Freud - Complete Works (755 page)

   You will not forget that here I
am only treating these problems in so far as it is possible to
approach them from the direction of psycho-analysis. When they
first came into my range of vision more than ten years ago, I too
felt a dread of a threat against our scientific
Weltanschauung
, which, I feared, was bound to give place to
spiritualism or mysticism if portions of occultism were proved
true. To-day I think otherwise. In my opinion it shows no great
confidence in science if one does not think it capable of
assimilating and working over whatever may perhaps turn out to be
true in the assertions of occultists. And particularly so far as
thought-transference is concerned, it seems actually to favour the
extension of the scientific - or, as our opponents say, the
mechanistic - mode of thought to the mental phenomena which are so
hard to lay hold of. The telepathic process is supposed to consist
in a mental act in one person instigating the same mental act in
another person. What lies between these two mental acts may easily
be a physical process into which the mental one is transformed at
one end and which is transformed back once more into the same
mental one at the other end. The analogy with other
transformations, such as occur in speaking and hearing by
telephone, would then be unmistakable. And only think if one could
get hold of this physical equivalent of the psychical act! It would
seem to me that psycho-analysis, by inserting the unconscious
between what is physical and what was previously called
‘psychical’, has paved the way for the assumption of
such processes as telepathy. If only one accustoms oneself to the
idea of telepathy, one can accomplish a great deal with it - for
the time being, it is true, only in imagination. It is a familiar
fact that we do not know how the common purpose comes about in the
great insect communities: possibly it is done by means of a direct
psychical transference of this kind. One is led to a suspicion that
this is the original, archaic method of communication between
individuals and that in the course of phylogenetic evolution it has
been replaced by the better method of giving information with the
help of signals which are picked up by the sense organs. But the
older method might have persisted in the background and still be
able to put itself into effect under certain conditions - for
instance, in passionately excited mobs. All this is still uncertain
and full of unsolved riddles; but there is no reason to be
frightened by it.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4665

   If there is such a thing as
telepathy as a real process, we may suspect that, in spite of its
being so hard to demonstrate, it is quite a common phenomenon. It
would tally with our expectations if we were able to point to it
particularly in the mental life of children. Here we are reminded
of the frequent anxiety felt by children over the idea that their
parents know all their thoughts without having to be told them - an
exact counterpart and perhaps the source of the belief of adults in
the omniscience of God. A short time ago Dorothy Burlingham, a
trustworthy witness, in a paper on child analysis and the mother
published some observations which, if they can be confirmed, would
be bound to put an end to the remaining doubts on the reality of
thought-transference. She made use of the situation, no longer a
rare one, in which a mother and child are simultaneously in
analysis, and reported some remarkable events such as the
following. One day the mother spoke during her analytic session of
a gold coin that had played a particular part in one of the scenes
of her childhood. Immediately afterwards, after she had returned
home, her little boy, about ten years old, came to her room and
brought her a gold coin which he asked her to keep for him. She
asked him in astonishment where he had got it from. He had been
given it on his birthday; but his birthday had been several months
earlier and there was no reason why the child should have
remembered the gold coin precisely then. The mother reported the
occurrence to the child’s analyst and asked her to find out
from the child the reason for his action. But the child’s
analysis threw no light on the matter; the action had forced its
way that day into the child’s life like a foreign body. A few
weeks later the mother was sitting at her writing-desk to write
down, as she had been told to do, an account of the experience,
when in came the boy and asked for the gold coin back, as he wanted
to take it with him to show in his analytic session. Once again the
child’s analysis could discover no explanation of his
wish.

   And this brings us back to
psycho-analysis, which was what we started out from.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4666

LECTURE XXXI

THE
DISSECTION OF THE PSYCHICAL PERSONALITY

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - I know you are aware in regard to your own
relations, whether with people or things, of the importance of your
starting-point. This was also the case with psycho-analysis. It has
not been a matter of indifference for the course of its development
or for the reception it met with that it began its work on what is,
of all the contents of the mind, most foreign to the ego - on
symptoms. Symptoms are derived from the repressed, they are, as it
were, its representatives before the ego; but the repressed is
foreign territory to the ego - internal foreign territory - just as
reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external
foreign territory. The path led from symptoms to the unconscious,
to the life of the instincts, to sexuality; and it was then that
psycho-analysis was met by the brilliant objection that human
beings are not merely sexual creatures but have nobler and higher
impulses as well. It might have been added that, exalted by their
consciousness of these higher impulses, they often assume the right
to think nonsense and to neglect facts.

   You know better. From the very
first we have said that human beings fall ill of a conflict between
the claims of instinctual life and the resistance which arises
within them against it; and not for a moment have we forgotten this
resisting, repelling, repressing agency, which we thought of as
equipped with its special forces, the ego-instincts, and which
coincides with the ego of popular psychology. The truth was merely
that, in view of the laborious nature of the progress made by
scientific work, even psycho-analysis was not able to study every
field simultaneously and to express its views on every problem in a
single breath. But at last the point was reached when it was
possible for us to divert our attention from the repressed to the
repressing forces, and we faced this ego, which had seemed so
self-evident, with the secure expectation that here once again we
should find things for which we could not have been prepared. It
was not easy, however, to find a first approach; and that is what I
intend to talk to you about to-day.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4667

   I must, however, let you know of
my suspicion that this account of mine of ego-psychology will
affect you differently from the introduction into the psychical
underworld which preceded it. I cannot say with certainty why this
should be so. I thought first that you would discover that whereas
what I reported to you previously were, in the main, facts, however
strange and peculiar, now you will be listening principally to
opinions - that is, to speculations. But that does not meet the
position. After further consideration I must maintain that the
amount of intellectual working-over of the factual material in our
ego-psychology is not much greater than it was in the psychology of
the neuroses. I have been obliged to reject other explanations as
well of the result I anticipate: I now believe that it is somehow a
question of the nature of the material itself and of our being
unaccustomed to dealing with it. In any case, I shall not be
surprised if you show yourselves even more reserved and cautious in
your judgement than hitherto.

   The situation in which we find
ourselves at the beginning of our enquiry may be expected itself to
point the way for us. We wish to make the ego the matter of our
enquiry, our very own ego. But is that possible? After all, the ego
is in its very essence a subject; how can it be made into an
object? Well, there is no doubt that it can be. The ego can take
itself as an object, can treat itself like other objects, can
observe itself, criticize itself, and do Heaven knows what with
itself. In this, one part of the ego is setting itself over against
the rest. So the ego can be split; it splits itself during a number
of its functions - temporarily at least. Its parts can come
together again afterwards. That is not exactly a novelty, though it
may perhaps be putting an unusual emphasis on what is generally
known. On the other hand, we are familiar with the notion that
pathology, by making things larger and coarser, can draw our
attention to normal conditions which would otherwise have escaped
us. Where it points to a breach or a rent, there may normally be an
articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it
breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its
lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were
invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure.
Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind.
Even we cannot withhold from them something of the reverential awe
which peoples of the past felt for the insane. They have turned
away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more
about internal, psychical reality and can reveal a number of things
to us that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4668

   We describe one group of these
patients as suffering from delusions of being observed. They
complain to us that perpetually, and down to their most intimate
actions, they are being molested by the observation of unknown
powers - presumably persons - and that in hallucinations they hear
these persons reporting the outcome of their observation:
‘now he’s going to say this, now he’s dressing to
go out’ and so on. Observation of this sort is not yet the
same thing as persecution, but it is not far from it; it
presupposes that people distrust them, and expect to catch them
carrying out forbidden actions for which they would be punished.
How would it be if these insane people were right, if in each of us
there is present in his ego an agency like this which observes and
threatens to punish, and which in them has merely become sharply
divided from their ego and mistakenly displaced into external
reality?

   I cannot tell whether the same
thing will happen to you as to me. Ever since, under the powerful
impression of this clinical picture, I formed the idea that the
separation of the observing agency from the rest of the ego might
be a regular feature of the ego’s structure, that idea has
never left me, and I was driven to investigate the further
characteristics and connections of the agency which was thus
separated off. The next step is quickly taken. The content of the
delusions of being observed already suggests that the observing is
only a preparation for judging and punishing, and we accordingly
guess that another function of this agency must be what we call our
conscience. There is scarcely anything else in us that we so
regularly separate from our ego and so easily set over against it
as precisely our conscience. I feel an inclination to do something
that I think will give me pleasure, but I abandon it on the ground
that my conscience does not allow it. Or I have let myself be
persuaded by too great an expectation of pleasure into doing
something to which the voice of conscience has objected and after
the deed my conscience punishes me with distressing reproaches and
causes me to feel remorse for the deed. I might simply say that the
special agency which I am beginning to distinguish in the ego is
conscience. But it is more prudent to keep the agency as something
independent and to suppose that conscience is one of its functions
and that self-observation, which is an essential preliminary to the
judging activity of conscience, is another of them. And since when
we recognize that something has a separate existence we give it a
name of its own, from this time forward I will describe this agency
in the ego as the ‘
super-ego
’.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4669

   I am now prepared to hear you ask
me scornfully whether our ego-psychology comes down to nothing more
than taking commonly used abstractions literally and in a crude
sense, and transforming them from concepts into things - by which
not much would be gained. To this I would reply that in
ego-psychology it will be difficult to escape what is universally
known; it will rather be a question of new ways of looking at
things and new ways of arranging them than of new discoveries. So
hold to your contemptuous criticism for the time being and await
further explanations. The facts of pathology give our efforts a
background that you would look for in vain in popular psychology.
So I will proceed.

   Hardly have we familiarized
ourselves with the idea of a super-ego like this which enjoys a
certain degree of autonomy, follows its own intentions and is
independent of the ego for its supply of energy, than a clinical
picture forces itself on our notice which throws a striking light
on the severity of this agency and indeed its cruelty, and on its
changing relations to the ego. I am thinking of the condition of
melancholia, or, more precisely, of melancholic attacks, which you
too will have heard plenty about, even if you are not
psychiatrists. The most striking feature of this illness, of whose
causation and mechanism we know much too little, is the way in
which the super-ego - ‘conscience’, you may call it,
quietly - treats the ego. While a melancholic can, like other
people, show a greater or lesser degree of severity to himself in
his healthy periods, during a melancholic attack his super-ego
becomes over-severe, abuses the poor ego, humiliates it and
ill-treats it, threatens it with the direst punishments, reproaches
it for actions in the remotest past which had been taken lightly at
the time - as though it had spent the whole interval in collecting
accusations and had only been waiting for its present access of
strength in order to bring them up and make a condemnatory
judgement on their basis. The super-ego applies the strictest moral
standard to the helpless ego which is at its mercy; in general it
represents the claims of morality, and we realize all at once that
our moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension between
the ego and the super-ego. It is a most remarkable experience to
see morality, which is supposed to have been given us by God and
thus deeply implanted in us, functioning as a periodic phenomenon.
For after a certain number of months the whole moral fuss is over,
the criticism of the super-ego is silent, the ego is rehabilitated
and again enjoys all the rights of man till the next attack. In
some forms of the disease, indeed, something of a contrary sort
occurs in the intervals; the ego finds itself in a blissful state
of intoxication, it celebrates a triumph, as though the super-ego
had lost all its strength or had melted into the ego; and this
liberated, manic ego permits itself a truly uninhibited
satisfaction of all its appetites. Here are happenings rich in
unsolved riddles!