Freud - Complete Works (789 page)

Moses And Monotheism

4901

   (2) Two points must be stressed
in regard to the common characteristics or peculiarities of
neurotic phenomena: (
a
) The effects of traumas are of two
kinds, positive and negative. The former are attempts to bring the
trauma into operation once again - that is, to remember the
forgotten experience or, better still, to make it real, to
experience a repetition of it anew, or, even if it was only an
early emotional relationship, to revive it in an analogous
relationship with someone else. We summarize these efforts under
the name of ‘fixations’ to the trauma and as a
‘compulsion to repeat’. They may be taken up into what
passes as a normal ego and, as permanent trends in it, may lend it
unalterable character-traits, although, or rather precisely
because, their true basis and historical origin are forgotten. Thus
a man who has spent his childhood in an excessive and to-day
forgotten attachment to his mother, may spend his whole life
looking for a wife on whom he can make himself dependent and by
whom he can arrange to be nourished and supported. A girl who was
made the object of a sexual seduction in her early childhood may
direct her later sexual life so as constantly to provoke similar
attacks. It may easily be guessed that from such discoveries about
the problem of neurosis we can penetrate to an understanding of the
formation of character in general.

   The negative reactions follow the
opposite aim: that nothing of the forgotten traumas shall be
remembered and nothing repeated. We can summarize them as
‘defensive reactions’. Their principal expression are
what are called ‘avoidances’, which may be intensified
into ‘inhibitions’ and ‘phobias’. These
negative reactions too make the most powerful contributions to the
stamping of character. Fundamentally they are just as much
fixations to the trauma as their opposites, except that they are
fixations with a contrary purpose. The symptoms of neurosis in the
narrower sense are compromises in which both the trends proceeding
from traumas come together, so that the share, now of one and now
of the other tendency, finds preponderant expression in them. This
opposition between the reactions sets up conflicts which in the
ordinary course of events can reach no conclusion.

   (
b
) All these phenomena,
the symptoms as well as the restrictions on the ego and the stable
character-changes, have a
compulsive
quality: that is to say
that they have great psychical intensity and at the same time
exhibit a far-reaching independence of the organization of the
other mental processes, which are adjusted to the demands of the
real external world and obey the laws of logical thinking. They are
insufficiently or not at all influenced by external reality, pay no
attention to it or to its psychical representatives, so that they
may easily come into active opposition to both of them. They are,
one might say, a State within a State, an inaccessible party, with
which co-operation is impossible, but which may succeed in
overcoming what is known as the normal party and forcing it into
its service. If this happens, it implies a domination by an
internal psychical reality over the reality of the external world
and the path to a psychosis lies open. Even if things do not go so
far, the practical importance of this situation can scarcely be
overestimated. The inhibition upon the life of those who are
dominated by a neurosis and their incapacity for living constitute
a most important factor in a human society and we may recognize in
their condition a direct expression of their fixation to an early
portion of their past.

Moses And Monotheism

4902

   And now let us enquire about
latency, which, in view of the analogy, is bound to interest us
especially. A trauma in childhood may be followed immediately by a
neurotic outbreak, an infantile neurosis, with an abundance of
efforts at defence, and accompanied by the formation of symptoms.
This neurosis may last a considerable time and cause marked
disturbances, but it may also run a latent course and be
overlooked. As a rule defence retains the upper hand in it; in any
case alterations of the ego, comparable to scars, are left behind.
It is only rarely that an infantile neurosis continues without
interruption into an adult one. Far more often it is succeeded by a
period of apparently undisturbed development - a course of things
which is supported or made possible by the intervention of the
physiological period of latency. Not until later does the change
take place with which the definitive neurosis becomes manifest as a
belated effect of the trauma. This occurs either at the irruption
of puberty or some while later. In the former case it happens
because the instincts, intensified by physical maturation, are able
now to take up the struggle again in which they were at first
defeated by the defence. In the latter case it happens because the
reactions and alterations of the ego brought about by the defence
now prove a hindrance in dealing with the new tasks of life, so
that severe conflicts come about between the demands of the real
external world and the ego, which seeks to maintain the
organization which it has painstakingly achieved in its defensive
struggle. The phenomenon of a latency of the neurosis between the
first reactions to the trauma and the later outbreak of the illness
must be regarded as typical. This latter illness may also be looked
upon as an attempt at cure - as an effort once more to reconcile
with the rest those portions of the ego that have been split off by
the influence of the trauma and to unite them into a powerful whole
vis-à-vis
the external world. An attempt of this kind
seldom succeeds, however, unless the work of analysis comes to its
help, and even then not always; it ends often enough in a complete
devastation or fragmentation of the ego or in its being overwhelmed
by the portion which was early split off and which is dominated by
the trauma.

Moses And Monotheism

4903

   In order to convince the reader,
it would be necessary to give detailed reports of the life
histories of numerous neurotics. But in view of the diffuseness and
difficulty of the topic, this would completely destroy the
character of the present work. It would turn into a monograph on
the theory of the neuroses and even so would probably only have an
effect on that minority of readers who have chosen the study and
practice of psycho-analysis as their life-work. Since I am
addressing myself here to a wider audience, I can only beg the
reader to grant a certain provisional credence to the abridged
account I have given above; and this must be accompanied by an
admission on my part that the implications to which I am now
leading him need only be accepted if the theories on which they are
based turn out to be correct.

   Nevertheless, I can attempt to
tell the story of a single case which exhibits with special clarity
some of the characteristics of a neurosis which I have mentioned.
We must not expect, of course, that a single case will show
everything and we need not feel disappointed if its subject-matter
is far removed from the topic for which we are seeking an
analogy.

   A little boy, who, as is so often
the case in middle-class families, shared his parents’
bedroom during the first years of his life, had repeated, and
indeed regular, opportunities of observing sexual acts between his
parents - of seeing some things and hearing still more - at an age
when he had scarcely learnt to speak. In his later neurosis, which
broke out immediately after his first spontaneous emission, the
earliest and most troublesome symptom was a disturbance of sleep.
He was extraordinarily sensitive to noises at night and, once he
was woken up, was unable to go to sleep again. This disturbance of
sleep was a true compromise-symptom. On the one hand it was an
expression of his defence against the things he had experienced at
night, and on the other an attempt to re-establish the waking state
in which he was able to listen to those impressions.

Moses And Monotheism

4904

   The child was aroused prematurely
by observations of this kind to an aggressive masculinity and began
to excite his little penis with his hand and to attempt various
sexual attacks on his mother, thus identifying himself with his
father, in whose place he was putting himself. This went on until
at last his mother forbade him to touch his penis and further
threatened that she would tell his father, who would punish him by
taking his sinful organ away. This threat of castration had an
extraordinarily powerful traumatic effect on the boy. He gave up
his sexual activity and altered his character. Instead of
identifying himself with his father, he was afraid of him, adopted
a passive attitude to him and, by occasional naughtinesses,
provoked him into administering corporal punishment; this had a
sexual meaning for him, so that he was thus able to identify
himself with his ill-treated mother. He clung to his mother herself
more and more anxiously, as though he could not do without her love
for a single moment, since he saw in it a protection against the
danger of castration which threatened him from his father. In this
modification of the Oedipus complex he passed his latency period,
which was free from any marked disturbances. He became an exemplary
boy and was quite successful at school.

   So far we have followed the
immediate effect of the trauma and have confirmed the fact of
latency.

   The arrival of puberty brought
with it the manifest neurosis and disclosed its second main symptom
- sexual impotence. He had forfeited the sensitivity of his penis,
did not attempt to touch it, did not venture to approach a woman
for sexual purposes. His sexual activity remained limited to
psychical masturbation accompanied by sadistic-masochistic
phantasies in which it was not hard to recognize off-shoots of his
early observations of intercourse between his parents. The wave of
intensified masculinity which puberty brought along with it was
employed in furious hatred of his father and insubordination to
him. This extreme relation to his father, reckless to the pitch of
self-destruction, was responsible as well for his failure in life
and his conflicts with the external world. He must be a failure in
his profession because his father had forced him into it. Nor did
he make any friends and he was never on good terms with his
superiors.

   When, burdened by these symptoms
and incapacities, he at last, after his father’s death, had
found a wife, there emerged in him, as though they were the core of
his being, character-traits which made contact with him a hard task
for those about him. He developed a completely egoistic, despotic,
and brutal personality, which clearly felt a need to suppress and
insult other people. It was a faithful copy of his father as he had
formed a picture of him in his memory: that is to say, a revival of
the identification with his father which in the past he had taken
on as a little boy from sexual motives. In this part of the story
we recognize the
return
of the repressed, which (along with
the immediate effects of the trauma and the phenomenon of latency)
we have described as among the essential features of a
neurosis.

Moses And Monotheism

4905

D

APPLICATION

   Early trauma - defence - latency
- outbreak of neurotic illness - partial return of the repressed.
Such is the formula which we have laid down for the development of
a neurosis. The reader is now invited to take the step of supposing
that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to
what occurs in the life of individuals: of supposing, that is, that
here too events occurred of a sexually aggressive nature, which
left behind them permanent consequences but were for the most part
fended off and forgotten, and which after a long latency came into
effect and created phenomena similar to symptoms in their structure
and purpose.

   We believe that we can guess
these events and we propose to show that their symptom-like
consequences are the phenomena of religion. Since the emergence of
the idea of evolution no longer leaves room for doubt that the
human race has a prehistory, and since this is unknown - that is,
forgotten - a conclusion of this kind almost carries the weight of
a postulate. When we learn that in both cases the operative and
forgotten traumas relate to life in the human family, we can greet
this as a highly welcome, unforeseen bonus which has not been
called for by our discussions up to this point.

   I put forward these assertions as
much as a quarter of a century ago in my
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13) and I need only repeat them here. My construction starts
out from a statement of Darwin’s and takes in a hypothesis of
Atkinson’s. It asserts that in primaeval times primitive man
lived in small hordes, each under the domination of a powerful
male. No date can be assigned to this, nor has it been synchronized
with the geological epochs known to us: it is probable that these
human creatures had not advanced far in the development of speech.
An essential part of the construction is the hypothesis that the
events I am about to describe occurred to all primitive men - that
is, to all our ancestors. The story is told in an enormously
condensed form, as though it had happened on a single occasion,
while in fact it covered thousands of years and was repeated
countless times during that long period. The strong male was lord
and father of the entire horde and unrestricted in his power, which
he exercised with violence. All the females were his property -
wives and daughters of his own horde and some, perhaps, robbed from
other hordes. The lot of his sons was a hard one: if they roused
their father’s jealousy they were killed or castrated or
driven out. Their only resource was to collect together in small
communities, to get themselves wives by robbery, and, when one or
other of them could succeed in it, to raise themselves into a
position similar to their father’s in the primal horde. For
natural reasons, youngest sons occupied an exceptional position.
They were protected by their mother’s love, and were able to
take advantage of their father’s increasing age and succeed
him on his death. We seem to detect echoes in legends and fairy
tales both of the expulsion of elder sons and of the favouring of
youngest sons.