Contributions to the neue freie presse 14 страница

In my description I shall, as I have already said, content myself with the briefest possible summary of the circumstances. Obviously the first problem to be solved was why the two speeches of the Czech captain - his rat story, and his request to the patient that he should pay back the money to Lieutenant A. - should have had such an agitating effect on him and should have provoked such violently pathological reactions. The presumption was that it was a question of ‘complexive sensitiveness’, and that the speeches had jarred upon certain hyperaesthetic spots in his unconscious. And so it proved to be. As always happened with the patient in connection with military matters, he had been in a state of unconscious identification with his father, who had seen many years’ service and had been full of stories of his soldiering days. Now it happened by chance - for chance may play a part in the formation of a symptom, just as the wording may help in the making of a joke - that one of his father’s little adventures had an important element in common with the captain’s request. His father, in his capacity as non-commissioned officer, had control over a small sum of money and had on one occasion lost it at cards. (Thus he had been a ‘Spielratte’.¹) He would have found himself in a serious position if one of his comrades had not advanced him the amount. After he had left the army and become well-off, he had tried to find this friend in need so as to pay him back the money, but had not managed to trace him. The patient was uncertain whether he had ever succeeded in returning the money. The recollection of this sin of his father’s youth was painful to him, for, in spite of appearances, his unconscious was filled with hostile strictures upon his father’s character. The captain’s words, ‘You must pay back the 3.80 kronen to Lieutenant A.’, had sounded to his ears like an allusion to this unpaid debt of his father’s.

¹ [Literally, ‘play-rat’. Colloquial German for ‘gambler’.]5

But the information that the young lady at the post office at Z-- had herself paid the charges due upon the packet, with a complimentary remark about himself,¹ had intensified his identification with his father in quite another direction. At this stage in the analysis he brought out some new information, to the effect that the landlord of the inn at the little place where the post office was had had a pretty daughter. She had been decidedly encouraging to the smart young officer, so that he had thought of returning there after the manoeuvres were over and of trying his luck with her. Now, however, she had a rival in the shape of the young lady at the post office. Like his father in the tale of his marriage, he could afford now to hesitate upon which of the two he should bestow his favours when he had finished his military service. We can see at once that his singular indecision whether he should travel to Vienna or go back to the place where the post office was, and the constant temptation he felt to turn back while he was on the journey (p. 2140), were not so senseless as they seemed to us at first. To his conscious mind, the attraction exercised upon him by Z--, the place where the post office was, was explained by the necessity of seeing Lieutenant A. and fulfilling the vow with his assistance. But in reality what was attracting him was the young lady at the post office, and the lieutenant was merely a good substitute for her, since he had lived at the same place and had himself been in charge of the military postal service. And when subsequently he heard that it was not Lieutenant A. but another officer B., who had been on duty at the post office that day, he drew him into his combination as well; and he was then able to reproduce in his deliria in connection with the two officers the hesitation he felt between the two girls who were so kindly disposed towards him.²

¹ It must not be forgotten that he had learnt this before the captain, owing to a misapprehension, requested him to pay back the money to Lieutenant A. This circumstance was the vital point of the story, and by suppressing it the patient reduced himself to a state of the most hopeless muddle and for some time prevented me from getting any idea of the meaning of it all.

² (Footnote added 1923:) My patient did his very best to throw confusion over the little episode of the repayment of the charges for his pince-nez, so that perhaps my own account of it may also have failed to clear it up entirely. I therefore reproduce here a little map (Fig. 5), by means of which Mr. and Mrs. Strachey have endeavoured to make the situation at the end of the manoeuvres plainer. My translators have justly observed that the patient’s behaviour remains unintelligible so long as a further circumstance is not expressly stated, namely, that Lieutenant A. had formerly lived at the place Z-- where the post office was situated and had been in charge of the military post office there, but that during the last few days he had handed over this billet to Lieutenant B. and had been transferred to another village. The ‘cruel’ captain had been in ignorance of this transfer, and this was the explanation of his mistake in supposing that the charges had to be paid back to Lieutenant A.

Fig. 5.

In elucidating the effects produced by the captain’s rat story we must follow the course of the analysis more closely. The patient began by producing an enormous mass of associative material, which at first, however, threw no light upon the circumstances in which the formation of his obsession had taken place. The idea of the punishment carried out by means of rats had acted as a stimulus to a number of his instincts and had called up a whole quantity of recollections; so that, in the short interval between the captain’s story and his request to him to pay back the money, rats had acquired a series of symbolic meanings, to which, during the period which followed, fresh ones were continually being added. I must confess that I can only give a very incomplete account of the whole business. What the rat punishment stirred up more than anything else was his anal erotism, which had played an important part in his childhood and had been kept in activity for many years by a constant irritation due to worms. In this way rats came to have the meaning of ‘money’.¹ The patient gave an indication of this connection by reacting to the word ‘Ratten’ [‘rats’] with the association ‘Raten’ [‘instalments’]. In his obsessional deliria he had coined himself a regular rat currency. When, for instance, in reply to a question, I told him the amount of my fee for an hour’s treatment, he said to himself (as I learned six months later): ‘So many florins, so many rats’. Little by little he translated into this language the whole complex of money interests which centred round his father’s legacy to him, that is to say, all his ideas connected with that subject were, by way of the verbal bridge ‘Raten - Ratten’, carried over into his obsessional life and brought under the dominion of his unconscious. Moreover, the captain’s request to him to pay back the charges due upon the packet served to strengthen the money significance of rats, by way of another verbal bridge ‘

Spielratte’, which led back to his father’s gambling debt.

¹ See my paper on ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).7

But the patient was also familiar with the fact that rats are carriers of dangerous infectious diseases; he could therefore employ them as symbols of his dread (justifiable enough in the army) of syphilitic infection. This dread concealed all sorts of doubts as to the kind of life his father had led during his term of military service. Again, in another sense, the penis itself is a carrier of syphilitic infection; and in this way he could consider the rat as a male organ of sex. It had a further title to be so regarded; for a penis (especially a child’s penis) can easily be compared to a worm, and the captain’s story had been about rats burrowing in some one’s anus, just as the large round-worms had in his when he was a child. Thus the penis significance of rats was based, once more, upon anal erotism. And apart from this, the rat is a dirty animal, feeding upon excrement and living in sewers.¹ It is perhaps unnecessary to point out how great an extension of the rat delirium became possible owing to this new meaning. For instance, ‘So many rats, so many florins’ could serve as an excellent characterization of a certain female profession which he particularly detested. On the other hand, it is certainly not a matter of indifference that the substitution of a penis for a rat in the captain’s story resulted in a situation of intercourse per anum, which could not fail to be especially revolting to him when brought into connection with his father and the woman he loved. And when we consider that the same situation was reproduced in the compulsive threat which had formed in his mind after the captain had made his request, we shall be forcibly reminded of certain curses in use among the Southern Slavs.² Moreover, all of this material, and more besides, was woven into the fabric of the rat discussions behind the screen-association ‘heiraten’ [‘to marrry’].

¹ If the reader feels tempted to shake his head at the possibility of such leaps of imagination in the neurotic mind, I may remind him that artists have sometimes indulged in similar freaks of fancy. Such, for instance, are Le Poitevin’s Diableries érotiques.

² The exact terms of these curses will be found in the periodical Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Krauss.8

The story of the rat punishment, as was shown by the patient’s own account of the matter and by his facial expression as he repeated the story to me, had fanned into a flame all his prematurely suppressed impulses of cruelty, egoistic and sexual alike. Yet, in spite of all this wealth of material, no light was thrown upon the meaning of his obsessional idea until one day the Rat-Wife in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf came up in the analysis, and it became impossible to escape the inference that in many of the shapes assumed by his obsessional deliria rats had another meaning still - namely, that of children.¹ Enquiry into the origin of this new meaning at once brought me up against some of the earliest and most important roots. Once when the patient was visiting his father’s grave he had seen a big beast, which he had taken to be a rat, gliding along over the grave.² He assumed that it had actually come out of his father’s grave, and had just been having a meal off his corpse. The notion of a rat is inseparably bound up with the fact that it has sharp teeth with which it gnaws and bites.³ But rats cannot be sharp-toothed, greedy and dirty with impunity: they are cruelly persecuted and mercilessly put to death by man, as the patient had often observed with horror. He had often pitied the poor creatures. But he himself had been just such a nasty, dirty little wretch, who was apt to bite people when he was in a rage, and had been fearfully punished for doing so (p. 2162). He could truly be said to find ‘a living likeness of himself’ in the rat. It was almost as though Fate, when the captain told him his story, had been putting him through an association test: she had called out a ‘complex stimulus-word’, and he had reacted to it with his obsessional idea.

¹ Ibsen’s Rat-Wife must certainly be derived from the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin, who first enticed away the rats into the water, and then, by the same means, lured the children out of the town, never to return. So too, Little Eyolf threw himself into the water under the spell of the Rat-Wife. In legends generally the rat appears not so much as a disgusting creature but as something uncanny - as a chthonic animal, one might almost say; and it is used to represent the souls of the dead.

² It was no doubt a weasel, of which there are great numbers in the Zentralfriedhof [the principal cemetery] in Vienna.

³ Compare the words of Mephistopheles:

Doch dieser Schwelle Zauber zu zerspalten

Bedarf ich eines Rattenzahns.

........

Noch einen Biss, so ist’s geschehn!

[But to break through the magic of this threshold

I need a rat’s tooth. (He conjures up a rat.)

........

Another bite, and it is done!]9

According, then, to his earliest and most momentous experiences, rats were children. And at this point he brought out a piece of information which he had kept away from its context long enough, but which now fully explained the interest he was bound to feel in children. The lady, whose admirer he had been for so many years, but whom he had nevertheless not been able to make up his mind to marry, was condemned to childlessness by reason of a gynaecological operation which had involved the removal of both ovaries. This indeed - for he was extraordinarily fond of children - had been the chief reason for his hesitation.

It was only then that it became possible to understand the inexplicable process by which his obsessional idea had been formed. With the assistance of our knowledge of infantile sexual theories and of symbolism (as learnt from the interpretation of dreams) the whole thing could be translated and given a meaning. When, at the afternoon halt (during which he had lost his pince-nez), the captain had told him about the rat punishment, the patient had only been struck at first by the combined cruelty and lasciviousness of the situation depicted. But immediately afterwards a connection had been set up with the scene from his childhood in which he himself had bitten some one. The captain - a man who could defend such punishments - had become a substitute for his father, and had thus drawn down upon himself a part of the reviving animosity which had burst out, on the original occasion, against his cruel father. The idea which came into his consciousness for a moment, to the effect that something of the sort might happen to some one he was fond of, is probably to be translated into a wish such as ‘You ought to have the same thing done to you!’ aimed at the teller of the story, but through him at his father. A day and a half later,¹ when the captain had handed him the packet upon which the charges were due and had requested him to pay back the 3.80 kronen to Lieutenant A., he had already been aware that his ‘cruel superior’ was making a mistake, and that the only person he owed anything to was the young lady at the post office. It might easily, therefore, have occurred to him to think of some derisive reply, such as, ‘Will I, though?’ or ‘Pay your grandmother!’ or ‘Yes! You bet I’II pay him back the money!’ - answers which would have been subject to no compulsive force. But instead, out of the stirrings of his father-complex and out of his memory of the scene from his childhood, there formed in his mind some such answer as: ‘Yes! I’II pay back the money to A. when my father and the lady have children!’ or ‘As sure as my father and the lady can have children, I’ll pay him back the money!’ In short, a derisive affirmation attached to an absurd condition which could never be fulfilled.²

¹ Not that evening, as he first told me. It was quite impossible that the pince-nez he had ordered could have arrived the same day. The patient shortened the interval of time retrospectively, because it was the period during which the decisive mental connections had been set up, and during which the repressed episode had taken place - the episode of his interview with the officer who told him of the friendly conduct of the young lady at the post office.

² Thus absurdity signifies derision in the language of obsessional thought, just as it does in dreams. See my Interpretation of Dreams.

But now the crime had been committed; he had insulted the two persons who were dearest to him - his father and his lady. The deed had called for punishment, and the penalty had consisted in his binding himself by a vow which it was impossible for him to fulfil and which entailed literal obedience to his superior’s ill-founded request. The vow ran as follows: ‘Now you must really pay back the money to A.’ In his convulsive obedience he had repressed his better knowledge that the captain’s request had been based upon erroneous premises: ‘Yes, you must pay back the money to A., as your father’s surrogate has required. Your father cannot be mistaken.’ So too the king cannot be mistaken; if he addresses one of his subjects by a title which is not his, the subject bears that title ever afterwards.

Only vague intelligence of these events reached the patient’s consciousness. But his revolt against the captain’s order and the sudden transformation of that revolt into its opposite were both represented there. First had come the idea that he was not to pay back the money, or it (that is, the rat punishment) would happen; and then had come the transformation of this idea into a vow to the opposite effect, as a punishment for his revolt.

Let us, further, picture to ourselves the general conditions under which the formation of the patient’s great obsessional idea occurred. His libido had been increased by a long period of abstinence coupled with the friendly welcome which a young officer can always reckon upon receiving when he goes among women. Moreover, at the time when he had started for the manoeuvres, there had been a certain coolness between himself and his lady. This intensification of his libido had inclined him to a renewal of his ancient struggle against his father’s authority, and he had dared to think of having sexual intercourse with other women. His loyalty to his father’s memory had grown weaker, his doubts as to his lady’s merits had increased; and in that frame of mind he let himself be dragged into insulting the two of them, and had then punished himself for it. In doing so he had copied an old model. And when at the end of the manoeuvres he had hesitated so long whether he should travel to Vienna or whether he should stop and fulfil his vow, he had represented in a single picture the two conflicts by which he had from the very first been torn - whether or no he should remain obedient to his father and whether or no he should remain faithful to his beloved.¹

¹ It is perhaps not uninteresting to observe that once again obedience to his father coincided with abandoning the lady. If he had stopped and paid back the money to A., he would have made atonement to his father, and at the same time he would have deserted his lady in favour of some one else more attractive. In this conflict the lady had been victorious - with the assistance, to be sure, of the patient’s own normal good sense.1

I may add a word upon the interpretation of the ‘sanction’ which, it will be remembered, was to the effect that ‘otherwise the rat punishment will be carried out on both of them’. It was based upon the influence of two infantile sexual theories, which I have discussed elsewhere.¹ The first of these theories is that babies come out of the anus; and the second, which follows logically from the first, is that men can have babies just as well as women. According to the technical rules for interpreting dreams, the notion of coming out of the rectum can be represented by the opposite notion of creeping into the rectum (as in the rat punishment), and vice versa

.

We should not be justified in expecting such severe obsessional ideas as were present in this case to be cleared up in any simpler manner or by any other means. When we reached the solution that has been described above, the patient’s rat delirium disappeared.

¹ ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908c).2

II THEORETICAL(A) SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF OBSESSIONAL STRUCTURES ¹

In the year 1896 I defined obsessional ideas as ‘transformed self-reproaches which have re-emerged from repression and which always relate to some sexual act that was performed with pleasure in childhood’. This definition now seems to me to be open to criticism upon formal grounds, though its component elements are unobjectionable. It was aiming too much at unification, and took as its model the practice of obsessional neurotics themselves, when, with their characteristic liking for indeterminateness, they heap together under the name of ‘obsessional ideas’ the most heterogeneous psychical structures.² In point of fact, it would be more correct to speak of ‘obsessive thinking’, and to make it clear that obsessional structures can correspond to every sort of psychical act. They can be classed as wishes, temptations, impulses, reflections, doubts, commands, or prohibitions. Patients endeavour in general to tone down such distinctions and to regard what remains of these psychical acts after they have been deprived of their affective index simply as ‘obsessional ideas’. Our present patient gave an example of this type of behaviour in one of his first sessions, when he attempted to reduce a wish to the level of a mere ‘train of thought’ (p. 2144idh_p2144).

¹ Several of the points dealt with in this and the following section have already been mentioned in the literature on the subject of obsessional neuroses, as may be gathered from Löwenfeld’s exhaustive study, Die psychischen Zwangserscheinungen, 1904, which is the standard work upon this form of disease.

² This fault in my definition is to some extent corrected in the paper itself. The following passage will be found: ‘The re-activated memories, however, and the self-reproaches formed from them never re-emerge into consciousness unchanged: what become conscious as obsessional ideas and affects, and take the place of the pathogenic memories so far as conscious life is concerned, are structures in the nature of a compromise between the repressed ideas and the repressing ones.’ In the definition, that is to say, especial stress is to be laid on the word ‘transformed’.

It must be confessed, moreover, that even the phenomenology of obsessional thinking has not yet had sufficient attention paid to it. During the secondary defensive struggle, which the patient carries on against the ‘obsessional ideas’ that have forced their way into his consciousness, psychical structures make their appearance which deserve to be given a special name. (Such, for example, were the sequences of thoughts that occupied our patient’s mind on his journey back from the manoeuvres.) They are not purely reasonable considerations arising in opposition to the obsessional thoughts, but, as it were, hybrids between the two species of thinking; they accept certain of the premises of the obsession they are combating, and thus, while using the weapons of reason, are established upon a basis of pathological thought. I think such structures as these deserve to be given the name of ‘deliria’. To make the distinction clear, I will give an instance, which should be inserted into its proper context in the patient’s case history. I have already described the crazy conduct to which he gave way at one time when he was preparing for an examination - how, after working till far into the night, he used to go and open the front door to his father’s ghost, and then look at his genitals in the looking-glass (p. 2160). He tried to bring himself to his senses by asking himself what his father would say to it all if he were really still alive. But the argument had no effect so long as it was put forward in this rational shape. The spectre was not laid until he had transformed the same idea into a ‘delirious’ threat to the effect that if he ever went through this nonsense again some evil would befall his father in the next world.

The distinction between a primary and a secondary defensive struggle is no doubt well founded, but we find its value unexpectedly diminished when we discover that the patients themselves do not know the wording of their own obsessional ideas. This may sound paradoxical, but it is perfectly good sense. During the progress of a psycho-analysis it is not only the patient who plucks up courage, but his disease as well; it grows bold enough to speak more plainly than before. To drop the metaphor, what happens is that the patient, who his hitherto turned his eyes away in terror from his own pathological productions, begins to attend to them and obtains a clearer and more detailed view of them.¹

There are, besides this, two special ways in which a more precise knowledge of obsessional structures can be gained. In the first place, experience shows that an obsessional command (or whatever it may be), which in waking life is known only in a truncated and distorted form, like a mutilated telegraph message, may have its actual text brought to light in a dream. Such texts appear in dreams in the shape of speeches, and are thus an exception to the rule that speeches in dreams are derived from speeches in real life.² Secondly, in the course of the analytic examination of a case history, one becomes convinced that if a number of obsessions succeed one another they are often - even though their wording is not identical - ultimately one and the same. The obsession may have been successfully shaken off on its first appearance, but it comes back a second time in a distorted form and without being recognized, and may then perhaps be able to hold its own in the defensive struggle more effectively, precisely because of its distortion. But the original form is the correct one, and often displays its meaning quite openly. When we have at great pains elucidated an unintelligible obsessional idea, it often happens that the patient informs us that just such a notion, wish, or temptation as the one we have constructed did in fact make its appearance on one occasion before the obsessional idea had arisen, but that it did not persist. It would unfortunately involve us in too lengthy a digression if we were to give instances of this from the history of our present patient.

¹ Some patients carry the diversion of their attention to such lengths that they are totally unable to give the content of an obsessional idea or to describe an obsessional act though they have performed it over and over again.

² See The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a, Chapter VI, Section F.5

What is officially described as an ‘obsessional idea’ exhibits, therefore, in its distortion from its original wording, traces of the primary defensive struggle. Its distortion enables it to persist, since conscious thought is thus compelled to misapprehend it, just as though it were a dream; for dreams also are a product of compromise and distortion, and are also misapprehended by waking thought.

This misapprehension on the part of consciousness can be seen at work not only in reference to the obsessional ideas themselves, but also in reference to the products of the secondary defensive struggle, such, for instance, as the protective formulas. I can produce two good examples of this. Our patient used to employ as a defensive formula a rapidly pronounced ‘aber’ [‘but’] accompanied by a gesture of repudiation. He told me on one occasion that this formula had become altered recently; he now no longer said ‘áber’ but ‘abér’. When he was asked to give the reason for this new departure, he declared that the mute ‘e’ of the second syllable gave him no sense of security against the intrusion, which he so much dreaded, of some foreign and contradictory element, and that he had therefore decided to accent the ‘e’. This explanation (an excellent sample of the obsessional neurotic style) was, however, clearly inadequate; the most that it could claim to be was a rationalization. The truth was that ‘abér’ was an approximation towards the similar-sounding ‘abwehr’ [’defence’], a term which he had learnt in the course of our theoretical discussions of psycho-analysis. He had thus put the treatment to an illegitimate and ‘delirious’ use in order to strengthen a defensive formula. Another time he told me about his principal magic word, which was an apotropaic against every evil; he had put it together out of the initial letters of the most powerfully beneficent of his prayers and had clapped on an ‘amen’ at the end of it. I cannot reproduce the word itself, for reasons which will become apparent immediately. For, when he told it me, I could not help noticing that the word was in fact an anagram of the name of his lady. Her name contained an ‘s’, and this he had put last, that is, immediately before the ‘amen’ at the end. We may say, therefore, that by this process he had brought his ‘Samen’ [‘semen’] into contact with the woman he loved; in imagination, that is to say, he had masturbated with her. He himself, however, had never noticed this very obvious connection; his defensive forces had allowed themselves to be fooled by the repressed ones. This is also a good example of the rule that in time the thing which is meant to be warded off invariably finds its way into the very means which is being used for warding it off.

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