Freud - Complete Works (743 page)

4583

LIBIDINAL TYPES

(1931)

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4585

LIBIDINAL TYPES

Observation teaches us that individual human
beings realize the general picture of humanity in an almost
infinite variety of ways. If we yield to the legitimate need to
distinguish particular types in this multiplicity, we shall at the
start have the choice as to what characteristics and what points of
view we shall take as the basis of our differentiation. For that
purpose physical qualities will doubtless serve no less well than
mental ones; the most valuable distinctions will be those which
promise to present a regular combination of physical and mental
characteristics.

   It is doubtful whether we are as
yet in a position to discover types to fulfil this requirement - as
we shall no doubt be able to do later, on some basis of which we
are still ignorant. If we confine our effort to setting up purely
psychological types, the libidinal situation will have a first
claim to serve as a basis for our classification. It may fairly be
demanded that this classification should not merely be deduced from
our knowledge or our hypotheses about the libido, but that it
should be easily confirmed in actual experience and that it should
contribute to the clarification of the mass of our observations and
help us to grasp them. It may at once be admitted that these
libidinal types need not be the only possible ones even in the
psychical field, and that, if we proceeded from other qualities, we
might perhaps establish a whole set of other psychological types.
But it must be required of all such types that they shall not
coincide with clinical pictures. On the contrary, they must
comprehend all the variations which according to our practical
judgement fall within the limits of the normal. In their extreme
developments, however, they may well approximate to clinical
pictures and in that way help to bridge the gulf that is supposed
to lie between the normal and the pathological.

   According, then, as the libido is
predominantly allocated to the provinces of the mental apparatus,
we can distinguish three main libidinal types. To give names to
these types is not particularly easy; following the lines of our
depth-psychology, I should like to call them the
erotic
, the
narcissistic
and the
obsessional
types.

Libidinal Types

4586

   The
erotic
type is easily
characterized. Erotics are those whose main interest - the
relatively largest part of whose libido - is turned towards love.
Loving, but above all being loved, is the most important thing for
them. They are dominated by the fear of loss of love and are
therefore especially dependent on others who may withhold their
love from them. Even in its pure form this type is a very common
one. Variants of it occur according as it is blended with another
type and in proportion to the amount of aggressiveness present in
it. From the social and cultural standpoint this type represents
the elementary instinctual demands of the id, to which the other
psychical agencies have become compliant.

   The second type is what I have
termed the
obsessional
type - a name which may at first seem
strange. It is distinguished by the predominance of the super-ego,
which is separated from the ego under great tension. People of this
type are dominated by fear of their conscience instead of fear of
losing love. They exhibit, as it were, an internal instead of an
external dependence. They develop a high degree of self-reliance;
and, from the social standpoint, they are the true, pre-eminently
conservative vehicles of civilization.

   The third type, justly called the
narcissistic
type, is mainly to be described in negative
terms. There is no tension between ego and super-ego (indeed, on
the strength of this type one would scarcely have arrived at the
hypothesis of a super-ego), and there is no preponderance of erotic
needs. The subject’s main interest is directed to
self-preservation; he is independent and not open to intimidation.
His ego has a large amount of aggressiveness at its disposal, which
also manifests itself in readiness for activity. In his erotic life
loving is preferred above being loved. People belonging to this
type impress others as being ‘personalities’; they are
especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the
role of leaders and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural
development or to damage the established state of affairs.

Libidinal Types

4587

   These pure types will hardly
escape the suspicion of having been deduced from the theory of the
libido. But we feel ourselves on the firm ground of experience when
we turn to the mixed types, which are to be observed so much more
frequently than the unmixed ones. These new types - the
erotic-obsessional
, the
erotic-narcissistic
and the
narcissistic-obsessional
- seem in fact to afford a good
classification of the individual psychical structures which we have
come to know though analysis. If we study these mixed types we find
in them pictures of characters with which we have long been
familiar. In the
erotic-obsessional
type it appears that the
preponderance of instinctual life is restricted by the influence of
the super-ego. In this type, dependence at once on contemporary
human objects and on the residues of parents, educators and
exemplars, is carried to its highest pitch. The
erotic-narcissistic
type is perhaps the one we must regard
as the commonest of all. It unites opposites, which are able to
moderate one another in it. One may learn from this type, as
compared with the two other erotic ones, that aggressiveness and
activity go along with a predominance of narcissism. Finally, the
narcissistic-obsessional
type produces the variation which
is most valuable from a cultural standpoint; for it adds to
independence of the external world and a regard for the demands of
conscience a capacity for vigorous action, and it strengthens the
ego against the super-ego.

   One might think one was making a
jest if one asked why no mention has been made here of another
mixed type which is theoretically possible - namely, the
erotic-obsessional-narcissistic
type. But the answer to this
jest is serious. Such a type would no longer be a type at all: it
would be the absolute norm, the ideal harmony. We thus realize that
the phenomenon of types arises precisely from the fact that, of the
three main ways of employing the libido in the economy of the mind,
one or two have been favoured at the expense of the others.

   The question may also be raised
of what the relation is of these libidinal types to pathology -
whether some of them have a special disposition to pass over into
neurosis, and if so, which types lead to which forms of neurosis.
The answer is that the setting-up of these libidinal types throws
no new light on the genesis of the neuroses. Experience shows that
all these types can exist without any neurosis. The pure types,
marked by the undisputed preponderance of a single mental agency,
seem to have a better chance of manifesting themselves as pure
characterological pictures, while we might expect that mixed types
would provide a more favourable soil for conditions leading to a
neurosis. But I think we should not make up our minds on these
matters till they have been submitted to a careful and specially
directed examination.

   It seems easy to infer that when
people of the erotic type fall ill they will develop hysteria, just
as those of the obsessional the will develop obsessional neurosis;
but these inferences, too, share the uncertainty which I have just
stressed. People of the narcissistic type who are exposed to a
frustration from the external world, though otherwise independent,
are peculiarly disposed to psychosis; and they also present
essential preconditions for criminality.

   It is a familiar fact that the
aetiological preconditions of neurosis are not yet known with
certainty. The precipitating causes of it are frustrations and
internal conflicts: conflicts between the three major psychical
agencies, conflicts arising within the libidinal economy in
consequence of our bisexual disposition and conflicts between the
erotic and the aggressive instinctual components. It is the
endeavour of the psychology of the neuroses to discover what makes
these processes, which belong to the normal course of mental life,
become pathogenic.

4588

FEMALE SEXUALITY

(1931)

4589

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4590

FEMALE SEXUALITY

I

During the phase of the normal Oedipus complex
we find the child tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite
sex, while its relation to the parent of its own sex is
predominantly hostile. In the case of a boy there is no difficulty
in explaining this. His first love-object was his mother. She
remains so; and, with the strengthening of his erotic desires and
his deeper insight into the relations between his father and
mother, the former is bound to become his rival. With the small
girl it is different. Her first object, too, was her mother. How
does she find her way to her father? How, when and why does she
detach herself from her mother? We have long understood that the
development of female sexuality is complicated by the fact that the
girl has the task of giving up what was originally her leading
genital zone the clitoris - in favour of a new zone - the vagina.
But it now seems to us that there is a second change of the same
sort which is no less characteristic and important for the
development of the female: the exchange of her original object -
her mother - for her father. The way in which the two tasks are
connected with each other is not yet clear to us.

   It is well known that there are
many women who have a strong attachment to their father; nor need
they be in any way neurotic. It is upon such women that I have made
the observations which I propose to report here and which have led
me to adopt a particular view of female sexuality. I was struck,
above all, by two facts. The first was that where the woman’s
attachment to her father was particularly intense, analysis showed
that it had been preceded by a phase of exclusive attachment to her
mother which had been equally intense and passionate. Except for
the change of her love-object, the second phase had scarcely added
any new feature to her erotic life. Her primary relation to her
mother had been built up in a very rich and many-sided manner. The
second fact taught me that the
duration
of this attachment
had also been greatly under-estimated. In several cases it lasted
until well into the fourth year - in one case into the fifth year -
so that it covered by far the longer part of the period of early
sexual efflorescence. Indeed, we had to reckon with the possibility
that a number of women remain arrested in their original attachment
to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men.
This being so, the pre-Oedipus phase in women gains an importance
which we have not attributed to it hitherto.

Female Sexuality

4591

   Since this phase allows room for
all the fixations and repressions from which we trace the origin of
the neuroses, it would seem as though we must retract the
universality of the thesis that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus
of the neuroses. But if anyone feels reluctant about making this
correction, there is no need for him to do so. On the one hand, we
can extend the content of the Oedipus complex to include all the
child’s relations to both parents; or, on the other, we can
take due account of our new findings by saying that the female only
reaches the normal positive Oedipus situation after she has
surmounted a period before it that is governed by the negative
complex. And indeed during that phase a little girl’s father
is not much else for her than a troublesome rival, although her
hostility towards him never reaches the pitch which is
characteristic of boys. We have, after all, long given up any
expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual
development.

   Our insight into this early,
pre-Oedipus, phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the
discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization
behind the civilization of Greece.

   Everything in the sphere of this
first attachment to the mother seemed to me so difficult to grasp
in analysis - so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to
revivify - that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially
inexorable repression. But perhaps I gained this impression because
the women who were in analysis with me were able to cling to the
very attachment to the father in which they had taken refuge from
the early phase that was in question. It does indeed appear that
women analysts - as, for instance, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Helene
Deutsch - have been able to perceive these facts more easily and
clearly because they were helped in dealing with those under their
treatment by the transference to a suitable mother-substitute. Nor
have I succeeded in seeing my way though any case completely, and I
shall therefore confine myself to reporting the most general
findings and shall give only a few examples of the new ideas which
I have arrived at. Among these is a suspicion that this phase of
attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to the
aetiology of hysteria, which is not surprising when we reflect that
both the phase and the neurosis are characteristically feminine,
and further, that in this dependence on the mother we have the germ
of later paranoia in women.¹ For this germ appears to be the
surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (? devoured) by the
mother. It is plausible to assume that this fear corresponds to a
hostility which develops in the child towards her mother in
consequence of the manifold restrictions imposed by the latter in
the course of training and bodily care and that the mechanism of
projection is favoured by the early age of the child’s
psychical organization.

  
¹
In the well-known case of delusional
jealousy reported by Ruth Mack Brunswick (1928), the direct source
of the disorder was the patient’s pre-Oedipus fixation (to
her sister).

Female Sexuality

4592

II

I began by stating the two facts which have
struck me as new: that a woman’s strong dependence on her
father merely takes over the heritage of an equally strong
attachment to her mother, and that this earlier phase has lasted
for an unexpectedly long period of time. I shall now go back a
little in order to insert these new findings into the picture of
female sexual development with which we are familiar. In doing
this, a certain amount of repetition will be inevitable. It will
help our exposition if, as we go along, we compare the state of
things in women with that in men.

   First of all, there can be no
doubt that the bisexuality, which is present, as we believe, in the
innate disposition of human beings, comes to the fore much more
clearly in women than in men. A man, after all, has only one
leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas a woman has two: the
vagina - the female organ proper - and the clitoris, which is
analogous to the male organ. We believe we are justified in
assuming that for many years the vagina is virtually non-existent
and possibly does not produce sensations until puberty. It is true
that recently an increasing number of observers report that vaginal
impulses are present even in these early years. In women,
therefore, the main genital occurrences of childhood must take
place in relation to the clitoris. Their sexual life is regularly
divided into two phases, of which the first has a masculine
character, while only the second is specifically feminine. Thus in
female development there is a process of transition from the one
phase to the other, to which there is nothing analogous in the
male. A further complication arises from the fact that the
clitoris, with its virile character, continues to function in later
female sexual life in a manner which is very variable and which is
certainly not yet satisfactorily understood. We do not, of course,
know the biological basis of these peculiarities in women; and
still less are we able to assign them any teleological purpose.

   Parallel with this first great
difference there is the other, concerned with the finding of the
object. In the case of a male, his mother becomes his first
love-object as a result of her feeding him and looking after him,
and she remains so until she is replaced by someone who resembles
her or is derived from her. A female’s first object, too,
must be her mother: the primary conditions for a choice of object
are, of course, the same for all children. But at the end of her
development, her father - a man - should have become her new
love-object. In other words, to the change in her own sex there
must correspond a change in the sex of her object. The new problems
that now require investigating are in what way this change takes
place, how radically or how incompletely it is carried out, and
what the different possibilities are which present themselves in
the course of this development.

Female Sexuality

4593

   We have already learned, too,
that there is yet another difference between the sexes, which
relates to the Oedipus complex. We have an impression here that
what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies with complete
strictness to the male child only and that we are right in
rejecting the term ‘Electra complex’ which seeks to
emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes. It is
only in the male child that we find the fateful combination of love
for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other as a
rival. In his case it is the discovery of the possibility of
castration, as proved by the sight of the female genitals, which
forces on him the transformation of his Oedipus complex, and which
leads to the creation of his super-ego and thus initiates all the
processes that are designed to make the individual find a place in
the cultural community. After the paternal agency has been
internalized and become a super-ego, the next task is to detach the
latter from the figures of whom it was originally the psychical
representative. In this remarkable course of development it is
precisely the boy’s narcissistic interest in his genitals -
his interest in preserving his penis - which is turned round into a
curtailing of his infantile sexuality.

   One thing that is left over in
men from the influence of the Oedipus complex is a certain amount
of disparagement in their attitude towards women, whom they regard
as being castrated. In extreme cases this gives rise to an
inhibition in their choice of object, and, if it is supported by
organic factors, to exclusive homosexuality.

Female Sexuality

4594

   Quite different are the effects
of the castration complex in the female. She acknowledges the fact
of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male
and her own inferiority; but she rebels against this unwelcome
state of affairs. From this divided attitude three lines of
development open up. The first leads to a general revulsion from
sexuality. The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys,
grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic
activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good
part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her
to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened
masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of
getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life’s aim;
and the phantasy of being a man in spite of everything often
persists as a formative factor over long periods. This
‘masculinity complex’ in women can also result in a
manifest homosexual choice of object. Only if her development
follows the third, very circuitous, path does she reach the final
normal female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object
and so finds her way to the feminine form of the Oedipus complex.
Thus in women the Oedipus complex is the end-result of a fairly
lengthy development. It is not destroyed, but created, by the
influence of castration; it escapes the strongly hostile influences
which, in the male, have a destructive effect on it, and indeed it
is all too often not surmounted by the female at all. For this
reason, too, the cultural consequences of its break-up are smaller
and of less importance in her. We should probably not be wrong in
saying that it is this difference in the reciprocal relation
between the Oedipus and the castration complex which gives its
special stamp to the character of females as social
beings.¹

  
¹
It is to be anticipated that men analysts
with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree
with what I have said here. They will hardly fail to object that
such notions spring from the ‘masculinity complex’ of
the male and are designed to justify on theoretical grounds his
innate inclination to disparage and suppress women. But this sort
of psycho-analytic argumentation reminds us here, as it so often
does, of Dostoevsky’s famous ‘knife that cuts both
ways’. The opponents of those who argue in this way will on
their side think it quite natural that the female sex should refuse
to accept a view which appears to contradict their eagerly coveted
equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy
can clearly lead to no decision.

Female Sexuality

4595

   We see, then, that the phase of
exclusive attachment to the mother, which may be called the
pre-Oedipus
phase, possesses a far greater importance in
women than it can have in men. Many phenomena of female sexual life
which were not properly understood before can be fully explained by
reference to this phase. Long ago, for instance, we noticed that
many women who have chosen their husband on the model of their
father, or have put him in their father’s place, nevertheless
repeat towards him, in their married life, their bad relations with
their mother. The husband of such a woman was meant to be the
inheritor of her relation to her father, but in reality he became
the inheritor of her relation to her mother. This is easily
explained as an obvious case of regression. Her relation to her
mother was the original one, and her attachment to her father was
built up on it, and now, in marriage, the original relation emerges
from repression. For the main content of her development to
womanhood lay in the carrying over of her affective object
attachments from her mother to her father.