The psychical disorders of male potency 15 страница

(D) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM A DEVELOPMENTAL POINT OF VIEW

Not every analysis of psychological phenomena deserves the name of psycho-analysis. The latter implies more than the mere analysis of composite phenomena into simpler ones. It consists in tracing back one psychical structure to another which preceded it in time and out of which it developed. Medical psycho-analytic procedure was not able to eliminate a symptom until it had traced that symptom’s origin and development. Thus from the very first psycho-analysis was directed towards tracing developmental processes. It began by discovering the genesis of neurotic symptoms, and was led, as time went on, to turn its attention to other psychical structures and to construct a genetic psychology which would apply to them too.

Psycho-analysis has been obliged to derive the mental life of adults from that of children, and has had to take seriously the old saying that the child is father to the man. It has traced the continuity between the infantile and adult mind, and has also noted the transformations and re-arrangements that occur in the process. In most of us there is a gap in our memories covering the first years of our childhood, of which only a few fragmentary recollections survive. Psycho-analysis may be said to have filled in this gap and to have abolished man’s infantile amnesia. (See the section on ‘Educational Interest’ below.)

Some notable discoveries have been made in the course of this investigation of the infantile mind. Thus it has been possible to confirm, what has often already been suspected, the extraordinarily important influence exerted by the impressions of childhood (and particularly by its earliest years) on the whole course of later development. This brings us up against a psychological paradox - which for psycho-analysts alone is no paradox - that it is precisely these most important of all impressions that are not remembered in later years. Psycho-analysis has been able to establish the decisive and indestructible character of these earliest experiences in the clearest possible way in the case of sexual life. ‘On revient toujours à ses premiers amours’ is sober truth. The many riddles in the sexual life of adults can only be solved if stress is laid on the infantile factors in love. Theoretical light is thrown on their influence by the consideration that an individual’s first experiences in childhood do not occur only by chance but also correspond to the first activities of his innate or constitutional instinctual dispositions.

Another and far more surprising discovery has been that, in spite of all the later development that occurs in the adult, none of the infantile mental formations perish. All the wishes, instinctual impulses, modes of reaction and attitudes of childhood are still demonstrably present in maturity and in appropriate circumstances can emerge once more. They are not destroyed but merely overlaid - to use the spatial mode of description which psycho-analytic psychology has been obliged to adopt. Thus it is part of the nature of the mental past that, unlike the historic past, it is not absorbed by its derivatives; it persists (whether actually or only potentially) alongside what has proceeded from it. The proof of this assertion lies in the fact that the dreams of normal people revive their childhood characters every night and reduce their whole mental life to an infantile level. This same return to psychical infantilism (‘regression’) appears in the neuroses and psychoses, whose peculiarities may to a great extent be described as psychical archaisms. The strength in which the residues of infancy are still present in the mind shows us the amount of disposition to illness; that disposition may accordingly be regarded as an expression of an inhibition in development. The part of a person’s psychical material which has remained infantile and has been repressed as being unserviceable constitutes the core of his unconscious. And we believe we can follow in our patients’ life-histories the way in which this unconscious, held back as it is by the forces of repression, lies in wait for a chance to become active and makes use of its opportunities if the later and higher psychical structures fail to master the difficulties of real life.

In the last few years psycho-analytic writers¹ have become aware that the principle that ‘ontogeny is a repetition of phylogeny’ must be applicable to mental life; and this has led to a fresh extension of psycho-analytic interest.

¹ Abraham, Spielrein and Jung.1

(E) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW

OF THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

The comparison between the childhood of individual men and the early history of societies has already proved its fruitfulness in several directions, even though the study has scarcely more than begun. In this connection the psycho-analytic mode of thought acts like a new instrument of research. The application of its hypotheses to social psychology enables us both to raise fresh problems and to see old ones in a fresh light and contribute towards their solution.

In the first place, it seems quite possible to apply the psycho-analytic views derived from dreams to products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy tales.¹ The need to interpret such productions has long been felt; some ‘secret meaning’ has been suspected to lie behind them and it has been presumed that that meaning is concealed by changes and transformations. The study made by psycho-analysis of dreams and neuroses has given it the necessary experience to enable it to guess the technical procedures that have governed these distortions. But in a number of instances it can also reveal the hidden motives which have led to this modification in the original meaning of myths. It cannot accept as the first impulse to the construction of myths a theoretical craving for finding an explanation of natural phenomena or for accounting for cult observances and usages which have become unintelligible. It looks for that impulse in the same psychical ‘complexes’, in the same emotional trends, which it has discovered at the base of dreams and symptoms.

A similar application of its points of view, its hypotheses and its findings has enabled psycho-analysis to throw light on the origins of our great cultural institutions - on religion, morality, justice and philosophy.² By examining the primitive psychological situations which were able to provide the motive for creations of this kind, it has been in a position to reject certain attempts at an explanation that were based on too superficial a psychology and to replace them by a more penetrating insight.

¹ Cf. Abraham, Rank and Jung.

² For some first attempts in this direction, see Jung (1912) and Freud (1912-13).2

Psycho-analysis has established an intimate connection between these psychical achievements of individuals on the one hand and societies on the other by postulating one and the same dynamic source for both of them. It starts out from the basic idea that the principal function of the mental mechanism is to relieve the individual from the tensions created in him by his needs. One part of this task can be achieved by extracting satisfaction from the external world; and for this purpose it is essential to have control over the real world. But the satisfaction of another part of these needs - among them certain affective impulses - is regularly frustrated by reality. This leads to the further task of finding some other means of dealing with the unsatisfied impulses. The whole course of the history of civilization is no more than an account of the various methods adopted by mankind for ‘binding’ their unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions (modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration.

An investigation of primitive peoples shows mankind caught up, to begin with, in a childish belief in its own omnipotence.¹ A whole number of mental structures can thus be understood as attempts to deny whatever might disturb this feeling of omnipotence and so to prevent emotional life from being affected by reality until the latter could be better controlled and used for purposes of satisfaction. The principle of avoiding unpleasure dominates human actions until it is replaced by the better one of adaptation to the external world. Pari passu with men’s progressive control over the world goes a development in their Weltanschauung, their view of the universe as a whole. They turn away more and more from their original belief in their own omnipotence, rising from an animistic phase through a religious to a scientific one. Myths, religion and morality find their place in this scheme as attempts to seek a compensation for the lack of satisfaction of human wishes.

Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. For the neuroses themselves have turned out to be attempts to find individual solutions for the problems of compensating for unsatisfied wishes, while the institutions seek to provide social solutions for these same problems. The recession of the social factor and the predominance of the sexual one turns these neurotic solutions of the psychological problem into caricatures which are of no service except to help us in explaining such important questions.

¹ Cf. Ferenczi (1913c) and Freud (1912-13), Chapter III.3

(F) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW

OF THE SCIENCE OF AESTHETICS

Psycho-analysis throws a satisfactory light upon some of the problems concerning arts and artists; but others escape it entirely. In the exercising of an art it sees once again an activity intended to allay ungratified wishes - in the first place in the creative artist himself and subsequently in his audience or spectators. The motive forces of artists are the same conflicts which drive other people into neurosis and have encouraged society to construct its institutions. Whence it is that the artist derives his creative capacity is not a question for psychology. The artist’s first aim is to set himself free and, by communicating his work to other people suffering from the same arrested desires, he offers them the same liberation.¹ He represents his most personal wishful phantasies as fulfilled; but they only become a work of art when they have undergone a transformation which softens what is offensive in them, conceals their personal origin and, by obeying the laws of beauty, bribes other people with a bonus of pleasure. Psycho-analysis has no difficulty in pointing out, alongside the manifest part of artistic enjoyment, another that is latent though far more potent, derived from the hidden sources of instinctual liberation. The connection between the impressions of the artist’s childhood and his life-history on the one hand and his works, as reactions to those impressions, on the other is one of the most attractive subjects of analytic examination.²

For the rest, most of the problems of artistic creation and appreciation await further study, which will throw the light of analytic knowledge on them and assign them their place in the complex structure presented by the compensation for human wishes. Art is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions. Thus art constitutes a region half-way between a reality which frustrates wishes and the wish-fulfilling world of the imagination - a region in which, as it were, primitive man’s strivings for omnipotence are still in full force.

¹ Cf. Rank (1907).

² Cf. Rank (1912). See also, for the application of psycho-analysis to aesthetic problems, my book on jokes (Freud, 1905c).4

(G) THE SOCIOLOGICAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

It is true that psycho-analysis has taken the individual mind as its subject, but in investigating the individual it could not avoid dealing with the emotional basis of the relation of the individual to society. It has found that the social feelings invariably contain an erotic element - an element which, if it is over-emphasized and then repressed, becomes one of the marks of a particular group of mental disorders. Psycho-analysis has recognized that in general the neuroses are asocial in their nature and that they always aim at driving the individual out of society and at replacing the safe monastic seclusion of earlier days by the isolation of illness. The intense feeling of guilt which dominates so many neuroses has been shown to be a social modification of neurotic anxiety.

On the other hand, psycho-analysis has fully demonstrated the part played by social conditions and requirements in the causation of neurosis. The forces which, operating from the ego, bring about the restriction and repression of instinct owe their origin essentially to compliance with the demands of civilization. A constitution and a set of childhood experiences which, in other cases, would inevitably lead to a neurosis will produce no such result where this compliance is absent or where these demands are not made by the social circle in which the particular individual is placed. The old assertion that the increase in nervous disorders is a product of civilization is at least a half-truth. Young people are brought into contact with the demands of civilization by upbringing and example; and if instinctual repression occurs independently of these two factors, it is a plausible hypothesis to suppose that a primaeval and prehistoric demand has at last become part of the organized and inherited endowment of mankind. A child who produces instinctual repressions spontaneously is thus merely repeating a part of the history of civilization. What is to-day an act of internal restraint was once an external one, imposed, perhaps, by the necessities of the moment; and, in the same way, what is now brought to bear upon every growing individual as an external demand of civilization may some day become an internal disposition to repression.

(H) THE EDUCATIONAL INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The overmastering interest which must be felt in psycho-analysis by the theory of education is based upon a fact which has become evident. Only someone who can feel his way into the minds of children can be capable of educating them; and we grown-up people cannot understand children because we no longer understand our own childhood. Our infantile amnesia proves that we have grown estranged from our childhood. Psycho-analysis has brought to light the wishes, the thought structures and the developmental processes of childhood. All earlier attempts in this direction have been in the highest degree incomplete and misleading because they have entirely overlooked the inestimably important factor of sexuality in its physical and mental manifestations. The incredulous astonishment which meets the most certainly established findings of psycho-analysis on the subject of childhood - the Oedipus complex, self-love (or ‘narcissism’), the disposition to perversions, anal erotism, sexual curiosity - is a measure of the gulf which separates our mental life, our judgements of value and, indeed, our processes of thought from those of even normal children.

When educators have become familiar with the findings of psycho-analysis, it will be easier for them to reconcile themselves to certain phases of infantile development and they will, among other things, not be in danger of over-estimating the importance of the socially unserviceable or perverse instinctual impulses which emerge in children. On the contrary they will refrain from any attempt at forcibly suppressing such impulses, when they learn that efforts of this kind often produce no less undesirable results than the alternative, which is so much dreaded by educators, of giving free play to children’s naughtiness. The forcible suppression of strong instincts by external means never has the effect in a child of these instincts being extinguished or brought under control; it leads to repression, which establishes a predisposition to later nervous illness. Psycho-analysis has frequent opportunities of observing the part played by inopportune and undiscerning severity of upbringing in the production of neuroses, or the price, in loss of efficiency and of capacity for enjoyment, which has to be paid for the normality upon which the educator insists. And psycho-analysis can also show what precious contributions to the formation of character are made by these asocial and perverse instincts in the child, if they are not subjected to repression but are diverted from their original aims to more valuable ones by the process known as ‘sublimation’. Our highest virtues have grown up, as reaction formations and sublimations, out of our worst dispositions. Education should scrupulously refrain from burying these precious springs of action and should restrict itself to encouraging the processes by which these energies are led along safe paths. Whatever we can expect in the way of prophylaxis against neurosis in the individual lies in the hands of a psycho-analytically enlightened education.¹

¹ See the writings of the Zurich pastor, Dr. Oskar Pfister.6 It has not been my aim in my present paper to lay before a scientifically orientated public an account of the compass and content of psycho-analysis or of its hypotheses, problems and findings. My purpose will have been fulfilled if I have made clear the many spheres of knowledge in which psycho-analysis is of interest and the numerous links which it has begun to forge between them.7

OBSERVATIONS AND EXAMPLES FROM ANALYTIC PRACTICE (1913)

The collection of short contributions, of which we here present a first instalment, calls for a few introductory words. The cases of illness which come under a psycho-analyst’s observation are of course of unequal value in adding to his knowledge. There are some on which he has to bring to bear all that he knows and from which he learns nothing; and there are others which show him what he already knows in a particularly clearly marked manner and in exceptionally revealing isolation, so that he is indebted to them not only for a confirmation but for an extension of his knowledge. We are justified in supposing that the psychical processes which we wish to study are no different in the first class of cases from what they are in the second, but we shall choose to describe them as they occur in the favourable and clear examples afforded by the latter. Similarly, the theory of evolution assumes that in the animal kingdom the segmentation of the egg proceeds in the same manner in those cases where a high degree of pigmentation is present and which are unfavourable for observation, as it does in those cases where the object of study is transparent and poorly pigmented and which are on that account selected for observation.

But the numerous apt examples, which, in the course of an analyst’s daily work, bring him a confirmation of what he already knows, are for the most part lost to view, since their collection into a larger whole often involves long delays. There is therefore some advantage in the provision of a framework within which observations and examples of this kind can be published and made generally known without waiting to be worked over from a more generalized point of view.0

Under the heading which is here introduced space will be offered for material of this kind. Communications should be kept as concise as possible. The different items are arranged in no particular order.

(1)DREAM WITH AN UNRECOGNIZED PRECIPITATING CAUSE

A good sleeper awoke one morning at a summer resort in the Tyrol, knowing that he had had a dream that the Pope was dead. He could think of no explanation of it. During the morning of the same day his wife said to him: ‘Did you hear the dreadful noise the bells made early this morning?’ He had not heard it but had evidently dreamt about it. The interpretation which his dream gave of the bells was his revenge on the pious Tyrolese. According to the newspapers the Pope was slightly indisposed at that time.(2)THE TIME OF DAY IN DREAMS

This very often stands for the age of the dreamer at some particular period in his childhood. In one dream a quarter past five in the morning meant the age of five years and three months, which was significant, since that was the dreamer’s age at the time of the birth of his younger brother. - Many similar examples.1

(3)REPRESENTATION OF AGES IN DREAMS

A woman dreamt that she was walking with two little girls whose ages differed by fifteen months. She was unable to recall any family of her acquaintance to whom this would apply. It occurred to her that both the children represented herself and that the dream was reminding her that the two traumatic events of her childhood were separated from each other by fifteen months (3½ and 4¾).

(4)POSITION WHEN WAKING FROM A DREAM

A woman dreamt that she was lying on her back and pressing the soles of her feet against those of another woman. The analysis made it seem probable that she was thinking of scenes of romping which she had substituted for the memory of an observation of sexual intercourse. When she woke up she noticed that, on the contrary, she had been lying on her stomach with her arms crossed, and had thus been imitating the position of a man and his embrace.

(9)TWO ROOMS AND ONE ROOM

He had a dream in which he saw two familiar rooms which had been made into one.

Nothing factual. The dream pointed to the female genitals and the anus, which, as a child, he had regarded as one area, the ‘bottom’ (in accordance with the infantile ‘cloaca theory’), while he now knows that there are two separate cavities and orifices. A reversed representation.2

(10)OVERCOAT AS A SYMBOL

In women’s dreams an overcoat [German ‘Mantel’] is unquestionably shown to be a symbol for a man. Linguistic assonance may perhaps play some part in this.

(13)DISGRACED FEET (SHOES)

After several days of resistance the patient reported that she had felt very much snubbed because a young man whom she met regularly near the doctor’s house, and who used as a rule to look at her admiringly, had on the last occasion looked contemptuously at her feet. In fact she had no reason to be ashamed of her feet. She produced the explanation herself after admitting that she had regarded the young man as the doctor’s son, who thus (by way of the transference) stood for her elder brother. There now followed a memory of having been in the habit of accompanying her brother to the lavatory when she was about five years old and of watching him micturate. She was overcome with envy at not being able to do it in the same way as he did and one day tried to copy him (envy for the penis). But in doing so she wetted her shoes and got very angry when her brother teased her about it. For a long time afterwards her anger recurred whenever her brother looked contemptuously at her shoes with the object of reminding her of her misfortune. She added that this experience had determined her later behaviour at school. If she was unsuccessful in anything at the first attempt she could never bring herself to try again, so that in many subjects she failed completely. This is a good example of the way in which sexual life acts as a model and influences character.(15)SELF-CRITICISM BY NEUROTICS

It is always a striking thing and deserves special notice when a neurotic is in the habit of speaking ill of himself, expressing a low opinion of himself, and so on. As in the case of self-reproaches, it is often possible to explain it by supposing that he is identifying himself with someone else. But in one patient the attendant circumstances during the session necessitated another explanation of behaviour of this kind. A young lady, who was never tired of declaring that she had very little intelligence, was without gifts, etc., was only trying to indicate by this that she had great physical beauty, and was concealing this boast behind her self-criticism. Nor was a reference to the harmful effects of masturbation - a reference which is to be expected in all such cases - absent in this one.

(19)CONSIDERATIONS OF REPRESENTABILITY

A man dreamt that he was pulling a woman out from behind a bed: i.e. he was giving her preference.¹ - He (an officer) was sitting at a table opposite the Emperor: i.e. he was putting himself in opposition to the Emperor (his father). In both these cases the dreamer himself gave the translation.

(20)DREAMS ABOUT DEAD PEOPLE

If someone dreams of talking to dead people or associating with them, and so on, this often has the meaning of his own death. But if he remembers in his dream that the person in question is dead, the dreamer is repudiating the fact that it signifies his own death.

(21)FRAGMENTARY DREAMS

These often contain only the symbols relating to the subject of the dream. For instance, here is a dream that occurred in a context of homosexual impulses: he was going for a walk somewhere with a friend... (indistinct)... balloons.

(22)APPEARANCE IN THE DREAM OF THE SYMPTOMS OF THE ILLNESS

The symptoms of the illness (anxiety, etc.), when they appear in a dream, seem generally speaking to mean: ‘I fell ill because of this (i.e. in connection with the earlier elements of the dream).’ Such dreams, accordingly, correspond to a continuation of the analysis in the dream.

¹ [The point depends on a similarity between the German word for ‘pulling out’ (‘hervorziehen’) and ‘giving preference’ (‘vorziehen’).]4

FAUSSE RECONNAISSANCE (‘ Déjà raconté ’) IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC TREATMENT

(1914)

It not infrequently happens in the course of an analytic treatment that the patient, after reporting some fact that he has remembered, will go on to say: ‘But I’ve told you that already’ - while the analyst himself feels sure that this is the first time he has heard the story. If the patient is contradicted upon the point, he will often protest with energy that he is perfectly certain he is right, that he is ready to swear to it, and so on; while the analyst’s own conviction that what he has heard is new to him will become correspondingly stronger. To try to decide the dispute by shouting the patient down or by outvying him in protestations would be a most unpsychological proceeding. It is familiar ground that a sense of conviction of the accuracy of one’s memory has no objective value; and, since one of the two persons concerned must necessarily be in the wrong, it may just as well be the physician as the patient who has fallen a victim to a paramnesia. The analyst will admit as much to the patient, will break off the argument, and will postpone a settlement of the point until some later occasion.

In a minority of cases the analyst himself will then recollect that he has already heard the piece of information under dispute, and will at the same time discover the subjective, and often far-fetched, reason which led to this temporary forgetfulness. But in the great majority of cases it is the patient who turns out to have been mistaken; and he can be brought to recognize the fact. The explanation of this frequent occurrence appears to be that the patient really had an intention of giving this information, that once or even several times he actually made some remark leading up to it, but that he was then prevented by resistance from carrying out his purpose, and afterwards confused a recollection of his intention with a recollection of its performance.

Leaving on one side any cases in which there may still be some element of doubt, I will now bring forward a few others which are of special theoretical interest. With certain people it happens, and may even happen repeatedly, that they cling with particular obstinacy to the assertion that they have already told the analyst this or that, when the nature of the circumstances and of the information in question makes it quite impossible that they can be right. For what they claim to have told the analyst already and what they claim to recognize as something old, which must be familiar to the analyst as well, turn out to be memories of the greatest importance to the analysis - confirmatory facts for which the analyst has long been waiting, or solutions which wind up a whole section of the work and which he would certainly have made the basis of an exhaustive discussion. In the face of these considerations the patient himself soon admits that his recollection must have deceived him, though he is unable to account for its definite character.

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