Freud - Complete Works (669 page)

4063

NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

(1924)

4064

Intentionally left blank

4065

NEUROSIS AND PSYCHOSIS

In my recently published work,
The Ego and
the Id
(1923
b
), I have proposed a differentiation of the
mental apparatus, on the basis of which a number of relationships
can be represented in a simple and perspicuous manner. As regards
other points - for instance, in what concerns the origin and role
of the super-ego - enough remains obscure and unelucidated. Now one
may reasonably expect that a hypothesis of this kind should prove
useful and helpful in other directions as well, if only to enable
us to see what we already know from another angle, to group it
differently and to describe it more convincingly. Such an
application of the hypothesis might also bring with it a profitable
return from grey theory to the perpetual green of experience.

   In the work I have mentioned I
described the numerous dependent relationships of the ego, its
intermediate position between the external world and the id and its
efforts to humour all its masters at once. In connection with a
train of thought raised in other quarters, which was concerned with
the origin and prevention of the psychoses, a simple formula has
now occurred to me which deals with what is perhaps the most
important genetic difference between a neurosis and a psychosis:
neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id,
whereas psychosis in the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance
in the relations between the ego and the external world
.

Neurosis And Psychosis

4066

   There are certainly good grounds
for being suspicious of such simple solutions of a problem.
Moreover, the most that we may expect is that this formula will
turn out to be correct in the roughest outline. But even that would
be something. One recalls at once, too, a whole number of
discoveries and findings which seem to support our thesis. All our
analyses go to show that the transference neuroses originate from
the ego’s refusing to accept a powerful instinctual impulse
in the id or to help it to find a motor outlet, or from the
ego’s forbidding that impulse the object at which it is
aiming. In such a case the ego defends itself against the
instinctual impulse by the mechanism of repression. The repressed
material struggles against this fate. It creates for itself, along
paths over which the ego has no power, a substitutive
representation (which forces itself upon the ego by way of a
compromise) - the symptom. The ego finds its unity threatened and
impaired by this intruder, and it continues to struggle against the
symptom, just as it fended off the original instinctual impulse.
All this produces the picture of a neurosis. It is no contradiction
to this that, in undertaking the repression, the ego is at bottom
following the commands of its super-ego - commands which, in their
turn, originate from influences in the external world that have
found representation in the super-ego. The fact remains that the
ego
has
taken sides with those powers, that in it their
demands have more strength than the instinctual demands of the id,
and that the ego is the power which sets the repression in motion
against the portion of the id concerned and which fortifies the
repression by means of the anticathexis of resistance. The ego has
come into conflict with the id in the service of the super-ego and
of reality; and this is the state of affairs in every transference
neurosis.

   On the other side, it is equally
easy, from the knowledge we have so far gained of the mechanism of
the psychoses, to adduce examples which point to a disturbance in
the relationship between the ego and the external world. In
Meynert’s amentia - an acute hallucinatory confusion which is
perhaps the most extreme and striking form of psychosis - either
the external world is not perceived at all, or the perception of it
has no effect whatever. Normally, the external world governs the
ego in two ways: firstly, by current, present perceptions which are
always renewable, and secondly, by the store of memories of earlier
perceptions which, in the shape of an ‘internal world’,
form a possession of the ego and a constituent part of it. In
amentia, not only is the acceptance of new perceptions refused, but
the internal world, too, which, as a copy of the external world,
has up till now represented it, loses its significance (its
cathexis) - The ego creates, autocratically, a new external and
internal world; and there can be no doubt of two facts - that this
new world is constructed in accordance with the id’s wishful
impulses, and that the motive of this dissociation from the
external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a
wish - a frustration which seems intolerable. The close affinity of
this psychosis to normal dreams is unmistakable. A precondition of
dreaming, moreover, is a state of sleep, and one of the features of
sleep is a complete turning away from perception and the external
world.

Neurosis And Psychosis

4067

   We know that other forms of
psychosis, the schizophrenias, are inclined to end in affective
hebetude - that is, in a loss of all participation in the external
world. In regard to the genesis of delusions, a fair number of
analyses have taught us that the delusion is found applied like a
patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the
ego’s relation to the external world. If this precondition of
a conflict with the external world is not much more noticeable to
us than it now is, that is because, in the clinical picture of the
psychosis, the manifestations of the pathogenic process are often
overlaid by manifestations of an attempt at a cure or a
reconstruction.

   The aetiology common to the onset
of a psychoneurosis and of a psychosis always remains the same. It
consists in a frustration, a non-fulfilment of one of those
childhood wishes which are for ever undefeated and which are so
deeply rooted in our phylogenetically determined organization. This
frustration is in the last resort always an external one; but in
the individual case it may proceed from the internal agency (in the
super-ego) which has taken over the representation of the demands
of reality. The pathogenic effect depends on whether, in a
conflictual tension of this kind, the ego remains true to its
dependence on the external world and attempts to silence the id, or
whether it lets itself be overcome by the id and thus torn away
from reality. A complication is introduced into this apparently
simple situation, however, by the existence of the super-ego,
which, through a link that is not yet clear to us, unites in itself
influences coming from the id as well as from the external world,
and is to some extent an ideal model of what the whole endeavour of
the ego is aiming at - a reconciliation between its various
dependent relationships. The attitude of the super-ego should be
taken into account - which has not hitherto been done - in every
form of psychical illness. We may provisionally assume that there
must also be illnesses which are based on a conflict between the
ego and the super-ego. Analysis gives us a right to suppose that
melancholia is a typical example of this group; and we would set
aside the name of ‘narcissistic psychoneuroses’ for
disorders of that kind. Nor will it clash with our impressions if
we find reasons for separating states like melancholia from the
other psychoses. We now see that we have been able to make our
simple genetic formula more complete, without dropping it.
Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and
the id; narcissistic neuroses, to a conflict between the ego and
the super-ego; and psychoses, to one between the ego and the
external world. It is true that we cannot tell at once whether we
have really gained any new knowledge by this, or have only enriched
our store of formulas; but I think that this possible application
of the proposed differentiation of the mental apparatus into an
ego, a super-ego and an id cannot fail to give us courage to keep
that hypothesis steadily in view.

Neurosis And Psychosis

4068

   The thesis that neuroses and
psychoses originate in the ego’s conflicts with its various
ruling agencies - that is, therefore, that they reflect a failure
in the functioning of the ego, which is at pains to reconcile all
the various demands made on it - this thesis needs to be
supplemented in one further point. One would like to know in what
circumstances and by what means the ego can succeed in emerging
from such conflicts, which are certainly always present, without
falling ill. This is a new field of research, in which no doubt the
most varied factors will come up for examination. Two of them,
however, can be stressed at once. In the first place, the outcome
of all such situations will undoubtedly depend on economic
considerations - on the relative magnitudes of the trends which are
struggling with one another. In the second place, it will be
possible for the ego to avoid a rupture in any direction by
deforming itself, by submitting to encroachments on its own unity
and even perhaps by effecting a cleavage or division of itself. In
this way the inconsistencies, eccentricities and follies of men
would appear in a similar light to their sexual perversions, though
the acceptance of which they spare themselves repressions.

   In conclusion, there remains to
be considered the question of what the mechanism, analogous to
repression, can be by means of which the ego detaches itself from
the external world. This cannot, I think, be answered without fresh
investigations; but such a mechanism, it would seem, must, like
repression, comprise a withdrawal of the cathexis sent out by the
ego.

4069

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM OF MASOCHISM

(1924)

4070

Intentionally left blank

4071

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM OF MASOCHISM

The existence of a masochistic trend in the
instinctual life of human beings may justly be described as
mysterious from the economic point of view. For if mental processes
are governed by the pleasure principle in such a way that their
first aim is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of
pleasure, masochism is incomprehensible. If pain and unpleasure can
be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is
paralysed - it is as though the watchman over our mental life were
put out of action by a drug.

   Thus masochism appears to us in
the light of a great danger, which is in no way true of its
counterpart, sadism. We are tempted to call the pleasure principle
the watchman over our life rather than merely over our mental life.
But in that case we are faced with the task of investigating the
relationship of the pleasure principle to the two classes of
instincts which we have distinguished - the death instincts and the
erotic (libidinal) life instincts; and we cannot proceed further in
our consideration of the problem of masochism till we have
accomplished that task.

   It will be remembered that we
have taken the view that the principle which governs all mental
processes is a special case of Fechner’s ‘tendency
towards stability’,¹ and have accordingly attributed to
the mental apparatus the purpose of reducing to nothing, or at
least of keeping as low as possible, the sums of excitation which
flow in upon it. Barbara Low has suggested the name of
‘Nirvana principle’ for this supposed tendency, and we
have accepted the term. But we have unhesitatingly identified the
pleasure-unpleasure principle with this Nirvana principle. Every
unpleasure ought thus to coincide with a heightening, and every
pleasure with a lowering, of mental tension due to stimulus; the
Nirvana principle (and the pleasure principle which is supposedly
identical with it) would be entirely in the service of the death
instincts, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into
the stability of the inorganic state, and it would have the
function of giving warnings against the demands of the life
instincts - the libido - which try to disturb the intended course
of life. But such a view cannot be correct. It seems that in the
series of feelings of tension we have a direct sense of the
increase and decrease of amounts of stimulus, and it cannot be
doubted that there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable
relaxations of tension. The state of sexual excitation is the most
striking example of a pleasurable increase of stimulus of this
sort, but it is certainly not the only one.

  
¹
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920
g
).

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4072

   Pleasure and unpleasure,
therefore, cannot be referred to an increase or decrease of a
quantity (which we describe as ‘tension due to
stimulus’), although they obviously have a great deal to do
with that factor. It appears that they depend, not on this
quantitative factor, but on some characteristic of it which we can
only describe as a qualitative one. If we were able to say what
this qualitative characteristic is, we should be much further
advanced in psychology. Perhaps it is the rhythm, the temporal
sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus.
We do not know.

   However this may be, we must
perceive that the Nirvana principle, belonging as it does to the
death instinct, has undergone a modification in living organisms
through which it has become the pleasure principle; and we shall
henceforward avoid regarding the two principles as one. It is not
difficult, if we care to follow up this line of thought, to guess
what power was the source of the modification. It can only be the
life instinct, the libido, which has thus, alongside of the death
instinct, seized upon a share in the regulation of the processes of
life. In this way we obtain a small but interesting set of
connections. The
Nirvana
principle expresses the trend of
the death instinct; the
pleasure
principle represents the
demands of the libido; and the modification of the latter
principle, the
reality
principle, represents the influence
of the external world.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4073

   None of these three principles is
actually put out of action by another. As a rule they are able to
tolerate one another, although conflicts are bound to arise
occasionally from the fact of the differing aims that are set for
each - in one case a quantitative reduction of the load of the
stimulus, in another a qualitative characteristic of the stimulus,
and, lastly, a postponement of the discharge of the stimulus and a
temporary acquiescence in the unpleasure due to tension.

   The conclusion to be drawn from
these considerations is that the description of the pleasure
principle as the watchman over our life cannot be rejected.

   To return to masochism. Masochism
comes under our observation in three forms: as a condition imposed
on sexual excitation, as an expression of the feminine nature, and
as a norm of behaviour. We may, accordingly, distinguish an
erotogenic
, a
feminine
and a
moral
masochism.
The first, the erotogenic, masochism - pleasure in pain - lies at
the bottom of the other two forms as well. Its basis must be sought
along biological and constitutional lines and it remains
incomprehensible unless one decides to make certain assumptions
about matters that are extremely obscure. The third, and in some
respects the most important, form assumed by masochism has only
recently been recognized by psycho-analysis as a sense of guilt
which is mostly unconscious; but it can already be completely
explained and fitted into the rest of our knowledge. Feminine
masochism, on the other hand, is the one that is most accessible to
our observation and least problematical, and it can be surveyed in
all its relations. We will begin our discussion with it.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4074

   We have sufficient acquaintance
with this kind of masochism in men (to whom, owing to the material
at my command, I shall restrict my remarks), derived from
masochistic - and therefore often impotent - subjects whose
phantasies either terminate in an act of masturbation or represent
a sexual satisfaction in themselves. The real-life performances of
masochistic perverts tally completely with these phantasies,
whether the performances are carried out as an end in themselves or
serve to induce potency and to lead to the sexual act. In both
cases - for the performances are, after all, only a carrying-out of
the phantasies in play - the manifest content is of being gagged,
bound, painfully beaten, whipped, in some way maltreated, forced
into unconditional obedience, dirtied and debased. It is far more
rare for mutilations to be included in the content, and then only
subject to strict limitations. The obvious interpretation, and one
easily arrived at, is that the masochist wants to be treated like a
small and helpless child, but, particularly, like a naughty child.
It is unnecessary to quote cases to illustrate this; for the
material is very uniform and is accessible to any observer, even to
non-analysts. But if one has an opportunity of studying cases in
which the masochistic phantasies have been especially richly
elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a
characteristically female situation; they signify, that is, being
castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby. For this
reason I have called this form of masochism,
a potiori
as it
were, the feminine form, although so many of its features point to
infantile life. This superimposed stratification of the infantile
and the feminine will find a simple explanation later on. Being
castrated - or being blinded, which stands for it - often leaves a
negative trace of itself in phantasies, in the condition that no
injury is to occur precisely to the genitals or the eyes.
(Masochistic tortures, incidentally, rarely make such a serious
impression as the cruelties of sadism, whether imagined or
performed.) A sense of guilt, too, finds expression in the manifest
content of masochistic phantasies; the subject assumes that he has
committed some crime (the nature of which is left indefinite) which
is to be expiated by all these painful and tormenting procedures.
This looks like a superficial rationalization of the masochistic
subject-matter, but behind it there lies a connection with
infantile masturbation. On the other hand, this factor of guilt
provides a transition to the third, moral, form of masochism.

   This feminine masochism which we
have been describing is entirely based on the primary, erotogenic
masochism, on pleasure in pain. This cannot be explained without
taking our discussion very far back.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4075

   In my
Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality
, in the section on the sources of infantile
sexuality, I put forward the proposition that ‘in the case of
a great number of internal processes sexual excitation arises as a
concomitant effect, as soon as the intensity of those processes
passes beyond certain quantitative limits’. Indeed, ‘it
may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in
the organism without contributing some component to the excitation
of the sexual instinct’. In accordance with this, the
excitation of pain and unpleasure would be bound to have the same
result, too. The occurrence of such a libidinal sympathetic
excitation when there is tension due to pain and unpleasure would
be an infantile physiological mechanism which ceases to operate
later on. It would attain a varying degree of development in
different sexual constitutions; but in any case it would provide
the physiological foundation on which the psychical structure of
erotogenic masochism would afterwards be erected.

   The inadequacy of this
explanation is seen, however, in the fact that it throws no light
on the regular and close connections of masochism with its
counterpart in instinctual life, sadism. If we go back a little
further, to our hypothesis of the two classes of instincts which we
regard as operative in the living organism, we arrive at another
derivation of masochism, which, however, is not in contradiction
with the former one. In (multicellular) organisms the libido meets
the instinct of death, or destruction, which is dominant in them
and which seeks to disintegrate the cellular organism and to
conduct each separate unicellular organism into a state of
inorganic stability (relative though this may be). The libido has
the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it
fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent
outwards - soon with the help of a special organic system, the
muscular apparatus - towards objects in the external world. The
instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for
mastery, or the will to power. A portion of the instinct is placed
directly in the service of the sexual function, where it has an
important part to play. This is sadism proper. Another portion does
not share in this transposition outwards; it remains inside the
organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation
described above, becomes libidinally bound there. It is in this
portion that we have to recognize the original, erotogenic
masochism.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4076

   We are without any physiological
understanding of the ways and means by which this taming of the
death instinct by the libido may be effected. So far as the
psycho-analytic field of ideas is concerned, we can only assume
that a very extensive fusion and amalgamation, in varying
proportions, of the two classes of instincts takes place, so that
we never have to deal with pure life instincts or pure death
instincts but only with mixtures of them in different amounts.
Corresponding to a fusion of instincts of this kind, there may, as
a result of certain influences, be a
de
fusion of them. How
large the portions of the death instincts are which refuse to be
tamed in this way by being bound to admixtures of libido we cannot
at present guess.

   If one is prepared to overlook a
little inexactitude, it may be said that the death instinct which
is operative in the organism - primal sadism - is identical with
masochism. After the main portion of it has been transposed
outwards on to objects, there remains inside, as a residuum of it,
the erotogenic masochism proper, which on the one hand has become a
component of the libido and, on the other, still has the self as
its object. This masochism would thus be evidence of, and a
remainder from, the phase of development in which the coalescence,
which is so important for life, between the death instinct and Eros
took place. We shall not be surprised to hear that in certain
circumstances the sadism, or instinct of destruction, which has
been directed outwards, projected, can be once more introjected,
turned inwards, and in this way regress to its earlier situation.
If this happens, a secondary masochism is produced, which is added
to the original masochism.

The Economic Problem Of Masochism

4077