Freud - Complete Works (678 page)

  
¹
In my first critical account of the
‘History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’
(1914
d
), I recognized that this fact represents the core of
truth contained in Adler’s theory. That theory has no
hesitation in explaining the whole world by this single point
(‘organ inferiority’, the ‘masculine
protest’, ‘breaking away from the feminine line’)
and prides itself upon having in this way robbed sexuality of its
importance and put the desire for power in its place! Thus the only
organ which could claim to be called ‘inferior’ without
any ambiguity would be the clitoris. On the other hand, one hears
of analysts who boast that, though they have worked for dozens of
years, they have never found a sign of the existence of a
castration complex. We must bow our heads in recognition of the
greatness of this achievement, even though it is only a negative
one, a piece of virtuosity in the art of overlooking and mistaking.
The two theories form an interesting pair of opposites: in the
latter not a trace of a castration complex, in the former nothing
else than its consequences.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4152

   Even after penis-envy has
abandoned its true object, it continues to exist: by an easy
displacement it persists in the character-trait of
jealousy
.
Of course, jealousy is not limited to one sex and has a wider
foundation than this, but I am of opinion that it plays a far
larger part in the mental life of women than of men and that that
is because it is enormously reinforced from the direction of
displaced penis-envy. While I was still unaware of this source of
jealousy and was considering the phantasy ‘a child is being
beaten’, which occurs so commonly in girls, I constructed a
first phase for it in which its meaning was that another child, a
rival of whom the subject was jealous, was to be beaten.¹ This
phantasy seems to be a relic of the phallic period in girls. The
peculiar rigidity which struck me so much in the monotonous formula
‘a child is being beaten’ can probably be interpreted
in a special way. The child which is being beaten (or caressed) may
ultimately be nothing more nor less than the clitoris itself, so
that at its very lowest level the statement will contain a
confession of masturbation, which has remained attached to the
content of the formula from its beginning in the phallic phase till
later life.

   A third consequence of penis-envy
seems to be a loosening of the girl’s relation with her
mother as a love-object. The situation as a whole is not very
clear, but it can be seen that in the end the girl’s mother,
who sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped, is almost
always held responsible for her lack of a penis. The way in which
this comes about historically is often that soon after the girl has
discovered that her genitals are unsatisfactory she begins to show
jealousy of another child on the ground that her mother is fonder
of it than of her, which serves as a reason for her giving up her
affectionate relation to her mother. It will fit in with this if
the child which has been preferred by her mother is made into the
first object of the beating-phantasy which ends in
masturbation.

  
¹
‘"A child is Being
Beaten"’ (1919
e
).

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4153

   There is yet another surprising
effect of penis-envy, or of the discovery of the inferiority of the
clitoris, which is undoubtedly the most important of all. In the
past I had often formed an impression that in general women
tolerate masturbation worse than men, that they more frequently
fight against it and that they are unable to make use of it in
circumstances in which a man would seize upon it as a way of escape
without any hesitation. Experience would no doubt elicit
innumerable exceptions to this statement, if we attempted to turn
it into a rule. The reactions of human individuals of both sexes
are of course made up of masculine and feminine traits. But it
appeared to me nevertheless as though masturbation were further
removed from the nature of women than of men, and the solution of
the problem could be assisted by the reflection that masturbation,
at all events of the clitoris, is a masculine activity and that the
elimination of clitoridal sexuality is a necessary precondition for
the development of femininity. Analyses of the remote phallic
period have now taught me that in girls, soon after the first signs
of penis-envy, an intense current of feeling against masturbation
makes its appearance, which cannot be attributed exclusively to the
educational influence of those in charge of the child. This impulse
is clearly a forerunner of the wave of repression which at puberty
will do away with a large amount of the girl’s masculine
sexuality in order to make room for the development of her
femininity. It may happen that this first opposition to auto-erotic
activity fails to attain its end. And this was in fact the case in
the instances which I analysed. The conflict continued, and both
then and later the girl did everything she could to free herself
from the compulsion to masturbate. Many of the later manifestations
of sexual life in women remain unintelligible unless this powerful
motive is recognized.

   I cannot explain the opposition
which is raised in this way by little girls to phallic masturbation
except by supposing that there is some concurrent factor which
turns her violently against that pleasurable activity. Such a
factor lies close at hand. It cannot be anything else than her
narcissistic sense of humiliation which is bound up with
penis-envy, the reminder that after all this is a point on which
she cannot compete with boys and that it would therefore be best
for her to give up the idea of doing so. Thus the little
girl’s recognition of the anatomical distinction between the
sexes forces her away from masculinity and masculine masturbation
on to new lines which lead to the development of femininity.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4154

   So far there has been no question
of the Oedipus complex, nor has it up to this point played any
part. But now the girl’s libido slips into a new position
along the line - there is no other way of putting it - of the
equation ‘penis-child’. She gives up her wish for a
penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child: and
with that
purpose in view
she takes her father as a love object. Her
mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The girl has turned into
a little woman. If I am to credit a single analytic instance, this
new situation can give rise to physical sensations which would have
to be regarded as a premature awakening of the female genital
apparatus. When the girl’s attachment to her father comes to
grief later on and has to be abandoned, it may give place to an
identification with him and the girl may thus return to her
masculinity complex and perhaps remain fixated in it.

   I have now said the essence of
what I had to say: I will stop, therefore, and cast an eye over our
findings. We have gained some insight into the prehistory of the
Oedipus complex in girls. The corresponding period in boys is more
or less unknown. In girls the Oedipus complex is a secondary
formation. The operations of the castration complex precede it and
prepare for it. As regards the relation between the Oedipus and
castration complexes there is a fundamental contrast between the
two sexes.
Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex is destroyed by
the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to
by the castration complex
. This contradiction is cleared up if
we reflect that the castration complex always operates in the sense
implied in its subject-matter: it inhibits and limits masculinity
and encourages femininity. The difference between the sexual
development of males and females at the stage we have been
considering is an intelligible consequence of the anatomical
distinction between their genitals and of the psychical situation
involved in it; it corresponds to the difference between a
castration that has been carried out and one that has merely been
threatened. In their essentials, therefore, our findings are
self-evident and it should have been possible to foresee them.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4155

   The Oedipus complex, however, is
such an important thing that the manner in which one enters and
leaves it cannot be without its effects. In boys (as I have shown
at length in the paper to which I have just referred and to which
all of my present remarks are closely related) the complex is not
simply repressed, it is literally smashed to pieces by the shock of
threatened castration. Its libidinal cathexes are abandoned,
desexualized and in part sublimated; its objects are incorporated
into the ego, where they form the nucleus of the super-ego and give
that new structure its characteristic qualities. In normal, or, it
is better to say, in ideal cases, the Oedipus complex exists no
longer, even in the unconscious; the super-ego has become its heir.
Since the penis (to follow Ferenczi) owes its extraordinarily high
narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the
propagation of the species, the catastrophe to the Oedipus complex
(the abandonment of incest and the institution of conscience and
morality) may be regarded as a victory of the race over the
individual. This is an interesting point of view when one considers
that neurosis is based upon a struggle of the ego against the
demands of the sexual function. But to leave the standpoint of
individual psychology is not of any immediate help in clarifying
this complicated situation.

   In girls the motive for the
demolition of the Oedipus complex is lacking. Castration has
already had its effect, which was to force the child into the
situation of the Oedipus complex. Thus the Oedipus complex escapes
the fate which it meets with in boys: it may be slowly abandoned or
dealt with by repression, or its effects may persist far into
women’s normal mental life. I cannot evade the notion (though
I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what
is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their
super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of
its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.
Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up
against women - that they show less sense of justice than men, that
they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that
they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of
affection or hostility - all these would be amply accounted for by
the modification in the formation of their super-ego which we have
inferred above. We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from
such conclusions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious
to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position
and worth; but we shall, of course, willingly agree that the
majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that
all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition
and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and
feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity
remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.

Some Psychical Consequences Of The Anatomical Distinction Between The Sexes

4156

   I am inclined to set some value
on the considerations I have brought forward upon the psychical
consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. I am
aware, however, that this opinion can only be maintained if my
findings, which are based on a handful of cases, turn out to have
general validity and to be typical. If not, they would remain no
more than a contribution to our knowledge of the different paths
along which sexual life develops.

   In the valuable and comprehensive
studies on the masculinity and castration complexes in women by
Abraham (1921), Horney (1923) and Helene Deutsch (1925) there is
much that touches closely on what I have written but nothing that
coincides with it completely, so that here again I feel justified
in publishing this paper.

4157

JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS AND THE THEORY OF DREAMS

(1923)

4158

Intentionally left blank

4159

JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS AND THE THEORY OF DREAMS

There is much of interest to be said on the
subject of apparent scientific originality. When some new idea
comes up in science, which is hailed at first as a discovery and is
also as a rule disputed as such, objective research soon afterwards
reveals that after all it was in fact no novelty. Usually the
discovery has already been made repeatedly and has afterwards been
forgotten, often at very long intervals of time. Or at least it has
had forerunners, had been obscurely surmised or incompletely
enunciated. This is too well known to call for further
discussion.

   But the subjective side of
originality also deserves consideration. A scientific worker may
sometimes ask himself what was the source of the ideas peculiar to
himself which he has applied to his material. As regards some of
them he will discover without much reflection the hints from which
they were derived, the statements made by other people which he has
picked out and modified and whose implications he has elaborated.
But as regards others of his ideas he can make no such
acknowledgements; he can only suppose that these thoughts and lines
of approach were generated - he cannot tell how - in his own mental
activity, and it is on them that he bases his claim to
originality.

   Careful psychological
investigation, however, diminishes this claim still further. It
reveals hidden and long-forgotten sources which gave the stimulus
to the apparently original ideas, and it replaces the ostensible
new creation by a revival of something forgotten applied to fresh
material. There is nothing to regret in this; we had no right to
expect that what was ‘original’ could be untraceable
and undetermined.

   In my case, too, the originality
of many of the new ideas employed by me in the interpretation of
dreams and in psycho-analysis has evaporated in this way. I am
ignorant of the source of only one of these ideas. It was no less
than the key to my view of dreams and helped me to solve their
riddles, so far as it has been possible to solve them hitherto. I
started out from the strange, confused and senseless character of
so many dreams, and hit upon the notion that dreams were bound to
become like that because something was struggling for expression in
them which was opposed by a resistance from other mental forces. In
dreams hidden impulses were stirring which stood in contradiction
to what might be called the dreamer’s official ethical and
aesthetic creed; the dreamer was thus ashamed of these impulses,
turned away from them and refused to acknowledge them in day-time,
and if during the night he could not withhold expression of some
kind from them, he submitted them to a
‘dream-distortion’ which made the content of the dream
appear confused and senseless. To the mental force in human beings
which keeps watch on this internal contradiction and distorts the
dream’s primitive instinctual impulses in favour of
conventional or of higher moral standards, I gave the name of
‘dream-censorship’.

Josef Popper-Lynkeus And The Theory Of Dreams

4160

   Precisely this essential part of
my theory of dreams was, however, discovered by Popper-Lynkeus
independently. I will ask the reader to compare the following
quotation from a story called ‘Träumen wie Wachen’
in his
Phantasien eines Realisten
which was certainly
written in ignorance of the theory of dreams which I published in
1900, just as I myself was then in ignorance of Lynkeus’s
Phantasien
:

   ‘About a man who has the
remarkable attribute of never dreaming nonsense.

   ‘"This splendid gift
of yours, for dreaming as though you were waking, is a consequence
of your virtues, of your kindness, your sense of justice, and your
love of truth; it is the moral serenity of your nature which makes
me understand all about you."

   ‘"But when I think the
matter over properly", replied the other, "I almost
believe that everyone is made like me, and that no one at all ever
dreams nonsense. Any dream which one can remember clearly enough to
describe it afterwards - any dream, that is to say, which is not a
fever-dream - must
always
make sense, and it cannot possibly
be otherwise. For things that were mutually contradictory could not
group themselves into a single whole. The fact that time and space
are often thrown into confusion does not affect the true content of
the dream, since no doubt neither of them are of significance for
its real essence. We often do the same thing in waking life. Only
think of fairy tales and of the many daring products of the
imagination, which are full of meaning and of which only a man
without intelligence could say: ‘This is nonsense, for it is
impossible.’"

   ‘"If only one always
knew how to interpret dreams in the right way, as you have just
done with mine!" said his friend.

   ‘"That is certainly no
easy task; but with a little attention on the part of the dreamer
himself it should no doubt always succeed. - You ask why it is that
for the most part it does
not
succeed? In you other people
there seems always to be something that lies concealed in your
dreams, something unchaste in a special and higher sense, a certain
secret quality in your being which it is hard to follow. And that
is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning or even to
be nonsense. But in the deepest sense this is not in the least so;
indeed, it cannot be so at all - for it is always the same man,
whether he is awake or dreaming."’

   I believe that what enabled
me
to discover the cause of dream-distortion was my moral
courage. In the case of Popper it was the purity, love of truth and
moral serenity of his nature.