Freud - Complete Works (702 page)

   The individual will have made an
important advance in his capacity for self-preservation if he can
foresee and expect a traumatic situation of this kind which entails
helplessness, instead of simply waiting for it to happen. Let us
call a situation which contains the determinant for such an
expectation a danger-situation. It is in this situation that the
signal of anxiety is given. The signal announces: ‘I am
expecting a situation of helplessness to set in’, or:
‘The present situation reminds me of one of the traumatic
experiences I have had before. Therefore I will anticipate the
trauma and behave as though it had already come, while there is yet
time to turn it aside.’ Anxiety is therefore on the one hand
an expectation of a trauma, and on the other a repetition of it in
a mitigated form. Thus the two features of anxiety which we have
noted have a different origin. Its connection with expectation
belongs to the danger-situation, whereas its indefiniteness and
lack of object belong to the traumatic situation of helplessness -
the situation which is anticipated in the danger-situation.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4319

   Taking this sequence, anxiety -
danger - helplessness (trauma), we can now summarize what has been
said. A danger-situation is a recognized, remembered, expected
situation of helplessness. Anxiety is the original reaction to
helplessness in the trauma and is reproduced later on in the
danger-situation as a signal for help. The ego, which experienced
the trauma passively, now repeats it actively in a weakened
version, in the hope of being able itself to direct its course. It
is certain that children behave in this fashion towards every
distressing impression they receive, by reproducing it in their
play. In thus changing from passivity to activity they attempt to
master their experiences psychically. If this is what is meant by
‘abreacting a trauma’ we can no longer have anything to
urge against the phrase. But what is of decisive importance is the
first displacement of the anxiety-reaction from its origin in the
situation of helplessness to an expectation of that situation -
that is, to the danger-situation. After that come the later
displacements, from the danger to the determinant of the danger -
loss of the object and the modifications of that loss with which we
are already acquainted.

   The undesirable result of
‘spoiling’ a small child is to magnify the importance
of the danger of losing the object (the object being a protection
against every situation of helplessness) in comparison with every
other danger. It therefore encourages the individual to remain in
the state of childhood, the period of life which is characterized
by motor and psychical helplessness.

   So far we have had no occasion to
regard realistic anxiety in any different light from neurotic
anxiety. We know what the distinction is. A real danger is a danger
which threatens a person from an external object, and a neurotic
danger is one which threatens him from an instinctual demand. In so
far as the instinctual demand is something real, his neurotic
anxiety, too, can be admitted to have a realistic basis. We have
seen that the reason why there seems to be a specially close
connection between anxiety and neurosis is that the ego defends
itself against an instinctual danger with the help of the anxiety
reaction just as it does against an external real danger, but that
this line of defensive activity eventuates in a neurosis owing to
an imperfection of the mental apparatus. We have also come to the
conclusion that an instinctual demand often only becomes an
(internal) danger because its satisfaction would bring on an
external danger - that is, because the internal danger represents
an external one.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4320

   On the other hand, the external
(real) danger must also have managed to become internalized if it
is to be significant for the ego. It must have been recognized as
related to some situation of helplessness that has been
experienced.¹ Man seems not to have been endowed, or to have
been endowed to only a very small degree, with an instinctive
recognition of the dangers that threaten him from without. Small
children are constantly doing things which endanger their lives,
and that is precisely why they cannot afford to be without a
protecting object. In relation to the traumatic situation, in which
the subject is helpless, external and internal dangers, real
dangers and instinctual demands converge. Whether the ego is
suffering from a pain which will not stop or experiencing an
accumulation of instinctual needs which cannot obtain satisfaction,
the economic situation is the same, and the motor helplessness of
the ego finds expression in psychical helplessness.

   In this connection the puzzling
phobias of early childhood deserve to be mentioned once again. We
have been able to explain some of them, such as the fear of being
alone or in the dark or with strangers, as reactions to the danger
of losing the object. Others, like the fear of small animals,
thunder storms, etc., might perhaps be accounted for as vestigial
traces of the congenital preparedness to meet real dangers which is
so strongly developed in other animals. In man, only that part of
this archaic heritage is appropriate which has reference to the
loss of the object. If childhood phobias become fixated and grow
stronger and persist into later years, analysis shows that their
content has become associated with instinctual demands and has come
to stand for internal dangers as well.

  
¹
It may quite often happen that although a
danger-situation is correctly estimated in itself, a certain amount
of instinctual anxiety is added to the realistic anxiety. In that
case the instinctual demand before whose satisfaction the ego
recoils is a masochistic one: the instinct of destruction directed
against the subject himself. Perhaps an addition of this kind
explains cases in which reactions of anxiety are exaggerated,
inexpedient or paralysing. Phobias of heights (windows, towers,
precipices and so on) may have some such origin. Their hidden
feminine significance is closely connected with
masochism.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4321

C

ANXIETY, PAIN AND MOURNING

   So little is known about the
psychology of emotional processes that the tentative remarks I am
about to make on the subject may claim a very lenient judgement.
The problem before us arises out of the conclusion we have reached
that anxiety comes to be a reaction to the danger of a loss of an
object. Now we already know one reaction to the loss of an object,
and that is mourning. The question therefore is, when does that
loss lead to anxiety and when to mourning? In discussing the
subject of mourning on a previous occasion I found that there was
one feature about it which remained quite unexplained. This was its
peculiar painfulness.¹ And yet it seems self-evident that
separation from an object should be painful. Thus the problem
becomes more complicated: when does separation from an object
produce anxiety, when does it produce mourning and when does it
produce, it may be, only pain?

   Let me say at once that there is
no prospect in sight of answering these questions. We must content
ourselves with drawing certain distinctions and adumbrating certain
possibilities.

   Our starting-point will again be
the one situation which we believe we understand - the situation of
the infant when it is presented with a stranger instead of its
mother. It will exhibit the anxiety which we have attributed to the
danger of loss of object. But its anxiety is undoubtedly more
complicated than this and merits a more thorough discussion. That
it does have anxiety there can be no doubt; but the expression of
its face and its reaction of crying indicate that it is feeling
pain as well. Certain things seem to be joined together in it which
will later on be separated out. It cannot as yet distinguish
between temporary absence and permanent loss. As soon as it loses
sight of its mother it behaves as if it were never going to see her
again; and repeated consoling experiences to the contrary are
necessary before it learns that her disappearance is usually
followed by her re-appearance. Its mother encourages this piece of
knowledge which is so vital to it by playing the familiar game of
hiding her face from it with her hands and then, to its joy,
uncovering it again. In these circumstances it can, as it were,
feel longing unaccompanied by despair.

  
¹
‘Mourning and Melancholia’
(1917
e
).

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4322

   In consequence of the
infant’s misunderstanding of the facts, the situation of
missing its mother is not a danger-situation but a traumatic one.
Or, to put it more correctly, it is a traumatic situation if the
infant happens at the time to be feeling a need which its mother
should be the one to satisfy. It turns into a danger-situation if
this need is not present at the moment. Thus, the first determinant
of anxiety, which the ego itself introduces, is loss of perception
of the object (which is equated with loss of the object itself).
There is as yet no question of loss of love. Later on, experience
teaches the child that the object can be present but angry with it;
and then loss of love from the object becomes a new and much more
enduring danger and determinant of anxiety.

   The traumatic situation of
missing the mother differs in one important respect from the
traumatic situation of birth. At birth no object existed and so no
object could be missed. Anxiety was the only reaction that
occurred. Since then repeated situations of satisfaction have
created an object out of the mother; and this object, whenever the
infant feels a need, receives an intense cathexis which might be
described as a ‘longing’ one. It is to this new aspect
of things that the reaction of pain is referable. Pain is thus the
actual reaction to loss of object, while anxiety is the reaction to
the danger which that loss entails and, by a further displacement,
a reaction to the danger of the loss of object itself.

   We know very little about pain
either. The only fact we are certain of is that pain occurs in the
first instance and as a regular thing whenever a stimulus which
impinges on the periphery breaks through the devices of the
protective shield against stimuli and proceeds to act like a
continuous instinctual stimulus, against which muscular action,
which is as a rule effective because it withdraws the place that is
being stimulated from the stimulus, is powerless. If the pain
proceeds not from a part of the skin but from an internal organ,
the situation is still the same. All that has happened is that a
portion of the inner periphery has taken the place of the outer
periphery. The child obviously has occasion to undergo experiences
of pain of this sort, which are independent of its experiences of
need. This determinant of the generating of pain seems, however, to
have very little similarity with the loss of an object. And
besides, the element which is essential to pain, peripheral
stimulation, is entirely absent in the child’s situation of
longing. Yet it cannot be for nothing that the common usage of
speech should have created the notion of internal, mental pain and
have treated the feeling of loss of object as equivalent to
physical pain.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4323

   When there is physical pain, a
high degree of what may be termed narcissistic cathexis of the
painful place occurs. This cathexis continues to increase and
tends, as it were, to empty the ego. It is well known that when
internal organs are giving us pain we receive spatial and other
presentations of parts of the body which are ordinarily not
represented at all in conscious ideation. Again, the remarkable
fact that, when there is a psychical diversion brought about by
some other interest, even the most intense physical pains fail to
arise (I must not say ‘remain unconscious’ in this
case) can be accounted for by there being a concentration of
cathexis on the psychical representative of the part of the body
which is giving pain. I think it is here that we shall find the
point of analogy which has made it possible to carry sensations of
pain over to the mental sphere. For the intense cathexis of longing
which is concentrated on the missed or lost object (a cathexis
which steadily mounts up because it cannot be appeased) creates the
same economic conditions as are created by the cathexis of pain
which is concentrated on the injured part of the body. Thus the
fact of the peripheral causation of physical pain can be left out
of account. The transition from physical pain to mental pain
corresponds to a change from narcissistic cathexis to
object-cathexis. An object-presentation which is highly cathected
by instinctual need plays the same role as a part of the body which
is cathected by an increase of stimulus. The continuous nature of
the cathectic process and the impossibility of inhibiting it
produce the same state of mental helplessness. If the feeling of
unpleasure which then arises has the specific character of pain (a
character which cannot be more exactly described) instead of
manifesting itself in the reactive form of anxiety, we may
plausibly attribute this to a factor which we have not sufficiently
made use of in our explanations - the high level of cathexis and
‘binding’ that prevails while these processes which
lead to a feeling of unpleasure take place.