Freud - Complete Works (763 page)
You may perhaps shrug your
shoulders and say: ‘That isn’t natural science,
it’s Schopenhauer’s philosophy!’ But, Ladies and
Gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something
that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed
research? Moreover, there is nothing that has not been said
already, and similar things had been said by many people before
Schopenhauer. Furthermore, what we are saying is not even genuine
Schopenhauer. We are not asserting that death is the only aim of
life; we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as
death. We recognize two basic instincts and give each of them its
own aim. How the two of them are mingled in the process of living,
how the death instinct is made to serve the purposes of Eros,
especially by being turned outwards as aggressiveness - these are
tasks which are left to future investigation. We have not gone
beyond the point at which this prospect lies open before us. The
question, too, of whether the conservative character may not belong
to all instincts without exception, whether the erotic instincts as
well may not be seeking to bring back an earlier state of things
when they strive to bring about a synthesis of living things into
greater unities - this question, too, we must leave unanswered.
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We have travelled somewhat far
from our basis. I will tell you in retrospect the starting-point of
these reflections on the theory of the instincts. It was the same
as that which led us to revise the relation between the ego and the
unconscious - the impression derived from the work of analysis that
the patient who puts up a resistance is so often unaware of that
resistance. Not only the fact of the resistance is unconscious to
him, however, but its motives as well. We were obliged to search
out these motives or motive, and to our surprise we found them in a
powerful need for punishment which we could only class with
masochistic wishes. The practical significance of this discovery is
not less than its theoretical one, for the need for punishment is
the worst enemy of our therapeutic efforts. It is satisfied by the
suffering which is linked to the neurosis, and for that reason
holds fast to being ill. It seems that this factor, an unconscious
need for punishment, has a share in every neurotic illness. And
here those cases in which the neurotic suffering can be replaced by
suffering of another kind are wholly convincing. I will report an
experience of this kind.
I once succeeded in freeing an
unmarried woman, no longer young, from the complex of symptoms
which had condemned her for some fifteen years to an existence of
torment and had excluded her from any participation in life. She
now felt she was well, and she plunged into eager activity, in
order to develop her by no means small talent and to snatch a
little recognition, enjoyment, and success, late though the moment
was. But every one of her attempts ended either with people letting
her know or with herself recognizing that she was too old to
accomplish anything in that field. After each outcome of this kind
a relapse into illness would have been the obvious thing, but she
was no longer able to bring that about. Instead, she met each time
with an accident which put her out of action for a time and caused
her suffering. She fell down and sprained her ankle or hurt her
knee, or she injured her hand in something she was doing. When she
was made aware of how great her own share might be in these
apparent accidents, she, so to say, changed her technique. Instead
of accidents, indispositions appeared on the same provocations -
catarrhs, sore throats, influenzal conditions, rheumatic swellings
- till at last she made up her mind to resign her attempts and the
whole agitation came to an end.
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There is, as we think, no doubt
about the origin of this unconscious need for punishment. It
behaves like a piece of conscience, like a prolongation of our
conscience into the unconscious; and it must have the same origin
as conscience and correspond, therefore, to a piece of
aggressiveness that has been internalized and taken over by the
super-ego. If only the words went together better, we should be
justified for all practical purposes in calling it an
‘unconscious sense of guilt’. Theoretically we are in
fact in doubt whether we should suppose that all the aggressiveness
that has returned from the external world is bound by the super-ego
and accordingly turned against the ego, or that a part of it is
carrying on its mute and uncanny activity as a free destructive
instinct in the ego and the id. A distribution of the latter kind
is the more probable; but we know nothing more about it. There is
no doubt that, when the super-ego was first instituted, in
equipping that agency use was made of the piece of the
child’s aggressiveness towards his parents for which he was
unable to effect a discharge outwards on account of his erotic
fixation as well as of external difficulties; and for that reason
the severity of the super-ego need not simply correspond to the
strictness of the upbringing. It is very possible that, when there
are later occasions for suppressing aggressiveness, the instinct
may take the same path that was opened to it at that decisive point
of time.
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People in whom this unconscious
sense of guilt is excessively strong betray themselves in analytic
treatment by the negative therapeutic reaction which is so
disagreeable from the prognostic point of view. When one has given
them the solution of a symptom, which should normally be followed
by at least its temporary disappearance, what they produce instead
is a momentary exacerbation of the symptom and of the illness. It
is often enough to praise them for their behaviour in the treatment
or to say a few hopeful words about the progress of the analysis in
order to bring about an unmistakable worsening of their condition.
A non-analyst would say that the ‘will to recovery’ was
absent. If you follow the analytic way of thinking, you will see in
this behaviour a manifestation of the unconscious sense of guilt,
for which being ill, with its sufferings and impediments, is just
what is wanted. The problems which the unconscious sense of guilt
has opened up, its connections with morality, education, crime and
delinquency, are at present the preferred field of work for
psycho-analysts.
And here, at an unexpected point,
we have emerged from the psychical underworld into the open
market-place. I cannot lead you any further, but before I take
leave of you for to-day I must detain you with one more train of
thought. It has become our habit to say that our civilization has
been built up at the cost of sexual trends which, being inhibited
by society, are partly, it is true, repressed but have partly been
made usable for other aims. We have admitted, too, that, in spite
of all our pride in our cultural attainments, it is not easy for us
to fulfil the requirements of this civilization or to feel
comfortable in it, because the instinctual restrictions imposed on
us constitute a heavy psychical burden. Well, what we have come to
see about the sexual instincts, applies equally and perhaps still
more to the other ones, the aggressive instincts. It is they above
all that make human communal life difficult and threaten its
survival. Restriction of the individual’s aggressiveness is
the first and perhaps the severest sacrifice which society requires
of him. We have learnt the ingenious way in which the taming of
this unruly thing has been achieved. The institution of the
super-ego which takes over the dangerous aggressive impulses,
introduces a garrison, as it were, into regions that are inclined
to rebellion. But on the other hand, if we look at it purely
psychologically, we must recognize that the ego does not feel happy
in being thus sacrificed to the needs of society, in having to
submit to the destructive trends of aggressiveness which it would
have been glad to employ itself against others. It is like a
prolongation in the mental sphere of the dilemma of ‘eat or
be eaten’ which dominates the organic animate world. Luckily
the aggressive instincts are never alone but always alloyed with
the erotic ones. These latter have much to mitigate and much to
avert under the conditions of the civilization which mankind has
created.
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LECTURE XXXIII
FEMININITY
LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - All the while I am preparing to talk to you I
am struggling with an internal difficulty. I feel uncertain, so to
speak, of the extent of my licence. It is true that in the course
of fifteen years of work psycho-analysis has changed and grown
richer; but, in spite of that, an introduction to psycho-analysis
might have been left without alteration or supplement. It is
constantly in my mind that these lectures are without a
raison
d’etre
. For analysts I am saying too little and nothing
at all that is new; but for you I am saying too much and saying
things which you are not equipped to understand and which are not
in your province. I have looked around for excuses and I have tried
to justify each separate lecture on different grounds. The first
one, on the theory of dreams, was supposed to put you back again at
one blow into the analytic atmosphere and to show you how durable
our views have turned out to be. I was led on to the second one,
which followed the paths from dreams to what is called occultism,
by the opportunity of speaking my mind without constraint on a
department of work in which prejudiced expectations are fighting
to-day against passionate resistances, and I could hope that your
judgement, educated to tolerance on the example of psycho-analysis,
would not refuse to accompany me on the excursion. The third
lecture, on the dissection of the personality, certainly made the
hardest demands upon you with its unfamiliar subject-matter; but it
was impossible for me to keep this first beginning of an
ego-psychology back from you, and if we had possessed it fifteen
years ago I should have had to mention it to you then. My last
lecture, finally, which you were probably able to follow only by
great exertions, brought forward necessary corrections - fresh
attempts at solving the most important conundrums; and my
introduction would have been leading you astray if I had been
silent about them. As you see, when one starts making excuses it
turns out in the end that it was all inevitable, all the work of
destiny. I submit to it, and I beg you to do the same.
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To-day’s lecture, too,
should have no place in an introduction; but it may serve to give
you an example of a detailed piece of analytic work, and I can say
two things to recommend it. It brings forward nothing but observed
facts, almost without any speculative additions, and it deals with
a subject which has a claim on your interest second almost to no
other. Throughout history people have knocked their heads against
the riddle of the nature of femininity -
Häupter in Hieroglyphenmützen,
Häupter in Turban und schwarzem Barett,
Perückenhäupter und tausend andre
Arme, schwitzende Menschenhäupter. . . .
¹
Nor will
you
have escaped
worrying over this problem - those of you who are men; to those of
you who are women this will not apply - you are yourselves the
problem. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you
make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to
make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical
science shares your certainty at one point and not much further.
The male sexual product, the spermatozoon, and its vehicle are
male; the ovum and the organism that harbours it are female. In
both sexes organs have been formed which serve exclusively for the
sexual functions; they were probably developed from the same
disposition into two different forms. Besides this, in both sexes
the other organs, the bodily shapes and tissues, show the influence
of the individual’s sex, but this is inconstant and its
amount variable; these are what are known as the secondary sexual
characters. Science next tells you something that runs counter to
your expectations and is probably calculated to confuse your
feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the
male sexual apparatus also appear in women’s bodies, though
in an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It
regards their occurrence as indications of
bisexuality
, as
though an individual is not a man or a woman but always both -
merely a certain amount more the one than the other. You will then
be asked to make yourselves familiar with the idea that the
proportion in which masculine and feminine are mixed in an
individual is subject to quite considerable fluctuations. Since,
however, apart from the very rarest cases, only one kind of sexual
product - ova or semen - is nevertheless present in one person, you
are bound to have doubts as to the decisive significance of those
elements and must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or
femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay
hold of.
¹
Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets,
Heads in
turbans and black birettas,
Heads in
wigs and thousand other
Wretched,
sweating heads of humans....
(Heine,
Nordsee
.)
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Can psychology do so perhaps? We
are accustomed to employ ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ as mental qualities as well, and have in the
same way transferred the notion of bisexuality to mental life. Thus
we speak of a person, whether male or female, as behaving in a
masculine way in one connection and in a feminine way in another.
But you will soon perceive that this is only giving way to anatomy
or to convention. You cannot give the concepts of
‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’
any
new
connotation. The distinction is not a psychological one; when you
say ‘masculine’, you usually mean ‘active’,
and when you say ‘feminine’, you usually mean
‘passive’. Now it is true that a relation of the kind
exists. The male sex-cell is actively mobile and searches out the
female one, and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits
passively. This behaviour of the elementary sexual organisms is
indeed a model for the conduct of sexual individuals during
intercourse. The male pursues the female for the purpose of sexual
union, seizes hold of her and penetrates into her. But by this you
have precisely reduced the characteristic of masculinity to the
factor of aggressiveness so far as psychology is concerned. You may
well doubt whether you have gained any real advantage from this
when you reflect that in some classes of animals the females are
the stronger and more aggressive and the male is active only in the
single act of sexual union. This is so, for instance, with the
spiders. Even the functions of rearing and caring for the young,
which strike us as feminine
par excellence
, are not
invariably attached to the female sex in animals. In quite high
species we find that the sexes share the task of caring for the
young between them or even that the male alone devotes himself to
it. Even in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how
inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity
and feminine with passivity. A mother is active in every sense
towards her child; the act of lactation itself may equally be
described as the mother suckling the baby or as her being sucked by
it. The further you go from the narrow sexual sphere the more
obvious will the ‘error of superimposition’ become.
Women can display great activity in various directions, men are not
able to live in company with their own kind unless they develop a
large amount of passive adaptability. If you now tell me that these
facts go to prove precisely that both men and women are bisexual in
the psychological sense, I shall conclude that you have decided in
your own minds to make ‘active’ coincide with
‘masculine’ and ‘passive’ with
‘feminine’. But I advise you against it. It seems to me
to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge.
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One might consider characterizing
femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims.
This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a
passive aim may call for a large amount of activity. It is perhaps
the case that in a woman, on the basis of her share in the sexual
function, a preference for passive behaviour and passive aims is
carried over into her life to a greater or lesser extent, in
proportion to the limits, restricted or far-reaching, within which
her sexual life thus serves as a model. But we must beware in this
of underestimating the influence of social customs, which similarly
force women into passive situations. All this is still far from
being cleared up. There is one particularly constant relation
between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to
overlook. The suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is
prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially
favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which
succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends
which have been diverted inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is
truly feminine. But if, as happens so often, you meet with
masochism in men, what is left to you but to say that these men
exhibit very plain feminine traits?
And now you are already prepared
to hear that psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of
femininity. The explanation must no doubt come from elsewhere, and
cannot come till we have learnt how in general the differentiation
of living organisms into two sexes came about. We know nothing
about it, yet the existence of two sexes is a most striking
characteristic of organic life which distinguishes it sharply from
inanimate nature. However, we find enough to study in those human
individuals who, through the possession of female genitals, are
characterized as manifestly or predominantly feminine. In
conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho-analysis does not try
to describe what a woman is - that would be a task it could
scarcely perform - but sets about enquiring how she comes into
being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual
disposition. In recent times we have begun to learn a little about
this, thanks to the circumstance that several of our excellent
women colleagues in analysis have begun to work at the question.
The discussion of this has gained special attractiveness from the
distinction between the sexes. For the ladies, whenever some
comparison seemed to turn out unfavourable to their sex, were able
to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to
overcome certain deeply-rooted prejudices against what was
feminine, and that this was being paid for in the partiality of our
researches. We, on the other hand, standing on the ground of
bisexuality, had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had
only to say: ‘This doesn’t apply to
you
.
You’re the exception; on this point you’re more
masculine than feminine.’
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We approach the investigation of
the sexual development of women with two expectations. The first is
that here once more the constitution will not adapt itself to its
function without a struggle. The second is that the decisive
turning-points will already have been prepared for or completed
before puberty. Both expectations are promptly confirmed.
Furthermore, a comparison with what happens with boys tells us that
the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more
difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks,
to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a
man. Let us follow the parallel lines from their beginning.
Undoubtedly the material is different to start with in boys and
girls: it did not need psycho-analysis to establish that. The
difference in the structure of the genitals is accompanied by other
bodily differences which are too well known to call for mention.
Differences emerge too in the instinctual disposition which give a
glimpse of the later nature of women. A little girl is as a rule
less aggressive, defiant and self-sufficient; she seems to have a
greater need for being shown affection and on that account to be
more dependent and pliant. It is probably only as a result of this
pliancy that she can be taught more easily and quicker to control
her excretions: urine and faeces are the first gifts that children
make to those who look after them, and controlling them is the
first concession to which the instinctual life of children can be
induced. One gets an impression, too, that little girls are more
intelligent and livelier than boys of the same age; they go out
more to meet the external world and at the same time form stronger
object-cathexes. I cannot say whether this lead in development has
been confirmed by exact observations, but in any case there is no
question that girls cannot be described as intellectually backward.
These sexual differences are not, however, of great consequence:
they can be outweighed by individual variations. For our immediate
purposes they can be disregarded.
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Both sexes seem to pass through
the early phases of libidinal development in the same manner. It
might have been expected that in girls there would already have
been some lag in aggressiveness in the sadistic-anal phase, but
such is not the case. Analysis of children’s play has shown
our women analysts that the aggressive impulses of little girls
leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence.
With their entry into the phallic phase the differences between the
sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements. We are now
obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man. In boys,
as we know, this phase is marked by the fact that they have learnt
how to derive pleasurable sensations from their small penis and
connect its excited state with their ideas of sexual intercourse.
Little girls do the same thing with their still smaller clitoris.
It seems that with them all their masturbatory acts are carried out
on this penis-equivalent, and that the truly feminine vagina is
still undiscovered by both sexes. It is true that there are a few
isolated reports of early vaginal sensations as well, but it could
not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the anus or
vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part. We are
entitled to keep to our view that in the phallic phase of girls the
clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone. But it is not, of course,
going to remain so. With the change to femininity the clitoris
should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same
time its importance, to the vagina. This would be one of the two
tasks which a woman has to perform in the course of her
development, whereas the more fortunate man has only to continue at
the time of his sexual maturity the activity that he has previously
carried out at the period of the early efflorescence of his
sexuality.