Freud - Complete Works (701 page)

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4313

   It must not be supposed that
these emendations provide us with a complete survey of all the
kinds of resistance that are met with in analysis. Further
investigation of the subject shows that the analyst has to combat
no less than five kinds of resistance, emanating from three
directions - the ego, the id and the super-ego. The ego is the
source of three of these, each differing in its dynamic nature. The
first of these three ego-resistances is the
repression
resistance, which we have already discussed above and about which
there is least new to be added. Next there is the
transference
resistance, which is of the same nature but
which has different and much clearer effects in analysis, since it
succeeds in establishing a relation to the analytic situation or
the analyst himself and thus re-animating a repression which should
only have been recollected. The third resistance, though also an
ego-resistance, is of quite a different nature. It proceeds from
the
gain from illness
and is based upon an assimilation of
the symptom into the ego. It represents an unwillingness to
renounce any satisfaction or relief that has been obtained. The
fourth variety, arising from the
id
, is the resistance
which, as we have just seen, necessitates
‘working-through’. The fifth, coming from the
super-ego
and the last to be discovered, is also the most
obscure though not always the least powerful one. It seems to
originate from the sense of guilt or the need for punishment; and
it opposes every move towards success, including, therefore, the
patient’s own recovery through analysis.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4314

(
b
)
Anxiety from Transformation of
Libido

   The view of anxiety which I have
put forward in these pages diverges somewhat from the one I have
hitherto thought correct. Formerly I regarded anxiety as a general
reaction of the ego under conditions of unpleasure. I always sought
to justify its appearance on economic grounds and I assumed, on the
strength of my investigations into the ‘actual’
neuroses, that libido (sexual excitation) which was rejected or not
utilized by the ego found direct discharge in the form of anxiety.
It cannot be denied that these various assertions did not go very
well together, or at any rate did not necessarily follow from one
another. Moreover, they gave the impression of there being a
specially intimate connection between anxiety and libido and this
did not accord with the general character of anxiety as a reaction
to unpleasure.

   The objection to this view arose
from our coming to regard the ego as the sole seat of anxiety. It
was one of the results of the attempt at a structural division of
the mental apparatus which I made in
The Ego and the Id
.
Whereas the old view made it natural to suppose that anxiety arose
from the libido belonging to the repressed instinctual impulses,
the new one, on the contrary, made the ego the source of anxiety.
Thus it is a question of instinctual (id-) anxiety or ego-anxiety.
Since the energy which the ego employs is desexualized, the new
view also tended to weaken the close connection between anxiety and
libido. I hope I have at least succeeded in making the
contradiction plain and in giving a clear idea of the point in
doubt.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4315

   Rank’s contention - which
was originally my own -, that the affect of anxiety is a
consequence of the event of birth and a repetition of the situation
then experienced, obliged me to review the problem of anxiety once
more. But I could make no headway with his idea that birth is a
trauma, states of anxiety a reaction of discharge to it and all
subsequent affects of anxiety an attempt to ‘abreact’
it more and more completely. I was obliged to go back from the
anxiety reaction to the
situation of danger
that lay behind
it. The introduction of this element opened up new aspects of the
question. Birth was seen to be the prototype of all later
situations of danger which overtook the individual under the new
conditions arising from a changed mode of life and a growing mental
development. On the other hand its own significance was reduced to
this prototypic relationship to danger. The anxiety felt at birth
became the prototype of an affective state which had to undergo the
same vicissitudes as the other affects. Either the state of anxiety
reproduced itself
automatically
in situations analogous to
the original situation and was thus an inexpedient form of reaction
instead of an expedient one as it had been in the first situation
of danger; or the ego acquired power over this affect, reproduced
it on its own initiative, and employed it as a warning of danger
and as a means of setting the pleasure-unpleasure mechanism in
motion. We thus gave the biological aspect of the anxiety affect
its due importance by recognizing anxiety as the general reaction
to situations of danger; while we endorsed the part played by the
ego as the seat of anxiety by allocating to it the function of
producing the anxiety affect according to its needs. Thus we
attributed two modes of origin to anxiety in later life. One was
involuntary, automatic and always justified on economic grounds,
and arose whenever a danger situation analogous to birth had
established itself. The other was produced by the ego as soon as a
situation of this kind merely threatened to occur, in order to call
for its avoidance. In the second case the ego subjects itself to
anxiety as a sort of inoculation, submitting to a slight attack of
the illness in order to escape its full strength. It vividly
imagines the danger situation, as it were, with the unmistakable
purpose of restricting that distressing experience to a mere
indication, a signal. We have already seen in detail how the
various situations of danger arise one after the other, retaining
at the same time a genetic connection.

   We shall perhaps be able to
proceed a little further in our understanding of anxiety when we
turn to the problem of the relation between neurotic anxiety and
realistic anxiety.

   Our former hypothesis of a direct
transformation of libido into anxiety possesses less interest for
us now than it did. But if we do nevertheless consider it, we shall
have to distinguish different cases. As regards anxiety evoked by
the ego as a signal, it does not come into consideration; nor does
it, therefore, in any of those danger-situations which move the ego
to bring on repression. The libidinal cathexis of the repressed
instinctual impulse is employed otherwise than in being transformed
into anxiety and discharged as such - as is most clearly seen in
conversion hysteria. On the other hand, further enquiry into the
question of the danger-situation will bring to our notice an
instance of the production of anxiety which will, I think, have to
be accounted for in a different way.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4316

(
c
)
Repression and Defence

   In the course of discussing the
problem of anxiety I have revived a concept or, to put it more
modestly, a term, of which I made exclusive use thirty years ago
when I first began to study the subject but which I later
abandoned. I refer to the term ‘defensive
process’.¹ I afterwards replaced it by the word
‘repression’, but the relation between the two remained
uncertain. It will be an undoubted advantage, I think, to revert to
the old concept of ‘defence’, provided we employ it
explicitly as a general designation for all the techniques which
the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a neurosis,
while we retain the word ‘repression’ for the special
method of defence which the line of approach taken by our
investigations made us better acquainted with in the first
instance.

   Even a purely terminological
innovation ought to justify its adoption; it ought to reflect some
new point of view or some extension of knowledge. The revival of
the concept of defence and the restriction of that of repression
takes into account a fact which has long since been known but which
has received added importance owing to some new discoveries. Our
first observations of repression and of the formation of symptoms
were made in connection with hysteria. We found that the perceptual
content of exciting experiences and the ideational content of
pathogenic structures of thought were forgotten and debarred from
being reproduced in memory, and we therefore concluded that the
keeping away from consciousness was a main characteristic of
hysterical repression. Later on, when we came to study the
obsessional neuroses, we found that in that illness pathogenic
occurrences are not forgotten. They remain conscious but they are
‘isolated’ in some way that we cannot as yet grasp, so
that much the same result is obtained as in hysterical amnesia.
Nevertheless the difference is great enough to justify the belief
that the process by which instinctual demands are set aside in
obsessional neurosis cannot be the same as in hysteria. Further
investigations have shown that in obsessional neurosis a regression
of the instinctual impulses to an earlier libidinal stage is
brought about through the opposition of the ego, and that this
regression, although it does not make repression unnecessary,
clearly works in the same sense as repression. We have seen, too,
that in obsessional neurosis anticathexis, which is also presumably
present in hysteria, plays a specially large part in protecting the
ego by effecting a reactive alteration in it. Our attention has,
moreover, been drawn to a process of ‘isolation’ (whose
technique cannot as yet be elucidated) which finds direct
symptomatic manifestation, and to a procedure, that may be called
magical, of ‘undoing’ what has been done - a procedure
about whose defensive purpose there can be no doubt, but which has
no longer any resemblance to the process of
‘repression’. These observations provide good enough
grounds for re-introducing the old concept of
defence
, which
can cover all these processes that have the same purpose - namely,
the protection of the ego against instinctual demands - and for
subsuming repression under it as a special case. The importance of
this nomenclature is heightened if we consider the possibility that
further investigations may show that there is an intimate
connection between special forms of defence and particular
illnesses, as, for instance, between repression and hysteria. In
addition we may look forward to the possible discovery of yet
another important correlation. It may well be that before its sharp
cleavage into an ego and an id, and before the formation of a
super-ego, the mental apparatus makes use of different methods of
defence from those which it employs after it has reached these
stages of organization.

  
¹
Cf. ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of
Defence’ (1894
a
).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4317

B

SUPPLEMENTARY REMARKS ON ANXIETY

   The affect of anxiety exhibits
one or two features the study of which promises to throw further
light on the subject. Anxiety has an unmistakable relation to
expectation
: it is anxiety
about
something. It has a
quality of
indefiniteness and lack of object
. In precise
speech we use the word ‘fear’ rather than
‘anxiety’ if it has found an object. Moreover, in
addition to its relation to danger, anxiety has a relation to
neurosis which we have long been trying to elucidate. The question
arises: why are not all reactions of anxiety neurotic - why do we
accept so many of them as normal? And finally the problem of the
difference between realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety awaits a
thorough examination.

   To begin with the last problem.
The advance we have made is that we have gone behind reactions of
anxiety to situations of danger. If we do the same thing with
realistic anxiety we shall have no difficulty in solving the
question. Real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic
anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic
anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus
a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that
it is an instinctual danger. By bringing this danger which is not
known to the ego into consciousness, the analyst makes neurotic
anxiety no different from realistic anxiety, so that it can be
dealt with in the same way.

   There are two reactions to real
danger. One is an affective reaction, an outbreak of anxiety. The
other is a protective action. The same will presumably be true of
instinctual danger. We know how the two reactions can co-operate in
an expedient way, the one giving the signal for the other to
appear. But we also know that they can behave in an inexpedient
way: paralysis from anxiety may set in, and the one reaction spread
at the cost of the other.

   In some cases the characteristics
of realistic anxiety and neurotic anxiety are mingled. The danger
is known and real but the anxiety in regard to it is over-great,
greater than seems proper to us. It is this surplus of anxiety
which betrays the presence of a neurotic element. Such cases,
however, introduce no new principle; for analysis shows that to the
known real danger an unknown instinctual one is attached.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4318

   We can find out still more about
this if, not content with tracing anxiety back to danger, we go on
to enquire what the essence and meaning of a danger-situation is.
Clearly, it consists in the subject’s estimation of his own
strength compared to the magnitude of the danger and in his
admission of helplessness in the face of it - physical helplessness
if the danger is real and psychical helplessness if it is
instinctual. In doing this he will be guided by the actual
experiences he has had. (Whether he is wrong in his estimation or
not is immaterial for the outcome.) Let us call a situation of
helplessness of this kind that has been actually experienced a
traumatic situation
. We shall then have good grounds for
distinguishing a traumatic situation from a danger-situation.