Freud - Complete Works (812 page)

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VI

   The next question we come to is
whether every alteration of the ego - in our sense of the term - is
acquired during the defensive struggles of the earliest years.
There can be no doubt about the answer. We have no reason to
dispute the existence and importance of original, innate
distinguishing characteristics of the ego. This is made certain by
the single fact that each person makes a selection from the
possible mechanisms of defence, that he always uses a few only of
them and always the same ones. This would seem to indicate that
each ego is endowed from the first with individual dispositions and
trends, though it is true that we cannot specify their nature or
what determines them. Moreover, we know that we must not exaggerate
the difference between inherited and acquired characters into an
antithesis; what was acquired by our forefathers certainly forms an
important part of what we inherit. When we speak of an
‘archaic heritage’ we are usually thinking only of the
id and we seem to assume that at the beginning of the
individual’s life no ego is as yet in existence. But we shall
not overlook the fact that id and ego are originally one; nor does
it imply any mystical overvaluation of heredity if we think it
credible that, even before the ego has come into existence, the
lines of development, trends and reactions which it will later
exhibit are already laid down for it. The psychological
peculiarities of families, races and nations, even in their
attitude to analysis, allow of no other explanation. Indeed, more
than this: analytic experience has forced on us a conviction that
even particular psychical contents, such as symbolism, have no
other sources than hereditary transmission, and researches in
various fields of social anthropology, make it plausible to suppose
that other, equally specialized precipitates left by early human
development are also present in the archaic heritage.

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   With the recognition that the
properties of the ego which we meet with in the form of resistances
can equally well be determined by heredity as acquired in defensive
struggles, the topographical distinction between what is ego and
what is id loses much of its value for our investigation. If we
advance a step further in our analytic experience, we come upon
resistances of another kind, which we can no longer localize and
which seem to depend on fundamental conditions in the mental
apparatus. I can only give a few examples of this type of
resistance; the whole field of enquiry is still bewilderingly
strange and insufficiently explored. We come across people, for
instance, to whom we should be inclined to attribute a special
‘adhesiveness of the libido’. The processes which the
treatment sets in motion in them are so much slower than in other
people because, apparently, they cannot make up their minds to
detach libidinal cathexes from one object and displace them on to
another, although we can discover no special reason for this
cathectic loyalty. One meets with the opposite type of person, too,
in whom the libido seems particularly mobile; it enters readily
upon the new cathexes suggested by analysis, abandoning its former
ones in exchange for them. The difference between the two types is
comparable to the one felt by a sculptor, according to whether he
works in hard stone or soft clay. Unfortunately, in this second
type the results of analysis often turn out to be very impermanent:
the new cathexes are soon given up once more, and we have an
impression, not of having worked in clay, but of having written on
water. In the words of the proverb: ‘Soon got, soon
gone.’¹

  
¹
[‘
Wie gewonnen, so
zerronnen
.’]

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   In another group of cases we are
surprised by an attitude in our patients which can only be put down
to a depletion of the plasticity, the capacity for change and
further development, which we should ordinarily expect. We are, it
is true, prepared to find in analysis a certain amount of psychical
inertia. When the work of analysis has opened up new paths for an
instinctual impulse, we almost invariably observe that the impulse
does not enter upon them without marked hesitation. We have called
this behaviour, perhaps not quite correctly, ‘resistance from
the id’. But with the patients I here have in mind, all the
mental processes, relationships and distributions of force are
unchangeable, fixed and rigid. One finds the same thing in very old
people, in which case it is explained as being due to what is
described as force of habit or an exhaustion of receptivity - a
kind of psychical entropy. But we are dealing here with people who
are still young. Our theoretical knowledge does not seem adequate
to give a correct explanation of such types. Probably some temporal
characteristics are concerned - some alterations of a rhythm of
development in psychical life which we have not yet
appreciated.

   In yet another group of cases the
distinguishing characteristics of the ego, which are to be held
responsible as sources of resistance against analytic treatment and
as impediments to therapeutic success, may spring from different
and deeper roots. Here we are dealing with the ultimate things
which psychological research can learn about: the behaviour of the
two primal instincts, their distribution, mingling and defusion -
things which we cannot think of as being confined to a single
province of the mental apparatus, the id, the ego or the super-ego.
No stronger impression arises from the resistances during the work
of analysis than of there being a force which is defending itself
by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely
resolved to hold on to illness and suffering. One portion of this
force has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the
sense of guilt and need for punishment, and has been localized by
us in the ego’s relation to the super-ego. But this is only
the portion of it which is, as it were, psychically bound by the
super-ego and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same
force, whether bound or free, may be at work in other, unspecified
places. If we take into consideration the total picture made up of
the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative
therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many
neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that
mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure.
These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a
power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of
destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the
original death instinct of living matter. It is not a question of
an antithesis between an optimistic and a pessimistic theory of
life. Only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two
primal instincts - Eros and the death instinct -, never by one or
the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the
phenomena of life.

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   How parts of these two classes of
instincts combine to fulfil the various vital functions, under what
conditions such combinations grow looser or break up, to what
disturbances these changes correspond and with what feelings the
perceptual scale of the pleasure principle replies to them - these
are problems whose elucidation would be the most rewarding
achievement of psychological research. For the moment we must bow
to the superiority of the forces against which we see our efforts
come to nothing. Even to exert a psychical influence on simple
masochism is a severe tax upon our powers.

   In studying the phenomena which
testify to the activity of the destructive instinct, we are not
confined to observations on pathological material. Numerous facts
of normal mental life call for an explanation of this kind, and the
sharper our eye grows, the more copiously they strike us. The
subject is too new and too important for me to treat it as a
side-issue in this discussion. I shall therefore content myself
with selecting a few sample cases.

   Here is one instance. It is well
known that at all periods there have been, as there still are,
people who can take as their sexual objects members of their own
sex as well as of the opposite one, without the one trend
interfering with the other. We call such people bisexuals, and we
accept their existence without feeling much surprise about it. We
have come to learn, however, that every human being is bisexual in
this sense and that his libido is distributed, either in a manifest
or a latent fashion, over objects of both sexes. But we are struck
by the following point. Whereas in the first class of people the
two trends have got on together without clashing, in the second and
more numerous class they are in a state of irreconcilable conflict.
A man’s heterosexuality will not put up with any
homosexuality, and
vice versa
. If the former is the stronger
it succeeds in keeping the latter latent and forcing it away from
satisfaction in reality. On the other hand, there is no greater
danger for a man’s heterosexual function than its being
disturbed by his latent homosexuality. We might attempt to explain
this by saying that each individual only has a certain quota of
libido at his disposal, for which the two rival trends have to
struggle. But it is not clear why the rivals do not always divide
up the available quota of libido between them according to their
relative strength, since they are able to do so in a number of
cases. We are forced to the conclusion that the tendency to a
conflict is something special, something which is newly added to
the situation, irrespective of the quantity of libido. An
independently-emerging tendency to conflict of this sort can
scarcely be attributed to anything but the intervention of an
element of free aggressiveness.

   If we recognize the case we are
discussing as an expression of the destructive or aggressive
instinct, the question at once arises whether this view should not
be extended to other instances of conflict, and, indeed, whether
all that we know about psychical conflict should not be revised
from this new angle. After all, we assume that in the course of
man’s development from a primitive state to a civilized one
his aggressiveness undergoes a very considerable degree of
internalization or turning inwards; if so, his internal conflicts
would certainly be the proper equivalent for the external struggles
which have then ceased. I am well aware that the dualistic theory
according to which an instinct of death or of destruction or
aggression claims equal rights as a partner with Eros as manifested
in the libido, has found little sympathy and has not really been
accepted even among psycho-analysts. This made me all the more
pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of mine in the
writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I am very
ready to give up the prestige of originality for the sake of such a
confirmation, especially as I can never be certain, in view of the
wide extent of my reading in early years, whether what I took for a
new creation might not be an effect of cryptomnesia.

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   Empedocles of Acragas
(Girgenti),¹ born about 495 B.C., is one of the grandest and
most remarkable figures in the history of Greek civilization. The
activities of his many-sided personality pursued the most varied
directions. He was an investigator and a thinker, a prophet and a
magician, a politician, a philanthropist and a physician with a
knowledge of natural science. He was said to have freed the town of
Selinunte from malaria, and his contemporaries revered him as a
god. His mind seems to have united the sharpest contrasts. He was
exact and sober in his physical and physiological researches, yet
he did not shrink from the obscurities of mysticism, and built up
cosmic speculations of astonishingly imaginative boldness. Capelle
compares him with Dr. Faust ‘to whom many a secret was
revealed’. Born as he was at a time when the realm of science
was not yet divided into so many provinces, some of his theories
must inevitably strike us as primitive. He explained the variety of
things by the mixture of the four elements, earth, air, fire and
water. He held that all nature was animate, and he believed in the
transmigration of souls. But he also included in his theoretical
body of knowledge such modern ideas as the gradual evolution of
living creatures, the survival of the fittest and a recognition of
the part played by chance (
τύχη
)
in that evolution.

   But the theory of Empedocles
which especially deserves our interest is one which approximates so
closely to the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts that we
should be tempted to maintain that the two are identical, if it
were not for the difference that the Greek philosopher’s
theory is a cosmic phantasy while ours is content to claim
biological validity. At the same time, the fact that Empedocles
ascribes to the universe the same animate nature as to individual
organisms robs this difference of much of its importance.

  
¹
I have based what follows on a work by
Wilhelm Capelle (1935).

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   The philosopher taught that two
principles governed events in the life of the universe and in the
life of the mind, and that those principles were everlastingly at
war with each other. He called them
φιλία
(love) and
υεΐκος
(strife). Of these two powers - which he conceived of as being at
bottom ‘natural forces operating like instincts, and by no
means intelligences with a conscious purpose’¹ - the one
strives to agglomerate the primal particles of the four elements
into a single unity, while the other, on the contrary, seeks to
undo all those fusions and to separate the primal particles of the
elements from one another. Empedocles thought of the process of the
universe as a continuous, never-ceasing alternation of periods, in
which the one or the other of the two fundamental forces gain the
upper hand, so that at one time love and at another strife puts its
purpose completely into effect and dominates the universe, after
which the other, vanquished, side asserts itself and in its turn
defeats its partner.