Freud - Complete Works (673 page)

   A conflict between two groups of
mental trends had to be looked on as the ground for repression and
accordingly as the cause of every neurotic illness. And here
experience taught us a new and surprising fact about the nature of
the forces that were struggling against each other. Repression
invariably proceeded from the sick person’s conscious
personality (his ego) and took its stand on aesthetic and ethical
motives; the impulses that were subjected to repression were those
of selfishness and cruelty, which can be summed up in general as
evil, but above all sexual wishful impulses, often of the crudest
and most forbidden kind. Thus the symptoms were a substitute for
forbidden satisfactions and the illness seemed to correspond to an
incomplete subjugation of the immoral side of human beings.

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   Advance in knowledge made ever
clearer the enormous part played in mental life by sexual wishful
impulses, and led to a detailed study of the nature and development
of the sexual instinct.¹ But we also came upon another purely
empirical finding, in the discovery that the experiences and
conflicts of the first years of childhood play an unsuspectedly
important part in the individual’s development and leave
behind them ineffaceable dispositions bearing upon the period of
maturity. This led to the revelation of something that had hitherto
been fundamentally overlooked by science - infantile sexuality,
which, from the tenderest age onwards, is manifested both in
physical reactions and in mental attitudes. In order to bring
together this sexuality of children with what is described as the
normal sexuality of adults and the abnormal sexual life of
perverts, the concept of what was sexual had itself to be corrected
and widened in a manner which could be justified by the evolution
of the sexual instinct.

   After hypnosis was replaced by
the technique of free association, Breuer’s cathartic
procedure turned into psycho-analysis, which for more than a decade
was developed by the author (Freud) alone. During that time
psycho-analysis gradually acquired a theory which appeared to give
a satisfactory account of the origin, meaning and purpose of
neurotic symptoms and provided a rational basis for medical
attempts at curing the complaint. I will once again enumerate the
factors that go to make up this theory. They are: emphasis on
instinctual life (affectivity), on mental dynamics, on the fact
that even the apparently most obscure and arbitrary mental
phenomena invariably have a meaning and a causation, the theory of
psychical conflict and of the pathogenic nature of repression, the
view that symptoms are substitutive satisfactions, the recognition
of the aetiological importance of sexual life, and in particular of
the beginnings of infantile sexuality. From a philosophical
standpoint this theory was bound to adopt the view that the mental
does not coincide with the conscious, that mental processes are in
themselves unconscious and are only made conscious by the
functioning of special organs (agencies or systems). By way of
completing this list, I will add that among the affective attitudes
of childhood the complicated emotional relation of children to
their parents - what is known as the Oedipus complex - came into
prominence. It became ever clearer that this was the nucleus of
every case of neurosis, and in the patient’s behaviour
towards his analyst certain phenomena of his emotional transference
emerged which came to be of great importance for theory and
technique alike.

  
¹
Freud,
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
(1905
d
)

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In the form which it
thus assumed, the psycho-analytic theory of the neuroses already
contained a number of things which ran counter to accepted opinions
and inclinations and which were calculated to provoke astonishment,
repugnance and scepticism in outsiders: for instance, the attitude
of psycho-analysis to the problem of the unconscious, its
recognition of an infantile sexuality and the stress it laid on the
sexual factor in mental life generally. But more was to follow.

III

   In order to reach even half way
to an understanding of how, in a hysterical girl, a forbidden
sexual wish can change into a painful symptom, it had been
necessary to make far-reaching and complicated hypotheses about the
structure and functioning of the mental apparatus. There was an
evident contradiction here between expenditure of effort and
result. If the conditions postulated by psycho-analysis really
existed, they were of a fundamental nature and must be able to find
expression in other phenomena besides hysterical ones. But if this
inference were correct, psycho-analysis would have ceased to be of
interest only to neurologists; it could claim the attention of
everyone to whom psychological research was of any importance. Its
findings would not only have to be taken into account in the field
of pathological mental life but could not be overlooked either in
coming to an understanding of normal functioning.

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   Evidence of its being of use for
throwing light on other than pathological mental activity was early
forthcoming in connection with two kinds of phenomena: with the
very frequent parapraxes that occur in everyday life - such as
forgetting things, slips of the tongue, and mislaying objects - and
with the dreams dreamt by healthy and psychically normal people.
Small failures of functioning, like the temporary forgetting of
normally familiar proper names, slips of the tongue and of the pen,
and so on, had hitherto not been considered worthy of any
explanation at all or were supposed to be accounted for by
conditions of fatigue, by distraction of the attention, etc. The
present writer then showed from many examples, in his book
The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901
b
), that events of
this kind have a meaning, and arise owing to a conscious intention
being interfered with by another, suppressed or actually
unconscious one. As a rule, quick reflection or a short analysis is
enough to reveal the interfering influence. Owing to the frequency
of such parapraxes as slips of the tongue, it became easy for
anyone to convince himself from his own experience of the existence
of mental processes which are not conscious, but which are
nevertheless operative and which at least find expression as
inhibitions and modifications of other, intended acts.

   The analysis of dreams led
further: it was brought to public notice by the present writer as
early as in 1900 in
The Interpretation of Dreams
. This
showed that dreams are constructed in just the same way as neurotic
symptoms. Like them, they may appear strange and senseless; but, if
we examine them by a technique which differs little from the free
association used in psycho-analysis, we are led from their manifest
content to a secret meaning, to the latent dream-thoughts. This
latent meaning is always a wishful impulse which is represented as
fulfilled at the moment of the dream. But, except in young children
and under the pressure of imperative physical needs, this secret
wish can never be expressed recognizably. It has first to submit to
a distortion, which is the work of restrictive, censoring forces in
the dreamer’s ego. In this way the manifest dream, as it is
remembered in waking life, comes about. It is distorted, to the
pitch of being unrecognizable, by concessions made to the
dream-censorship; but it can be revealed once more by analysis as
an expression of a situation of satisfaction or as the fulfilment
of a wish. It is a compromise between two conflicting groups of
mental trends, just as we have found to be the case with hysterical
symptoms. The formula which, at bottom, best meets the essence of
the dream is this: a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a
(repressed) wish. The study of the process which transforms the
latent dream-wish into the manifest content of the dream -a process
known as the ‘dream-work’ - has taught us the best part
of what we know of unconscious mental life.

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   Now a dream is not a morbid
symptom but a product of the normal mind. The wishes which it
represents as fulfilled are the same as those which are repressed
in neuroses. Dreams owe the possibility of their genesis merely to
the favourable circumstance that during the state of sleep, which
paralyses man’s power of movement, repression is mitigated
into the dream-censorship. If, however, the process of
dream-formation oversteps certain limits, the dreamer brings it to
a stop and wakes up in a fright. Thus it is proved that the same
forces and the same processes taking place between them operate in
normal as in pathological mental life. From the date of
The
Interpretation of Dreams
psycho-analysis had a twofold
significance. It was not only a new method of treating the neuroses
but it was also a new psychology; it claimed the attention not only
of nerve-specialists but also of all those who were students of a
mental science.

   The reception given it in the
scientific world was, however, no friendly one. For some ten years
no one took any notice of Freud’s works. About the year 1907
attention was drawn to psycho-analysis by a group of Swiss
psychiatrists (Bleuler and Jung, in Zurich), and a storm of
indignation, which was not precisely fastidious in its methods and
arguments, thereupon broke out, particularly in Germany. In this,
psycho-analysis was sharing the fate of many novelties which, after
a certain lapse of time, have found general recognition.
Nevertheless it lay in its nature that it should inevitably arouse
particularly violent opposition. It wounded the prejudices of
civilized humanity at some specially sensitive spots. It subjected
every individual, as it were, to the analytic reaction, by
uncovering what had by universal agreement been repressed into the
unconscious; and in this way it forced its contemporaries to behave
like patients who, under analytic treatment, above all else bring
their resistances to the fore. It must also be admitted that it was
no easy thing to become convinced of the correctness of the
psycho-analytic theories, nor to obtain instruction in the practice
of analysis.

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   The general hostility, however,
did not succeed in preventing psycho-analysis from continuous
expansion during the next decade in two directions: on the map, for
interest in it was constantly cropping up in new countries, and in
the field of the mental sciences, for it was constantly finding
applications in new branches of knowledge. In 1909 President G.
Stanley Hall invited Freud and Jung to give a series of lectures at
Clark University in Worcester, Mass., of which he was the head and
where they were given a friendly reception. Since then
psycho-analysis has remained popular in America, although precisely
in that country its name has been coupled with much superficiality
and some abuses. As early as in 1911, Havelock Ellis was able to
report that analysis was studied and practised, not only in Austria
and Switzerland, but also in the United States, in England, India,
Canada, and, no doubt, in Australia too.

   It was in this period of struggle
and of first blossoming, moreover, that the periodicals devoted
exclusively to psycho-analysis were inaugurated. These were the
Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische
Forschungen
(1909-1914), directed by Bleuler and Freud and
edited by Jung, which ceased publication at the outbreak of the
World War, the
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse
(1911),
edited by Adler and Stekel, which was soon replaced by the
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalse
(1913,
to-day in its tenth volume); further, since 1912,
Imago
,
founded by Rank and Sachs, a periodical for the application of
psycho-analysis to the mental sciences. The great interest taken in
the subject by Anglo-American doctors was shown in 1913 by the
founding of the still active
Psycho-Analytic Revue
by White
and Jelliffe. Later, in 1920,
The International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis
, intended specially for readers in England,
made its appearance under the editorship of Ernest Jones. The
Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag and the corresponding
English undertaking, The International Psycho-Analytical Press,
brought out a continuous series of analytic publications under the
name of the Internationale Psychoanalytische Bibliothek
(International Psycho-Analytical Library). The literature of
psycho-analysis is, of course, not to be found only in these
periodicals, which are for the most part supported by
psycho-analytic societies; it appears far and wide in a great
number of places, in scientific and in literary publications. Among
the periodicals of the Latin world which pay special attention to
psycho-analysis the
Rivista de Psiquiatria
, edited by H.
Delgado in Lima (Peru), may be specially mentioned.

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   An essential difference between
this second decade of psycho-analysis and the first lay in the fact
that the present writer was no longer its sole representative. A
constantly growing circle of pupils and followers had collected
around him, who devoted themselves first to the diffusion of the
theories of psycho-analysis and then extended them, supplemented
them and carried them deeper. In the course of years, several of
these supporters, as was inevitable, seceded, took their own paths,
or turned themselves into an opposition which seemed to threaten
the continuity of the development of psycho-analysis. Between 1911
and 1913 C. G. Jung in Zurich and Alfred Adler in Vienna produced
some stir by their attempts at giving new interpretations to the
facts of analysis and their efforts at a diversion from the
analytic standpoint. But it soon appeared that these secessions had
effected no lasting damage. What temporary success they achieved
was easily accounted for by the readiness of the mass of people to
have themselves set free from the pressure of the demands of
psycho-analysis by whatever path might be opened to them. The great
majority of co-workers remained firm and continued their work along
the lines indicated to them. We shall come on their names
repeatedly in the short account below of the findings of
psycho-analysis in the many and various fields of its
application.