
Breuer brought forward some speculative ideas about
the processes of excitation in the mind. These ideas determined the
direction of future lines of thought and even to-day have not
received sufficient appreciation. But they brought his
contributions to this branch of science to an end, and soon
afterwards he withdrew from the common work.

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Transition to
Psycho-analysis
. - Contrasts between the views of the two
authors had been visible even in the
Studies
. Breuer
supposed that the pathogenic ideas produced their traumatic effect
because they arose during ‘
hypnoid states
’, in
which mental functioning was subject to special limitations. The
present writer rejected this explanation and inclined to the belief
that an idea became pathogenic if its content was in opposition to
the predominant trend of the subject’s mental life so that it
provoked him into ’
defence
’.(Janet had
attributed to hysterical patients a constitutional incapacity for
holding together the contents of their minds; and it was at this
point that his path diverged from that of Breuer and Freud.)
Moreover, the two innovations which led the present writer to move
away from the cathartic method had already been mentioned in the
Studies
. After Breuer’s withdrawal they became the
starting-point of fresh developments.

  
Abandonment of Hypnosis
. -
The first of these innovations was based on practical experience
and led to a change in technique. The second consisted in an
advance in the clinical understanding of neuroses. It soon appeared
that the therapeutic hopes which had been placed upon cathartic
treatment in hypnosis were to some extent unfulfilled. It was true
that the disappearance of the symptoms went hand-in-hand with the
catharsis, but total success turned out to be entirely dependent
upon the patient’s relation to the physician and thus
resembled the effect of ‘suggestion’. If that relation
was disturbed, all the symptoms reappeared, just as though they had
never been cleared up. In addition to this, the small number of
people who could be put into a deep state of hypnosis involved a
very considerable limitation, from the medical standpoint, of the
applicability of the cathartic procedure. For these reasons the
present writer decided to give up the use of hypnosis. But at the
same time the impressions he had derived from hypnosis afforded him
the means of replacing it.

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Free
Association
. -
The effect of the hypnotic condition upon the patient had been so
greatly to increase his ability to make associations that he was
able straight away to find the path - inaccessible to his conscious
reflection - which led from the symptom to the thoughts and
memories connected with it. The abandonment of hypnosis seemed to
make the situation hopeless, until the writer recalled a remark of
Bernheim’s to the effect that things that had been
experienced in a state of somnambulism were only
apparently
forgotten and that they could be brought into recollection at any
time if the physician insisted forcibly enough that the patient
knew them. The writer therefore endeavoured to insist on his
unhypnotized
patients giving him their associations, so that
from the material thus provided he might find the path leading to
what had been forgotten or fended off. He noticed later that the
insistence was unnecessary and that copious ideas almost always
arose in the patient’s mind, but that they were held back
from being communicated and even from becoming conscious by certain
objections put by the patient in his own way. It was to be expected
- though this was still unproved and not until later confirmed by
wide experience - that everything that occurred to a patient
setting out from a particular starting-point must also stand in an
internal connection with that starting-point; hence arose the
technique of educating the patient to give up the whole of his
critical attitude and of making use of the material which was thus
brought to light for the purpose of uncovering the connections that
were being sought. A strong belief in the strict determination of
mental events certainly played a part in the choice of this
technique as a substitute for hypnosis.

  
The ‘Fundamental
Technical Rule’
of this procedure of ‘free
association’ has from that time on been maintained in
psycho-analytic work. The treatment is begun by the patient being
required to put himself in the position of an attentive and
dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the
surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of
the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back any
idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too
disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too
unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is
uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these
last-mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the
forgotten material.

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Psycho-analysis as an
Interpretive Art
. - The new technique altered the picture of
the treatment so greatly, brought the physician into such a new
relation to the patient and produced so many surprising results
that it seemed justifiable to distinguish the procedure from the
cathartic method by giving it a new name. The present writer gave
this method of treatment, which could now be extended to many other
forms of neurotic disorder, the name of
psycho-analysis
.
Now, in the first resort, this psycho-analysis was an art of
interpretation
and it set itself the task of carrying deeper
the first of Breuer’s great discoveries - namely, that
neurotic symptoms are significant substitutes for other mental acts
which have been omitted. It was now a question of regarding the
material produced by the patients’ associations as though it
hinted at a hidden meaning and of discovering that meaning from it.
Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic
physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself
to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of
evenly
suspended attention
, to avoid so far as possible reflection and
the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix
anything that he heard particularly in his memory, and by these
means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with
his own unconscious. It was then found that, except under
conditions that were too unfavourable, the patient’s
associations emerged like allusions, as it were, to one particular
theme and that it was only necessary for the physician to go a step
further in order to guess the material which was concealed from the
patient himself and to be able to communicate it to him. It is true
that this work of interpretation was not to be brought under strict
rules and left a great deal of play to the physician’s tact
and skill; but, with impartiality and practice, it was usually
possible to obtain trustworthy results - that is to say, results
which were confirmed by being repeated in similar cases. At a time
when so little was as yet known of the unconscious, the structure
of the neuroses and the pathological processes underlying them, it
was a matter for satisfaction that a technique of this kind should
be available, even if it had no better theoretical basis. Moreover
it is still employed in analyses at the present day in the same
manner, though with a sense of greater assurance and with a better
understanding of its limitations.

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The Interpretation of
Parapraxes and Haphazard Acts
. - It was a triumph for the
interpretative art of psycho-analysis when it succeeded in
demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for
which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological
explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms
of neurotics: that is to say, they had a
meaning
, which was
unknown to the subject but which could easily be discovered by
analytic means. The phenomena in question were such events as the
temporary forgetting of familiar words and names, forgetting to
carry out prescribed tasks, everyday slips of the tongue and of the
pen, misreadings, losses and mislayings of objects, certain errors,
instances of apparently accidental self-injury, and finally
habitual movements carried out seemingly without intention or in
play, tunes hummed ‘thoughtlessly’, and so on. All of
these were shorn of their physiological explanation, if any such
had ever been attempted, were shown to be strictly determined and
were revealed as an expression of the subject’s suppressed
intentions or as a result of a clash between two intentions one of
which was permanently or temporarily unconscious. The importance of
this contribution to psychology was of many kinds. The range of
mental determinism was extended by it in an unforeseen manner; the
supposed gulf between normal and pathological mental events was
narrowed; in many cases a useful insight was afforded into the play
of mental forces that must be suspected to lie behind the
phenomena. Finally, a class of material was brought to light which
is calculated better than any other to stimulate a belief in the
existence of unconscious mental acts even in people to whom the
hypothesis of something at once mental and unconscious seems
strange and even absurd. The study of one’s own parapraxes
and haphazard acts, for which most people have ample opportunities,
is even to-day the best preparation for an approach to
psycho-analysis. In analytic treatment, the interpretation of
parapraxes retains a place as a means of uncovering the
unconscious, alongside the immeasurably more important
interpretation of associations.