Freud - Complete Works (683 page)

An Autobiographical Study

4204

   Another result of my taking up
the study of nervous disorders in general was that I altered the
technique of catharsis. I abandoned hypnotism and sought to replace
it by some other method, because I was anxious not to be restricted
to treating hysteriform conditions. Increasing experience had also
given rise to two grave doubts in my mind as to the use of
hypnotism even as a means to catharsis. The first was that even the
most brilliant results were liable to be suddenly wiped away if my
personal relation with the patient became disturbed. It was true
that they would be re-established if a reconciliation could be
effected; but such an occurrence proved that the personal emotional
relation between doctor and patient was after all stronger than the
whole cathartic process, and it was precisely that factor which
escaped every effort at control. And one day I had an experience
which showed me in the crudest light what I had long suspected. It
related to one of my most acquiescent patients, with whom hypnotism
had enabled me to bring about the most marvellous results, and whom
I was engaged in relieving of her suffering by tracing back her
attacks of pain to their origins. As she woke up on one occasion,
she threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a
servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time
onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the
hypnotic treatment should be discontinued. I was modest enough not
to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction,
and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious
element that was at work behind hypnotism. In order to exclude it,
or at all events to isolate it, it was necessary to abandon
hypnotism.

An Autobiographical Study

4205

   But hypnotism had been of immense
help in the cathartic treatment, by widening the field of the
patient’s consciousness and putting within his reach
knowledge which he did not possess in his waking life. It seemed no
easy task to find a substitute for it. While I was in this
perplexity there came to my help the recollection of an experiment
which I had often witnessed while I was with Bernheim. When the
subject awoke from the state of somnambulism, he seemed to have
lost all memory of what had happened while he was in that state.
But Bernheim maintained that the memory was present all the same;
and if he insisted on the subject remembering, if he asseverated
that the subject knew it all and had only to say it, and if at the
same time he laid his hand on the subject’s forehead, then
the forgotten memories used in fact to return, hesitatingly at
first, but eventually in a flood and with complete clarity. I
determined that I would act in the same way. My patients, I
reflected, must in fact ‘know’ all the things which had
hitherto only been made accessible to them in hypnosis; and
assurances and encouragement on my part, assisted perhaps by the
touch of my hand, would, I thought, have the power of forcing the
forgotten facts and connections into consciousness. No doubt this
seemed a more laborious process than putting the patients into
hypnosis, but it might prove highly instructive. So I abandoned
hypnotism, only retaining my practice of requiring the patient to
lie upon a sofa while I sat behind him, seeing him, but not seen
myself.

An Autobiographical Study

4206

III

   My expectations were fulfilled; I
was set free from hypnotism. But along with the change in technique
the work of catharsis took on a new complexion. Hypnosis had
screened from view an interplay of forces which now came in sight
and the understanding of which gave a solid foundation to my
theory.

   How had it come about that the
patients had forgotten so many of the facts of their external and
internal lives but could nevertheless recollect them if a
particular technique was applied? Observation supplied an
exhaustive answer to these questions. Everything that had been
forgotten had in some way or other been distressing; it had been
either alarming or painful or shameful by the standards of the
subject’s personality. It was impossible not to conclude that
that was precisely why it had been forgotten - that is, why it had
not remained conscious. In order to make it conscious again in
spite of this, it was necessary to overcome something that fought
against one in the patient; it was necessary to make efforts on
one’s own part so as to urge and compel him to remember. The
amount of effort required of the physician varied in different
cases; it increased in direct proportion to the difficulty of what
had to be remembered. The expenditure of force on the part of the
physician was evidently the measure of a
resistance
on the
part of the patient. It was only necessary to translate into words
what I myself had observed, and I was in possession of the theory
of
repression
.

   It was now easy to reconstruct
the pathogenic process. Let us keep to a simple example, in which a
particular impulsion had arisen in the subject’s mind but was
opposed by other powerful impulsions. We should have expected the
mental
conflict
which now arose to take the following
course. The two dynamic quantities - for our present purposes let
us call them ‘the instinct’ and ‘the
resistance’ - would struggle with each other for some time in
the fullest light of consciousness, until the instinct was
repudiated and the cathexis of energy withdrawn from its impulsion.
This would have been the normal solution. In a neurosis, however
(for reasons which were still unknown), the conflict found a
different outcome. The ego drew back, as it were, on its first
collision with the objectionable instinctual impulse; it debarred
the impulse from access to consciousness and to direct motor
discharge, but at the same time the impulse retained its full
cathexis of energy. I named this process
repression
; it was
a novelty, and nothing like it had ever before been recognized in
mental life. It was obviously a primary mechanism of defence,
comparable to an attempt at flight, and was only a forerunner of
the later-developed normal condemning judgement. The first act of
repression involved further consequences. In the first place the
ego was obliged to protect itself against the constant threat of a
renewed advance on the part of the repressed impulse by making a
permanent expenditure of energy, an
anticathexis
, and it
thus impoverished itself. On the other hand, the repressed impulse,
which was now
unconscious
, was able to find means of
discharge and of substitutive satisfaction by circuitous routes and
thus to bring the whole purpose of the repression to nothing. In
the case of conversion hysteria the circuitous route led to the
somatic innervation; the repressed impulse broke its way through at
some point or other and produced
symptoms
. The symptoms were
thus results of a compromise, for although they were substitutive
satisfactions they were nevertheless distorted and deflected from
their aim owing to the resistance of the ego.

An Autobiographical Study

4207

   The theory of repression became
the corner-stone of our understanding of the neuroses. A different
view had now to be taken of the task of therapy. Its aim was no
longer to ‘abreact’ an affect which had got on to the
wrong lines but to uncover repressions and replace them by acts of
judgement which might result either in the accepting or in the
condemning of what had formerly been repudiated. I showed my
recognition of the new situation by no longer calling my method of
investigation and treatment
catharsis
but
psycho-analysis
.

   It is possible to take repression
as a centre and to bring all the elements of psycho-analytic theory
into relation with it. But before doing so I have a further comment
of a polemical nature to make. According to Janet’s view a
hysterical woman was a wretched creature who, on account of a
constitutional weakness, was unable to hold her mental acts
together, and it was for that reason that she fell a victim to a
splitting of her mind and to a restriction of the field of her
consciousness. The outcome of psycho-analytic investigations, on
the other hand, showed that these phenomena were the result of
dynamic factors - of mental conflict and of repression. This
distinction seems to me to be far-reaching enough to put an end to
the glib repetition of the view that whatever is of value in
psycho-analysis is merely borrowed from the ideas of Janet. The
reader will have learned from my account that historically
psycho-analysis is completely independent of Janet’s
discoveries, just as in its content it diverges from them and goes
far beyond them. Janet’s works would never have had the
implications which have made psycho-analysis of such importance to
the mental sciences and have made it attract such universal
interest. I always treated Janet himself with respect, since his
discoveries coincided to a considerable extent with those of
Breuer, which had been made earlier but were published later than
his. But when in the course of time psycho-analysis became a
subject of discussion in France, Janet behaved ill, showed
ignorance of the facts and used ugly arguments. And finally he
revealed himself to my eyes and destroyed the value of his own work
by declaring that when he had spoken of ‘unconscious’
mental acts he had meant nothing by the phrase - it had been no
more than a
façon de parler
.

An Autobiographical Study

4208

   But the study of pathogenic
repressions and of other phenomena which have still to be mentioned
compelled psycho-analysis to take the concept of the
‘unconscious’ seriously. Psycho-analysis regarded
everything mental as being in the first instance unconscious; the
further quality of ‘consciousness’ might also be
present, or again it might be absent. This of course provoked a
denial from the philosophers, for whom ‘conscious’ and
‘mental’ were identical, and who protested that they
could not conceive of such an absurdity as the ‘unconscious
mental’. There was no help for it, however, and this
idiosyncrasy of the philosophers could only be disregarded with a
shrug. Experience (gained from pathological material, of which the
philosophers were ignorant) of the frequency and power of impulses
of which one knew nothing directly, and whose existence had to be
inferred like some fact in the external world, left no alternative
open. It could be pointed out, incidentally, that this was only
treating one’s own mental life as one had always treated
other people’s. One did not hesitate to ascribe mental
processes to other people, although one had no immediate
consciousness of them and could only infer them from their words
and actions. But what held good for other people must be applicable
to oneself. Anyone who tried to push the argument further and to
conclude from it that one’s own hidden processes belonged
actually to a second
consciousness
would be faced with the
concept of a consciousness of which one knew nothing, of an
‘unconscious consciousness’ - and this would scarcely
be preferable to the assumption of an ‘unconscious
mental’. If on the other hand one declared, like some other
philosophers, that one was prepared to take pathological phenomena
into account, but that the processes underlying them ought not to
be described as mental but as ‘psychoid’, the
difference of opinion would degenerate into an unfruitful dispute
about words, though even so expediency would decide in favour of
keeping the expression ‘unconscious mental’. The
further question as to the ultimate nature of this unconscious is
no more sensible or profitable than the older one as to the nature
of the conscious.

   It would be more difficult to
explain concisely how it came about that psycho-analysis made a
further distinction in the unconscious, and separated it into a
preconscious
and an unconscious proper. It will be
sufficient to say that it appeared a legitimate course to
supplement the theories that were a direct expression of experience
with hypotheses that were designed to facilitate the handling of
the material and related to matters which could not be a subject of
immediate observation. The very same procedure is adopted by the
older sciences. The subdivision of the unconscious is part of an
attempt to picture the apparatus of the mind as being built up of a
number of
agencies
or
systems
whose relations to one
another are expressed in spatial terms, without, however, implying
any connection with the actual anatomy of the brain. (I have
described this as the
topographical
method of approach.)
Such ideas as these are part of a speculative superstructure of
psycho-analysis, any portion of which can be abandoned or changed
without loss or regret the moment its inadequacy has been proved.
But there is still plenty to be described that lies closer to
actual experience.

An Autobiographical Study

4209

   I have already mentioned that my
investigation of the precipitating and underlying causes of the
neuroses led me more and more frequently to conflicts between the
subject’s sexual impulses and his resistances to sexuality.
In my search for the pathogenic situations in which the repressions
of sexuality had set in and in which the symptoms, as substitutes
for what was repressed, had had their origin, I was carried further
and further back into the patient’s life and ended by
reaching the first years of his childhood. What poets and students
of human nature had always asserted turned out to be true: the
impressions of that early period of life, though they were for the
most part buried in amnesia, left ineradicable traces upon the
individual’s growth and in particular laid down the
disposition to any nervous disorder that was to follow. But since
these experiences of childhood were always concerned with sexual
excitations and the reaction against them, I found myself faced by
the fact of
infantile sexuality
- once again a novelty and a
contradiction of one of the strongest of human prejudices.
Childhood was looked upon as ‘innocent’ and free from
the lusts of sex, and the fight with the demon of
‘sensuality’ was not thought to begin until the
troubled age of puberty. Such occasional sexual activities as it
had been impossible to overlook in children were put down as signs
of degeneracy or premature depravity or as a curious freak of
nature. Few of the findings of psycho-analysis have met with such
universal contradiction or have aroused such an outburst of
indignation as the assertion that the sexual function starts at the
beginning of life and reveals its presence by important signs even
in childhood. And yet no other finding of analysis can be
demonstrated so easily and so completely.