Freud - Complete Works (691 page)

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4254

   This brings us to a further
question: how is it possible, from an economic point of view, for a
mere process of withdrawal and discharge, like the withdrawing of a
preconscious ego-cathexis, to produce unpleasure or anxiety, seeing
that, according to our assumptions, unpleasure and anxiety can only
arise as a result of an
increase
in cathexis? The reply is
that this causal sequence should not be explained from an economic
point of view. Anxiety is not newly created in repression; it is
reproduced as an affective state in accordance with an already
existing mnemic image. If we go further and enquire into the origin
of that anxiety - and of affects in general - we shall be leaving
the realm of pure psychology and entering the borderland of
physiology. Affective states have become incorporated in the mind
as precipitates of primaeval traumatic experiences, and when a
similar situation occurs they are revived like mnemic symbols. I do
not think I have been wrong in likening them to the more recent and
individually acquired hysterical attack and in regarding them as
its normal prototypes. In man and the higher animals it would seem
that the act of birth, as the individual’s first experience
of anxiety, has given the affect of anxiety certain characteristic
forms of expression. But, while acknowledging this connection, we
must not lay undue stress on it nor overlook the fact that
biological necessity demands that a situation of danger should have
an affective symbol, so that a symbol of this kind would have to be
created in any case. Moreover, I do not think that we are justified
in assuming that whenever there is an outbreak of anxiety something
like a reproduction of the situation of birth goes on in the mind.
It is not even certain whether hysterical attacks, though they were
originally traumatic reproductions of this sort, retain that
character permanently.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4255

   As I have shown elsewhere, most
of the repressions with which we have to deal in our therapeutic
work are cases of
after
-pressure. They presuppose the
operation of earlier,
primal repressions
which exert an
attraction on the more recent situation. Far too little is known as
yet about the background and preliminary stages of repression.
There is a danger of over-estimating the part played in repression
by the super-ego. We cannot at present say whether it is perhaps
the emergence of the super-ego which provides the line of
demarcation between primal repression and after-pressure. At any
rate, the earliest outbreaks of anxiety, which are of a very
intense kind, occur before the super-ego has become differentiated.
It is highly probable that the immediate precipitating causes of
primal repressions are quantitative factors such as an excessive
degree of excitation and the breaking through of the protective
shield against stimuli.

   This mention of the protective
shield sounds a note which recalls to us the fact that repression
occurs in two different situations - namely, when an undesirable
instinctual impulse is aroused by some external perception, and
when it arises internally without any such provocation. We shall
return to this difference later. But the protective shield exists
only in regard to external stimuli, not in regard to internal
instinctual demands.

   So long as we direct our
attention to the ego’s attempt at flight we shall get no
nearer to the subject of symptom-formation. A symptom arises from
an instinctual impulse which has been detrimentally affected by
repression. If the ego, by making use of the signal of unpleasure,
attains its object of completely suppressing the instinctual
impulse, we learn nothing of how this has happened. We can only
find out about it from those cases in which repression must be
described as having to a greater or less extent failed. In this
event the position, generally speaking, is that the instinctual
impulse has found a substitute in spite of repression, but a
substitute which is very much reduced, displaced and inhibited and
which is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction. And when the
substitutive impulse is carried out there is no sensation of
pleasure; its carrying out has, instead, the quality of a
compulsion.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4256

   In thus degrading a process of
satisfaction to a symptom, repression displays its power in a
further respect. The substitutive process is prevented, if
possible, from finding discharge though motility; and even if this
cannot be done, the process is forced to expend itself in making
alterations in the subject’s own body and is not permitted to
impinge upon the external world. It must not be transformed into
action. For, as we know, in repression the ego is operating under
the influence of external reality and therefore it debars the
substitutive process from having any effect upon that reality.

   Just as the ego controls the path
to action in regard to the external world, so it controls access to
consciousness. In repression it exercises its power in both
directions, acting in the one manner upon the instinctual impulse
itself and in the other upon the representative of that impulse. At
this point it is relevant to ask how I can reconcile this
acknowledgement of the might of the ego with the description of its
position which I gave in
The Ego and the Id
. In that book I
drew a picture of its dependent relationship to the id and to the
super-ego and revealed how powerless and apprehensive it was in
regard to both and with what an effort it maintained its show of
superiority over them. This view has been widely echoed in
psycho-analytic literature. Many writers have laid much stress on
the weakness of the ego in relation to the id and of our rational
elements in the face of the daemonic forces within us; and they
display a strong tendency to make what I have said into a
corner-stone of a psycho-analytic
Weltanschauung
. Yet surely
the psycho-analyst, with his knowledge of the way in which
repression works, should, of all people, be restrained from
adopting such an extreme and one-sided view.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4257

   I must confess that I am not at
all partial to the fabrication of
Weltanschauungen
. Such
activities may be left to philosophers, who avowedly find it
impossible to make their journey through life without a Baedeker of
that kind to give them information on every subject. Let us humbly
accept the contempt with which they look down on us from the
vantage-ground of their superior needs. But since
we
cannot
forgo our narcissistic pride either, we will draw comfort from the
reflection that such ‘Handbooks to Life’ soon grow out
of date and that it is precisely our short-sighted, narrow and
finicky work which obliges them to appear in new editions, and that
even the most up-to-date of them are nothing but attempts to find a
substitute for the ancient, useful and all-sufficient Church
Catechism. We know well enough how little light science has so far
been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however
much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the
situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything
is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually
bring about a change. The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the
dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an
inch further beyond his nose.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4258

III

   To return to the problem of the
ego. The apparent contradiction is due to our having taken
abstractions too rigidly and attended exclusively now to the one
side and now to the other of what is in fact a complicated state of
affairs. We were justified, I think, in dividing the ego from the
id, for there are certain considerations which necessitate that
step. On the other hand the ego is identical with the id, and is
merely a specially differentiated part of it. If we think of this
part by itself in contradistinction to the whole, or if a real
split has occurred between the two, the weakness of the ego becomes
apparent. But if the ego remains bound up with the id and
indistinguishable from it, then it displays its strength. The same
is true of the relation between the ego and the super-ego. In many
situations the two are merged; and as a rule we can only
distinguish one from the other when there is a tension or conflict
between them. In repression the decisive fact is that the ego is an
organization and the id is not. The ego is, indeed, the organized
portion of the id. We should be quite wrong if we pictured the ego
and the id as two opposing camps and if we supposed that, when the
ego tries to suppress a part of the id by means of repression, the
remainder of the id comes to the rescue of the endangered part and
measures its strength with the ego. This may often be what happens,
but it is certainly not the initial situation in repression. As a
rule the instinctual impulse which is to be repressed remains
isolated. Although the act of repression demonstrates the strength
of the ego, in one particular it reveals the ego’s
powerlessness and how impervious to influence are the separate
instinctual impulses of the id. For the mental process which has
been turned into a symptom owing to repression now maintains its
existence outside the organization of the ego and independently of
it. Indeed, it is not that process alone but all its derivatives
which enjoy, as it were, this same privilege of
extra-territoriality; and whenever they come into associative
contact with a part of the ego-organization, it is not at all
certain that they will not draw that part over to themselves and
thus enlarge themselves at the expense of the ego. An analogy with
which we have long been familiar compared a symptom to a foreign
body which was keeping up a constant succession of stimuli and
reactions in the tissue in which it was embedded. It does sometimes
happen that the defensive struggle against an unwelcome instinctual
impulse is brought to an end with the formation of a symptom. As
far as can be seen, this is most often possible in hysterical
conversion. But usually the outcome is different. The initial act
of repression is followed by a tedious or interminable sequel in
which the struggle against the instinctual impulse is prolonged
into a struggle against the symptom.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4259

   In this secondary defensive
struggle the ego presents two faces with contradictory expressions.
The one line of behaviour it adopts springs from the fact that its
very nature obliges it to make what must be regarded as an attempt
at restoration or reconciliation. The ego is an organization. It is
based on the maintenance of free intercourse and of the possibility
of reciprocal influence between all its parts. Its desexualized
energy still shows traces of its origin in its impulsion to bind
together and unify, and this necessity to synthesize grows stronger
in proportion as the strength of the ego increases. It is therefore
only natural that the ego should try to prevent symptoms from
remaining isolated and alien by using every possible method to bind
them to itself in one way or another, and to incorporate them into
its organization by means of those bonds. As we know, a tendency of
this kind is already operative in the very act of forming a
symptom. A classical instance of this are those hysterical symptoms
which have been shown to be a compromise between the need for
satisfaction and the need for punishment. Such symptoms participate
in the ego from the very beginning, since they fulfil a requirement
of the super-ego, while on the other hand they represent positions
occupied by the repressed and points at which an irruption has been
made by it into the ego-organization. They are a kind of
frontier-station with a mixed garrison. (Whether all primary
hysterical symptoms are constructed on these lines would be worth
enquiring into very carefully.) The ego now proceeds to behave as
though it recognized that the symptom had come to stay and that the
only thing to do was to accept the situation in good part and draw
as much advantage from it as possible. It makes an adaptation to
the symptom - to this piece of the internal world which is alien to
it - just as it normally does to the real external world. It can
always find plenty of opportunities for doing so. The presence of a
symptom may entail a certain impairment of capacity, and this can
be exploited to appease some demand on the part of the super-ego or
to refuse some claim from the external world. In this way the
symptom gradually comes to be the representative of important
interests; it is found to be useful in asserting the position of
the self and becomes more and more closely merged with the ego and
more and more indispensable to it. It is only very rarely that the
physical process of ‘healing’ round a foreign body
follows such a course as this. There is a danger, too, of
exaggerating the importance of a secondary adaptation of this kind
to a symptom, and of saying that the ego has created the symptom
merely in order to enjoy its advantages. It would be equally true
to say that a man who had lost his leg in the war had got it shot
away so that he might thenceforward live on his pension without
having to do any more work.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4260

   In obse
4160
ssional neurosis and paranoia
the forms which the symptoms assume become very valuable to the ego
because they obtain for it, not certain advantages, but a
narcissistic satisfaction which it would otherwise be without. The
systems which the obsessional neurotic constructs flatter his
self-love by making him feel that he is better than other people
because he is specially cleanly or specially conscientious. The
delusional constructions of the paranoic offer to his acute
perceptive and imaginative powers a field of activity which he
could not easily find elsewhere.