Psycho-analysis and the establishment of the facts in legal proceedings 2 страница

¹ See the collection of my shorter papers on the theory of the neuroses published in 1906.4

I must give a few examples to illustrate my point. Those who are familiar with the findings of psycho-analytic investigation into the psychoneuroses will not be surprised to learn that what is being represented in obsessive actions or in ceremonials is derived from the most intimate, and for the most part from the sexual, experiences of the patient.

(a) A girl whom I was able to observe was under a compulsion to rinse round her wash-basin several times after washing. The significance of this ceremonial action lay in the proverbial saying: ‘Don’t throw away dirty water till you have clean.’ Her action was intended to give a warning to her sister, of whom she was very fond, and to restrain her from getting divorced from her unsatisfactory husband until she had established a relationship with a better man.

(b) A woman who was living apart from her husband was subject to a compulsion, whenever she ate anything, to leave what was the best of it behind: for example, she would only take the outside of a piece of roast meat. This renunciation was explained by the date of its origin. It appeared on the day after she had refused marital relations with her husband - that is to say, after she had given up what was the best.

(c) The same patient could only sit on one particular chair and could only get up from it with difficulty. In regard to certain details of her married life, the chair symbolized her husband, to whom she remained faithful. She found an explanation of her compulsion in this sentence: ‘It is so hard to part from anything (a husband, a chair) upon which one has once settled.’

(d) Over a period of time she used to repeat an especially noticeable and senseless obsessive action. She would run out of her room into another room in the middle of which there was a table. She would straighten the table-cloth on it in a particular manner and ring for the housemaid. The latter had to come up to the table, and the patient would then dismiss her on some indifferent errand. In the attempts to explain this compulsion, it occurred to her that at one place on the table-cloth there was a stain, and that she always arranged the cloth in such a way that the housemaid was bound to see the stain. The whole scene proved to be a reproduction of an experience in her married life which had later on given her thoughts a problem to solve. On the wedding-night her husband had met with a not unusual mishap. He found himself impotent, and ‘many times in the course of the night he came hurrying from his room into hers’ to try once more whether he could succeed. In the morning he said he would feel ashamed in front of the hotel housemaid who made the beds, and he took a bottle of red ink and poured its contents over the sheet; but he did it so clumsily that the red stain came in a place that was very unsuitable for his purpose. With her obsessive action, therefore, she was representing the wedding-night. ‘Bed and board’ between them make up marriage.

(e) Another compulsion which she started - of writing down the number of every bank-note before parting with it - had also to be interpreted historically. At a time when she was still intending to leave her husband if she could find another more trustworthy man, she allowed herself to receive advances from a man whom she met at a watering-place, but she was in doubt as to whether his intentions were serious. One day, being short of small change, she asked him to change a five kronen piece for her. He did so, pocketed the large coin and declared with a gallant air that he would never part with it, since it had passed through her hands. At their later meetings she was frequently tempted to challenge him to show her the five-kronen piece, as though she wanted to convince herself that she could believe in his intentions. But she refrained, for the good reason that it is impossible to distinguish between coins of the same value. Thus her doubt remained unresolved; and it left her with the compulsion to write down the number of each bank-note, by which it can be distinguished from all others of the same value.

These few examples, selected from the great number I have met with, are merely intended to illustrate my assertion that in obsessive actions everything has its meaning and can be interpreted. The same is true of ceremonials in the strict sense, only that the evidence for this would require a more circumstantial presentation. I am quite aware of how far our explanations of obsessive actions are apparently taking us from the sphere of religious thought.

It is one of the conditions of the illness that the person who is obeying a compulsion carries it out without understanding its meaning - or at any rate its chief meaning. It is only thanks to the efforts of psycho-analytic treatment that he becomes conscious of the meaning of his obsessive action and, with it, of the motives that are impelling him to it. We express this important fact by saying that the obsessive action serves to express unconscious motives and ideas. In this, we seem to find a further departure from religious practices; but we must remember that as a rule the ordinary pious individual, too, performs a ceremonial without concerning himself with its significance, although priests and scientific investigators may be familiar with the - mostly symbolic - meaning of the ritual. In all believers, however, the motives which impel them to religious practices are unknown to them or are represented in consciousness by others which are advanced in their place.

Analysis of obsessive actions has already given us some sort of an insight into their causes and into the chain of motives which bring them into effect. We may say that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt, of which, however, he knows nothing, so that we must call it an unconscious sense of guilt, in spite of the apparent contradiction in terms. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events, but it is constantly being revived by renewed temptations which arise whenever there is a contemporary provocation. Moreover, it occasions a lurking sense of expectant anxiety, an expectation of misfortune, which is linked, through the idea of punishment, with the internal perception of the temptation. When the ceremonial is first being constructed, the patient is still conscious that he must do this or that lest some ill should befall, and as a rule the nature of the ill that is to be expected is still known to his consciousness. But what is already hidden from him is the connection - which is always demonstrable - between the occasion on which this expectant anxiety arises and the danger which it conjures up. Thus a ceremonial starts as an action for defence or insurance, a protective measure.

The sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they know that at heart they are miserable sinners; and the pious observances (such as prayers, invocations, etc.) with which such people preface every daily act, and in especial every unusual undertaking, seem to have the value of defensive or protective measures.7

A deeper insight into the mechanism of obsessional neurosis is gained if we take into account the primary fact which lies at the bottom of it. This is always the repression of an instinctual impulse (a component of the sexual instinct) which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to suppression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious. The influence of the repressed instinct is felt as a temptation, and during the process of repression itself anxiety is generated, which gains control over the future in the form of expectant anxiety. The process of repression which leads to obsessional neurosis must be considered as one which is only partly successful and which increasingly threatens to fail. It may thus be compared to an unending conflict; fresh psychical efforts are continually required to counterbalance the forward pressure of the instinct. Thus the ceremonial and obsessive actions arise partly as a defence against the temptation and partly as a protection against the ill which is expected. Against the temptation the protective measures seem soon to become inadequate; then the prohibitions come into play, with the purpose of keeping at a distance situations that give rise to temptation. Prohibitions take the place of obsessive actions, it will be seen, just as a phobia is designed to avert a hysterical attack. Again, a ceremonial represents the sum of the conditions subject to which something that is not yet absolutely forbidden is permitted, just as the Church’s marriage ceremony signifies for the believer a sanctioning of sexual enjoyment which would otherwise be sinful. A further characteristic of obsessional neurosis, as of all similar affections, is that its manifestations (its symptoms, including the obsessive actions) fulfil the condition of being a compromise between the warring forces of the mind. They thus always reproduce something of the pleasure which they are designed to prevent; they serve the repressed instinct no less than the agencies which are repressing it. As the illness progresses, indeed, actions which were originally mostly concerned with maintaining the defence come to approximate more and more to the proscribed actions through which the instinct was able to find expression in childhood.

Some features of this state of affairs may be seen in the sphere of religious life as well. The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component. A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis. Perhaps because of the admixture of sexual components, perhaps because of some general characteristics of the instincts, the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

We have noted as a curious and derogatory characteristic of obsessional neurosis that its ceremonials are concerned with the small actions of daily life and are expressed in foolish regulations and restrictions in connection with them. We cannot understand this remarkable feature of the clinical picture until we have realized that the mechanism of psychical displacement, which was first discovered by me in the construction of dreams,¹ dominates the mental processes of obsessional neurosis. It is already clear from the few examples of obsessive actions given above that their symbolism and the detail of their execution are brought about by a displacement from the actual, important thing on to a small one which takes its place - for instance, from a husband on to a chair. It is this tendency to displacement which progressively changes the clinical picture and eventually succeeds in turning what is apparently the most trivial matter into something of the utmost importance and urgency. It cannot be denied that in the religious field as well there is a similar tendency to a displacement of psychical values, and in the same direction, so that the petty ceremonials of religious practice gradually become the essential thing and push aside the underlying thoughts. That is why religions are subject to reforms which work retroactively and aim at a re-establishment of the original balance of values.

¹ See The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Chapter VI, Section B.9

The character of compromise which obsessive actions possess in their capacity as neurotic symptoms is the character least easily detected in corresponding religious observances. Yet here, too, one is reminded of this feature of neuroses when one remembers how commonly all the acts which religion forbids - the expressions of the instincts it has suppressed - are committed precisely in the name of, and ostensibly for the sake of, religion.

In view of these similarities and analogies one might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological counterpart of the formation of a religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis. The most essential similarity would reside in the underlying renunciation of the activation of instincts that are constitutionally present; and the chief difference would lie in the nature of those instincts, which in the neurosis are exclusively sexual in their origin, while in religion they spring from egoistic sources.

A progressive renunciation of constitutional instincts, whose activation might afford the ego primary pleasure, appears to be one of the foundations of the development of human civilization. Some part of this instinctual repression is effected by its religions, in that they require the individual to sacrifice his instinctual pleasure to the Deity: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ In the development of the ancient religions one seems to discern that many things which man kind had renounced as ‘iniquities’ had been surrendered to the Deity and were still permitted in his name, so that the handing over to him of bad and socially harmful instincts was the means by which man freed himself from their domination. For this reason, it is surely no accident that all the attributes of man, along with the misdeeds that follow from them, were to an unlimited amount ascribed to the ancient gods. Nor is it a contradiction of this that nevertheless man was not permitted to justify his own iniquities by appealing to divine example.

VIENNA, February 19070

THE SEXUAL ENLIGHTENMENT OF CHILDREN (AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. M. FÜRST)

(1907)

Dear Dr. Fürst,

When you ask me for an expression of opinion on ‘the sexual enlightenment of children’, I assume that what you want is not a regular, formal treatise on the subject which shall take into account the excessive mass of literature that has grown up around it, but the independent judgement of an individual doctor whose professional activities have offered him special opportunities for concerning himself with sexual problems. I know that you have followed my scientific efforts with interest and that, unlike many of our colleagues, you do not dismiss my ideas without examining them because I regard the psychosexual constitution and certain noxae of sexual life as the most important causes of the neurotic disorders that are so common. My Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, too, where I have described the way in which the sexual instinct is compounded and the disturbances which may occur in its development into the function of sexuality, have recently had a friendly reception in your journal.

I am expected, therefore, to answer questions on the following points: whether children ought to be given any enlightenment at all about the facts of sexual life, at what age this ought to happen and in what manner it should be carried out. Let me admit to you at once that I find a discussion of the second and third points perfectly reasonable, but that to my mind it is quite incomprehensible how there could be a difference of opinion on the first point. What can be the purpose of withholding from children - or, let us say, from young people - enlightenment of this kind about the sexual life of human beings? Is it from a fear of arousing their interest in these matters prematurely, before it awakens in them spontaneously? Is it from a hope that a concealment of this kind may retard the sexual instinct altogether until such time as it can find its way into the only channels open to it in our middle-class social order? Is it supposed that children would show no interest or understanding for the facts and riddles of sexual life if they were not prompted to do so by outside influences? Is it thought possible that the knowledge which is withheld from them will not reach them in other ways? Or is it genuinely and seriously intended that later on they should regard everything to do with sex as something degraded and detestable from which their parents and teachers wished to keep them away as long as possible?

I really do not know in which of these purposes to look for the motive for the concealment of what is sexual from children that is in fact carried out. I only know that they are all equally absurd and that I find it difficult to honour them with a serious refutation. I remember, however, that in the family letters of that great thinker and humanitarian Multatuli, I once found a few lines which are a more than adequate answer:

‘To my mind, certain things are in general too much wrapped in a veil. It is right to keep a child’s imagination pure, but this purity will not be preserved by ignorance. On the contrary, I think that concealment leads a boy or girl to suspect the truth more than ever. Curiosity leads us to pry into things which, if they had been told us without any great to do, would have aroused little or no interest in us. If this ignorance could be maintained even, I might become reconciled to it, but that is impossible. The child comes into contact with other children, books come his way which lead him to reflect, and the mystery-making with which his parents treat what he has nevertheless discovered actually increases his desire to know more. This desire, which is only partly satisfied and only in secret, excites his feeling and corrupts his imagination, so that the child already sins while his parents still believe that he does not know what sin is.’¹

¹ Multatuli, 1906, 1, 26.4

I do not know how the case could be better stated, but perhaps I may add a few remarks. It is undoubtedly nothing else but the customary prudishness and their own bad conscience over sexual matters that causes adults to adopt this attitude of ‘mystery-making’ in front of children; but possibly a part is also played by a piece of theoretical ignorance on their part, which we can counteract by giving the adults some enlightenment. It is commonly believed that the sexual instinct is absent in children and only begins to emerge in them at puberty when the sexual organs mature. This is a gross error, equally serious in its effects both on knowledge and on practice; and it is so easily corrected by observation that one wonders how it could ever have been made. As a matter of fact, the new-born baby brings sexuality with it into the world, certain sexual sensations accompany its development as a suckling and during early childhood, and only very few children would seem to escape sexual activities and sensations before puberty. Anyone who would like to find a detailed exposition of these statements can do so in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, to which I have referred above. There he will learn that the organs of reproduction proper are not the only parts of the body which provide sexual sensations of pleasure, and that nature has even so ordered matters that actual stimulations of the genitals are unavoidable during early childhood. This period of life, during which a certain quota of what is undoubtedly sexual pleasure is produced by the excitation of various parts of the skin (erotogenic zones), by the activity of certain biological instincts and as an accompanying excitation in many affective states, is called the period of auto-erotism, to use a term introduced by Havelock Ellis. All that puberty does is to give the genitals primacy among all the other zones and sources which produce pleasure, and thus to force erotism into the service of the function of reproduction. This process can naturally undergo certain inhibitions, and in many people (those who later become perverts and neurotics) it is only incompletely accomplished. On the other hand, the child is capable long before puberty of most of the psychical manifestations of love-tenderness, for example, devotion and jealousy. Often enough, too, an irruption of these mental states is associated with the physical sensations of sexual excitation, so that the child cannot remain in doubt as to the connection between the two. In short, except for his reproductive power, a child has a fully-developed capacity for love long before puberty; and it may be asserted that the ‘mystery-making’ merely prevents him from being able to gain an intellectual grasp of activities for which he is psychically prepared and physically adjusted.

A child’s intellectual interest in the riddles of sex, his desire for sexual knowledge, shows itself accordingly at an unexpectedly early age. If it has not been possible to make observations such as I am now going to put before you more frequently, that can only be because parents are either afflicted with blindness in regard to this interest on the part of their children, or, because, if they cannot overlook it, they at once take steps to stifle it. I know a delightful little boy, now four years old, whose understanding parents abstain from forcibly suppressing one part of the child’s development. Little Hans has certainly not been exposed to anything in the nature of seduction by a nurse, yet he has already for some time shown the liveliest interest in the part of the body which he calls his ‘widdler’. When he was only three he asked his mother: ‘ Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’ His mother answered: ‘Of course. What did you think?’ He also asked his father the same question repeatedly. At the same age he was taken to a cow-shed for the first time and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh look!’ he said, in surprise, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’ At the age of three and three quarters he was on the way to making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observations. He saw some water being let out of an engine and said, ‘Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’ He added afterwards in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ Recently he was watching his seven-day-old little sister being given a bath. ‘But her widdler’s still quite small’, he remarked; ‘when she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’ (I have been told of this same attitude towards the problem of sex distinction in other boys of similar age.) I should like to say explicitly that little Hans is not a sensual child or at all pathologically disposed. The fact is simply, I think, that, not having been intimidated or oppressed with a sense of guilt, he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] The history of little Hans’s later illness and recovery is described in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b).6

The second great problem which exercises a child’s mind - only at a somewhat later age, no doubt - is the question of the origin of babies. This is usually started by the unwelcome arrival of a small brother or sister. It is the oldest and most burning question that confronts immature humanity. Those who understand how to interpret myths and legends can detect it in the riddle which the Theban Sphinx set to Oedipus. The customary answers given to the child in the nursery damage his genuine instinct of research and as a rule deal the first blow, too, at his confidence in his parents. From that time on he usually begins to mistrust grown-up people, and to keep his most intimate interests secret from them. The following little document shows how tormenting this curiosity can become in older children. It is a letter written by a motherless girl of eleven and a half who had been speculating on the problem with her younger sister.

‘Dear Aunt Mali,

‘Will you please be so kind as to tell me how you got Christel and Paul. You must know because you are married. We were arguing about it yesterday evening and we want to know the truth. We have nobody else to ask. When are you coming to Salzburg? You know, Aunt Mali, we simply can’t understand how the stork brings babies. Trudel thought the stork brings them in a shirt. Then we want to know as well if the stork gets them out of the pond and why one never sees babies in ponds. And will you please tell me, too, how one knows beforehand when one is going to have one. Write and tell me everything about it.

‘With thousands of greetings and kisses from us all,

‘Your inquisitive niece,

Lili.’

I do not believe that this touching letter brought the two sisters the enlightenment they wanted. Later on the writer of it fell ill of the neurosis that arises from unanswered unconscious questions - of obsessional brooding.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] After some years, however, her obsessional brooding gave way to a dementia praecox.

There does not seem to me to be a single good reason for denying children the enlightenment which their thirst for knowledge demands. To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in favour of the ‘goodness’ which they think so much of, they cannot set about this better than by deceiving him in sexual matters and intimidating him in matters of religion. The stronger natures will, it is true, withstand these influences and become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other authority. If children are not given the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves with the problem in secret and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mingled in the most extraordinary way with grotesque untruths; or they whisper information to one another in which, because of the young enquirers’ sense of guilt, everything sexual is stamped as being horrible and disgusting. These infantile sexual theories would be well worth collecting and examining. From this time on, children usually lose the only proper attitude to sexual questions, and many of them never regain it.

It seems that the large majority of authors, both men and women, who have written about the sexual enlightenment of youth have concluded in favour of it. But the clumsiness of most of their proposals as to when and how this enlightenment is to take place tempts one to think that they have not found it easy to arrive at this conclusion. So far as my knowledge of the literature goes, a single outstanding exception is provided by the charming letter of explanation which a certain Frau Emma Eckstein quotes as having been written by her to her son when he was about ten years old.¹ The customary method is obviously not quite the right one: all sexual knowledge is kept from children as long as possible, and then on one single occasion a disclosure is made to them in solemn and turgid language, and even so is only half the truth and generally comes too late. Most of the answers to the question ‘How am I to tell my children?’ make such a miserable impression, on me at least, that I should prefer parents not to embark on the business of enlightenment at all. What is really important is that children should never get the idea that one wants to make more of a secret of the facts of sexual life than of any other matter which is not yet accessible to their understanding; and to ensure this it is necessary that from the very first what has to do with sexuality should be treated like anything else that is worth knowing about. Above all, it is the duty of schools not to evade the mention of sexual matters. The main facts of reproduction and their significance should be included in lessons about the animal kingdom, and at the same time stress should be laid on the fact that man shares every essential in his organization with the higher animals. Then, provided that the child’s home environment does not aim directly at frightening him off thinking, something that I once overheard in a nursery will probably happen more often. I heard a boy saying to his little sister: ‘How can you think babies are brought by the stork! You know man’s a mammal; d’you think storks bring other mammals their babies too?’

¹ Emma Eckstein, 1904.8

The child’s curiosity will never reach a very high degree of intensity provided it finds appropriate satisfaction at each stage of his learning. Enlightenment about the specific facts of human sexuality and an indication of its social significance should, therefore, be given to the child at the end of his time at his elementary school [Volksschule] and before he enters his intermediate school [Mittelschule] - that is to say, before he is ten years old. The period of confirmation would be a more suitable time than any other at which to instruct the child, who will by that time have a full knowledge of all the physical facts, in the moral obligations which are attached to the actual satisfaction of the instinct. Enlightenment about sexual life carried out along such lines as this, proceeding step by step and without any real interruption, and in which the school takes the initiative, seems to me to be the only kind which takes into account the child’s development and thus successfully avoids the dangers involved.

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