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An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

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   It is an interesting thing that
the relation between the Oedipus complex and the castration complex
should take such a different shape - an opposite one, in fact - in
the case of females as compared to that of males. In males, as we
have seen, the threat of castration brings the Oedipus complex to
an end; in females we find that, on the contrary, it is their lack
of a penis that forces them into their Oedipus complex. It does
little harm to a woman if she remains in her feminine Oedipus
attitude. (The term ‘Electra complex’ has been proposed
for it.) She will in that case choose her husband for his paternal
characteristics and be ready to recognize his authority. Her
longing to possess a penis, which is in fact unappeasable, may find
satisfaction if she can succeed in completing her love for the
organ by extending it to the bearer of the organ, just as happened
earlier when she progressed from her mother’s breast to her
mother as a whole person.

   If we ask an analyst what his
experience has shown to be the mental structures least accessible
to influence in his patients, the answer will be: in a woman her
wish for a penis, in a man his feminine attitude towards his own
sex, a precondition of which would, of course, be the loss of his
penis.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

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PART
III

THE
THEORETICAL YIELD

CHAPTER VIII

THE
PSYCHICAL APPARATUS AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD

All of the general discoveries and hypotheses
which I brought forward in the first chapter were, of course,
arrived at by laborious and patient detailed work of the kind of
which I have given an example in the previous chapter. We may now
feel tempted to make a survey of the increases in knowledge that we
have achieved by work such as this and to consider what paths we
have opened for further advances. In this connection we may be
struck by the fact that we have so often been obliged to venture
beyond the frontiers of the science of psychology. The phenomena
with which we were dealing do not belong to psychology alone; they
have an organic and biological side as well, and accordingly in the
course of our efforts at building up psycho-analysis we have also
made some important biological discoveries and have not been able
to avoid framing new biological hypotheses.

   But let us for the moment keep to
psychology. We have seen that it is not scientifically feasible to
draw a line of demarcation between what is psychically normal and
abnormal; so that that distinction, in spite of its practical
importance, possesses only a conventional value. We have thus
established a right to arrive at an understanding of the normal
life of the mind from a study of its disorders - which would not be
admissible if these pathological states, neuroses and psychoses,
had specific causes operating in the manner of foreign bodies.

   The study of a mental disorder
occurring during sleep, which is transient and harmless and which,
indeed, performs a useful function, has given us a key to the
understanding of the mental diseases which are permanent and
injurious to life. And we may now venture on the assertion that the
psychology of consciousness was no better capable of understanding
the normal functioning of the mind than of understanding dreams.
The data of conscious self-perception, which alone were at its
disposal, have proved in every respect inadequate to fathom the
profusion and complexity of the processes of the mind, to reveal
their interconnections and so to recognize the determinants of
their disturbances.

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   The hypothesis we have adopted of
a psychical apparatus extended in space, expediently put together,
developed by the exigencies of life, which gives rise to the
phenomena of consciousness only at one particular point and under
certain conditions - this hypothesis has put us in a position to
establish psychology on foundations similar to those of any other
science, such, for instance, as physics. In our science as in the
others the problem is the same: behind the attributes (qualities)
of the object under examination which are presented directly to our
perception, we have to discover something else which is more
independent of the particular receptive capacity of our sense
organs and which approximates more closely to what may be supposed
to be the real state of affairs. We have no hope of being able to
reach the latter itself, since it is evident that everything new
that we have inferred must nevertheless be translated back into the
language of our perceptions, from which it is simply impossible for
us to free ourselves. But herein lies the very nature and
limitation of our science. It is as though we were to say in
physics: ‘If we could see clearly enough we should find that
what appears to be a solid body is made up of particles of such and
such a shape and size and occupying such and such relative
positions.’ In the meantime we try to increase the efficiency
of our sense organs to the furthest possible extent by artificial
aids; but it may be expected that all such efforts will fail to
affect the ultimate outcome. Reality will always remain
‘unknowable’. The yield brought to light by scientific
work from our primary sense perceptions will consist in an insight
into connections and dependent relations which are present in the
external world, which can somehow be reliably reproduced or
reflected in the internal world of our thought and a knowledge of
which enables us to ‘understand’ something in the
external world, to foresee it and possibly to alter it. Our
procedure in psycho-analysis is quite similar. We have discovered
technical methods of filling up the gaps in the phenomena of our
consciousness, and we make use of those methods just as a physicist
makes use of experiment. In this manner we infer a number of
processes which are in themselves ‘unknowable’ and
interpolate them in those that are conscious to us. And if, for
instance, we say: ‘At this point an unconscious memory
intervened’, what that means is: ‘At this point
something occurred of which we are totally unable to form a
conception, but which, if it had entered our consciousness, could
only have been described in such and such a way.’

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   Our justification for making such
inferences and interpolations and the degree of certainty attaching
to them of course remain open to criticism in each individual
instance; and it cannot be denied that it is often extremely
difficult to arrive at a decision - a fact which finds expression
in the lack of agreement among analysts. The novelty of the problem
is to blame for this - that is to say, a lack of training. But
there is besides this a special factor inherent in the subject
itself; for in psychology, unlike physics, we are not always
concerned with things which can only arouse a cool scientific
interest. Thus we shall not be very greatly surprised if a woman
analyst who has not been sufficiently convinced of the intensity of
her own wish for a penis also fails to attach proper importance to
that factor in her patients. But such sources of error, arising
from the personal equation, have no great importance in the long
run. If one looks through old text-books on the use of the
microscope, one is astonished to find the extraordinary demands
which were made on the personality of those who made observations
with that instrument while its technique was still young - of all
of which there is no question to-day.

   I cannot undertake to attempt a
complete picture here of the psychical apparatus and its
activities; I should find myself hindered, among other things, by
the circumstance that psycho-analysis has not yet had time to study
all those functions equally. I shall therefore content myself with
a detailed recapitulation of the account in my opening chapter.

   The core of our being, then, is
formed by the obscure
id
, which has no direct communication
with the external world and is accessible even to our own knowledge
only though the medium of another agency. Within this id the
organic
instincts
operate, which are themselves compounded
of fusions of two primal forces (Eros and destructiveness) in
varying proportions and are differentiated from one another by
their relation to organs or systems of organs. The one and only
urge of these instincts is towards satisfaction, which is expected
to arise from certain changes in the organs with the help of
objects in the external world. But immediate and unheeding
satisfaction of the instincts, such as the id demands, would often
lead to perilous conflicts with the external world and to
extinction. The id knows no solicitude about ensuring survival and
no anxiety; or it would perhaps be more correct to say that, though
it can generate the sensory elements of anxiety, it cannot make use
of them. The processes which are possible in and between the
assumed psychical elements in the id (the
primary process
)
differ widely from those which are familiar to us through conscious
perception in our intellectual and emotional life; nor are they
subject to the critical restrictions of logic, which repudiates
some of these processes as invalid and seeks to undo them.

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   The id, cut off from the external
world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with
extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially
oscillations in the tension of its instinctual needs, and these
changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure
series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the
help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about.
But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic
feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage
of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the
inexorable pleasure principle. But not the id alone. It seems that
the activity of the other psychical agencies too is able only to
modify the pleasure principle but not to nullify it; and it remains
a question of the highest theoretical importance, and one that has
not yet been answered, when and how it is ever possible for the
pleasure principle to be overcome. The consideration that the
pleasure principle demands a reduction, at bottom the extinction
perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs (that is,
Nirvana
) leads to the still unassessed relations between the
pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death
instinct.

   The other agency of the mind,
which we believe we know best and in which we recognize ourselves
most easily - what is known as the
ego
- has been developed
out of the id’s cortical layer, which, through being adapted
to the reception and exclusion of stimuli, is in direct contact
with the external world (
reality
). Starting from conscious
perception it has subjected to its influence ever larger regions
and deeper strata of the id, and, in the persistence with which it
maintains its dependence on the external world, it bears the
indelible stamp of its origin (as it might be ‘Made in
Germany’). Its psychological function consists in raising the
passage in the id to a higher dynamic level (perhaps by
transforming freely mobile energy into bound energy, such as
corresponds to the preconscious state); its constructive function
consists in interpolating, between the demand made by an instinct
and the action that satisfies it, the activity of thought which,
after taking its bearings in the present and assessing earlier
experiences, endeavours by means of experimental actions to
calculate the consequences of the course of action proposed. In
this way the ego comes to a decision on whether the attempt to
obtain satisfaction is to be carried out or postponed or whether it
may not be necessary for the demand by the instinct to be
suppressed altogether as being dangerous. (Here we have the
reality principle
.) Just as the id is directed exclusively
to obtaining pleasure, so the ego is governed by considerations of
safety. The ego has set itself the task of self-preservation, which
the id appears to neglect. It makes use of the sensations of
anxiety as a signal to give a warning of dangers that threaten its
integrity. Since memory traces can become conscious just as
perceptions do, especially through their association with residues
of speech, the possibility arises of a confusion which would lead
to a mistaking of reality. The ego guards itself against this
possibility by the institution of
reality-testing
, which is
allowed to fall into abeyance in dreams on account of the
conditions prevailing in the state of sleep. The ego, which seeks
to maintain itself in an environment of overwhelming mechanical
forces, is threatened by dangers which come in the first instance
from external reality; but dangers do not threaten it from there
alone. Its own id is a source of similar dangers, and that for two
different reasons. In the first place, an excessive strength of
instinct can damage the ego in a similar way to an excessive
‘stimulus’ from the external world. It is true that the
former cannot destroy it; but it can destroy its characteristic
dynamic organization and change the ego back into a portion of the
id. In the second place, experience may have taught the ego that
the satisfaction of some instinctual demand which is not in itself
intolerable would involve dangers in the external world, so that an
instinctual demand of that kind itself becomes a danger. Thus the
ego is fighting on two fronts: it has to defend its existence
against an external world which threatens it with annihilation as
well as against an internal world that makes excessive demands. It
adopts the same methods of defence against both, but its defence
against the internal enemy is particularly inadequate. As a result
of having originally been identical with this latter enemy and of
having lived with it since on the most intimate terms, it has great
difficulty in escaping from the internal dangers. They persist as
threats, even if they can be temporarily held down.