Freud - Complete Works (692 page)

   All of this results in what is
familiar to us as the ‘(secondary) gain from illness’
which follows a neurosis. This gain comes to the assistance of the
ego in its endeavour to incorporate the symptom and increases the
symptom’s fixation. When the analyst tries subsequently to
help the ego in its struggle against the symptom, he finds that
these conciliatory bonds between ego and symptom operate on the
side of the resistances and that they are not easy to loosen.

   The two lines of behaviour which
the ego adopts towards the symptom are in fact directly opposed to
each other. For the other line is less friendly in character, since
it continues in the direction of repression. Nevertheless the ego,
it appears, cannot be accused of inconsistency. Being of a
peaceable disposition it would like to incorporate the symptom and
make it part of itself. It is from the symptom itself that the
trouble comes. For the symptom, being the true substitute for and
derivative of the repressed impulse, carries on the role of the
latter; it continually renews its demands for satisfaction and thus
obliges the ego in its turn to give the signal of unpleasure and
put itself in a posture of defence.

   The secondary defensive struggle
against the symptom takes many shapes. It is fought out on
different fields and makes use of a variety of methods. We shall
not be able to say much about it until we have made an enquiry into
the various different instances of symptom-formation. In doing this
we shall have an opportunity of going into the problem of anxiety -
a problem which has long been looming in the background. The wisest
plan will be to start from the symptoms produced by the hysterical
neurosis; for we are not as yet in a position to consider the
conditions in which the symptoms of obsessional neurosis, paranoia
and other neuroses are formed.

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IV

   Let us start with an infantile
hysterical phobia of animals - for instance, the case of
‘Little Hans’, whose phobia of horses was undoubtedly
typical in all its main features. The first thing that becomes
apparent is that in a concrete case of neurotic illness the state
of affairs is much more complex than one would suppose so long as
one was dealing with abstractions. It takes a little time to find
one’s bearings and to decide which the repressed impulse is,
what substitutive symptom it has found and where the motive for
repression lies.

   ‘Little Hans’ refused
to go out into the street because he was afraid of horses. This was
the raw material of the case. Which part of it constituted the
symptom? Was it his having the fear? Was it his choice of an object
for his fear? Was it his giving up of his freedom of movement? Or
was it more than one of these combined? What was the satisfaction
which he renounced? And why did he have to renounce it?

   At a first glance one is tempted
to reply that the case is not so very obscure. ‘Little
Hans’s’ unaccountable fear of horses was the symptom
and his inability to go out into the streets was an inhibition, a
restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to arouse
the anxiety-symptom. The second point is clearly correct; and in
the discussion which follows I shall not concern myself any further
with this inhibition. But as regards the alleged symptom, a
superficial acquaintance with the case does not even disclose its
true formulation. For further investigation shows that what he was
suffering from was not a vague fear of horses but a quite definite
apprehension that a horse was going to bite him. This idea, indeed,
was endeavouring to withdraw from consciousness and get itself
replaced by an undefined phobia in which only the anxiety and its
object still appeared. Was it perhaps this idea that was the
nucleus of his symptom?

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   We shall not make any headway
until we have reviewed the little boy’s psychical situation
as a whole as it came to light in the course of the analytic
treatment. He was at the time in the jealous and hostile Oedipus
attitude towards his father, whom nevertheless - except in so far
as his mother was the cause of estrangement - he dearly loved.
Here, then, we have a conflict due to ambivalence: a well-grounded
love and a no less justifiable hatred directed towards one and the
same person. ‘Little Hans’s’ phobia must have
been an attempt to solve this conflict. Conflicts of this kind due
to ambivalence are very frequent and they can have another typical
outcome, in which one of the two conflicting feelings (usually that
of affection) becomes enormously intensified and the other
vanishes. The exaggerated degree and compulsive character of the
affection alone betray the fact that it is not the only one present
but is continually on the alert to keep the opposite feeling under
suppression, and enable us to postulate the operation of a process
which we call repression by means of
reaction-formation
(in
the ego). Cases like ‘Little Hans’s’ show no
traces of a reaction-formation of this kind. There are clearly
different ways of egress from a conflict due to ambivalence.

   Meanwhile we have been able to
establish another point with certainty. The instinctual impulse
which underwent repression in ‘Little Hans’ was a
hostile one against his father. Proof of this was obtained in his
analysis while the idea of the biting horse was being followed up.
He had seen a horse fall down and he had also seen a playmate, with
whom he was playing at horses, fall down and hurt himself. Analysis
justified the inference that he had a wishful impulse that his
father should fall down and hurt himself as his playmate and the
horse had done. Moreover, his attitude towards someone’s
departure on a certain occasion makes it probable that his wish
that his father should be out of the way also found less hesitating
expression. But a wish of this sort is tantamount to an intention
of putting one’s father out of the way oneself - is
tantamount, that is, to the murderous impulse of the Oedipus
complex.

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   So far there seem to be no
connecting links between ‘Little Hans’s’
repressed instinctual impulse and the substitute for it which we
suspect is to be seen in his phobia of horses. Let us simplify his
psychical situation by setting on one side the infantile factor and
the ambivalence. Let us imagine that he is a young servant who is
in love with the mistress of the house and has received some tokens
of her favour. He hates his master, who is more powerful than he
is, and he would like to have him out of the way. It would then be
eminently natural for him to dread his master’s vengeance and
to develop a fear of him - just as ‘Little Hans’
developed a phobia of horses. We cannot, therefore, describe the
fear belonging to this phobia as a symptom. If ‘Little
Hans’, being in love with his mother, had shown fear of his
father, we should have no right to say that he had a neurosis or a
phobia. His emotional reaction would have been entirely
comprehensible. What made it a neurosis was one thing alone: the
replacement of his father by a horse. It is this displacement,
then, which has a claim to be called a symptom, and which,
incidentally, constitutes the alternative mechanism which enables a
conflict due to ambivalence to be resolved without the aid of a
reaction-formation. Such a displacement is made possible or
facilitated at ‘Little Hans’s’ early age because
the inborn traces of totemic thought can still be easily revived.
Children do not as yet recognize or, at any rate, lay such
exaggerated stress upon the gulf that separates human beings from
the animal world. In their eyes the grown man, the object of their
fear and admiration, still belongs to the same category as the big
animal who has so many enviable attributes but against whom they
have been warned because he may become dangerous. As we see, the
conflict due to ambivalence is not dealt with in relation to one
and the same person: it is circumvented, as it were, by one of the
pair of conflicting impulses being directed to another person as a
substitutive object.

   So far everything is clear. But
the analysis of ‘Hans’s’ phobia has been a
complete disappointment in one respect. The distortion which
constituted the symptom-formation was not applied to the
representative (the ideational content) of the instinctual impulse
that was to be repressed; it was applied to a quite different
representative and one which only corresponded to a
reaction
to the disagreeable instinct. It would be more in accordance with
our expectations if ‘Little Hans’ had developed,
instead of a fear of horses, as inclination to ill-treat them and
to beat them or if he had expressed in plain terms a wish to see
them fall down or be hurt or even die in convulsions (‘make a
row with their feet’). Something of the sort did in fact
emerge in his analysis, but it was not by any means in the
forefront of his neurosis. And, curiously enough, if he really had
produced a hostility of this sort not against his father but
against horses as his main symptom, we should not have said that he
was suffering from a neurosis. There must be something wrong either
with our view of repression or with our definition of a symptom.
One thing, of course, strikes us at once: if ‘Little
Hans’ had really behaved like that to horses, it would mean
that repression had in no way altered the character of his
objectionable and aggressive instinctual impulse itself but only
the object towards which it was directed.

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   Undoubtedly there are cases in
which this is all that repression does. But more than this happened
in the development of ‘Little Hans’s’ phobia -
how much more can be guessed from a part of another analysis.

   As we know, ‘Little
Hans’ alleged that what he was afraid of was that a horse
would bite him. Now some time later I was able to learn something
about the origin of another animal phobia. In this instance the
dreaded animal was a wolf; it, too, had the significance of a
father-substitute. As a boy the patient in question - a Russian
whom I did not analyse till he was in his twenties - had had a
dream (whose meaning was revealed in analysis) and, immediately
after it, had developed a fear of bring devoured by a wolf, like
the seven little goats in the fairy tale. 1 In the case of
‘Little Hans’ the ascertained fact that his father used
to play at horses with him doubtless determined his choice of a
horse as his anxiety-animal. In the same way it appeared at least
highly probable that the father of my Russian patient used, when
playing with him, to pretend to be a wolf and jokingly threaten to
gobble him up. Since then I have come across a third instance. The
patient was a young American who came to me for analysis. He did
not, it is true, develop an animal phobia, but it is precisely
because of this omission that his case helps to throw light upon
the other two. As a child he had been sexually excited by a
fantastic children’s story which had been read aloud to him
about an Arab chief who pursued a ‘ginger-bread man’ so
as to eat him up. He identified himself with this edible person,
and the Arab chief was easily recognizable as a father-substitute.
This phantasy formed the earliest substratum of his auto-erotic
phantasies.

   ¹
 ‘From the History of an
Infantile Neurosis’ (1918
b
).

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4265

   The idea of being devoured by the
father is typical age-old childhood material. It has familiar
parallels in mythology (e.g. the myth of Kronos) and in the animal
kingdom. Yet in spite of this confirmation the idea is so strange
to us that we can hardly credit its existence in a child. Nor do we
know whether it really means what it seems to say, and we cannot
understand how it can have become the subject of a phobia. Analytic
observation supplies the requisite information. It shows that the
idea of being devoured by the father gives expression, in a form
that has undergone regressive degradation, to a passive, tender
impulse to be loved by him in a genital-erotic sense. Further
investigation of the case history leaves no doubt of the
correctness of this explanation. The genital impulse, it is true,
betrays no sign of its tender purpose when it is expressed in the
language belonging to the superseded transitional phase between the
oral and sadistic organizations of the libido. Is it, moreover, a
question merely of the replacement of the representative by a
regressive form of expression or is it a question of a genuine
regressive degradation of the genitally-directed impulse in the id?
It is not at all easy to make certain. The case history of the
Russian ‘Wolf Man’ gives very definite support to the
second, more serious, view; for, from the time of the decisive
dream onward, the boy became naughty, tormenting and sadistic, and
soon afterwards developed a regular obsessional neurosis. At any
rate, we can see that repression is not the only means which the
ego can employ for the purpose of defence against an unwelcome
instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress,
it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by
repressing it. Sometimes, indeed, after forcing an instinct to
regress in this way, it goes on to repress it.

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   The case of the ‘Wolf
Man’ and the somewhat less complicated one of ‘Little
Hans’ raise a number of further considerations. But we have
already made two unexpected discoveries. There can be no doubt that
the instinctual impulse which was repressed in both phobias was a
hostile one against the father. One might say that that impulse had
been repressed by the process of being transformed into its
opposite. Instead of aggressiveness on the part of the subject
towards his father, there appeared aggressiveness (in the shape of
revenge) on the part of his father towards the subject. Since this
aggressiveness is in any case rooted in the sadistic phase of the
libido, only a certain amount of degradation is needed to reduce it
to the oral stage. This stage, while only hinted at in
‘Little Hans’s’ fear of being bitten, was
blatantly exhibited in the ‘Wolf Man’s’ terror of
being devoured. But, besides this, the analysis has demonstrated,
beyond a shadow of doubt, the presence of another instinctual
impulse of an opposite nature which had succumbed to repression.
This was a tender, passive impulse directed towards the father,
which had already reached the genital (phallic) level of libidinal
organization. As regards the final outcome of the process of
repression, this impulse seems, indeed, to have been the more
important of the two; it underwent a more far-reaching regression
and had a decisive influence upon the content of the phobia. In
following up a
single
instinctual repression we have thus
had to recognize a convergence of
two
such processes. The
two instinctual impulses that have been overtaken by repression -
sadistic aggressiveness towards the father and a tender passive
attitude to him - form a pair of opposites. Furthermore, a full
appreciation of ‘Little Hans’s’ case shows that
the formation of his phobia had had the effect of abolishing his
affectionate object-cathexis of his mother as well, though the
actual content of his phobia betrayed no sign of this. The process
of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus
complex - both his hostile and his tender impulses towards his
father and his tender impulses towards his mother. In my Russian
patient this state of affairs was much less obvious.