PARAPRAXES 34 страница

I now return to the brother’s story, but from this point I must proceed for a little upon thematic lines. The boy’s age at the time at which his sister began her seductions turned out to be three and a quarter years. It happened, as has been mentioned, in the spring of the same year in whose summer the English governess arrived, and in whose autumn his parents, on their return, found him so fundamentally altered. It is very natural, then, to connect this transformation with the awakening of his sexual activity that had meanwhile taken place.

How did the boy react to the allurements of his elder sister? By a refusal, is the answer, but by a refusal which applied to the person and not to the thing. His sister was not agreeable to him as a sexual object, probably because his relation to her had already been determined in a hostile direction owing to their rivalry for their parents’ love. He held aloof from her, and, moreover, her solicitations soon ceased. But he tried to win, instead of her, another person of whom he was fonder; and the information which his sister herself had given him, and in which the had claimed his Nanya as a model, turned his choice in that direction. He therefore began to play with his penis in his Nanya’s presence, and this, like so many other instances in which children do not conceal their masturbation, must be regarded as an attempt at seduction. His Nanya disillusioned him; she made a serious face, and explained that that wasn’t good; children who did that, she added, got a ‘wound’ in the place.

The effect of this intelligence, which amounted to a threat, is to be traced in various directions. His dependence upon his Nanya was diminished in consequence. He might well have been angry with her; and later on, when his fits of rage set in, it became clear that he really was embittered against her. But it was characteristic of him that every position of the libido which he found himself obliged to abandon was at first obstinately defended by him against the new development. When the governess came upon the scene and abused his Nanya, drove her out of the room, and tried to destroy her authority, he, on the contrary, exaggerated his love for the victim of these attacks and assumed a brusque and defiant attitude towards the aggressive governess. Nevertheless, in secret he began to look about for another sexual object. His seduction had given him the passive sexual aim of being touched on the genitals; we shall presently hear in connection with whom it was that he tried to achieve this aim, and what paths led him to this choice.

It agrees entirely with our anticipations when we learn that, after his first genital excitations, his sexual researches began, and that he soon came upon the problem of castration. At this time he succeeded in observing two girls - his sister and a friend of hers - while they were micturating. His acumen might well have enabled him to gather the true facts from this spectacle, but he behaved as we know other male children behave in these circumstances. He rejected the idea that he saw before him a confirmation of the wound with which his Nanya had threatened him, and he explained to himself that this was the girls’ ‘front bottom’. The theme of castration was not settled by this decision; he found new allusions to it in everything that he heard. Once when the children were given some coloured sugar-sticks, the governess, who was inclined to disordered fancies, pronounced that they were pieces of chopped-up snakes. He remembered afterwards that his father had once met a snake while he was walking along a footpath, and had beaten it to pieces with his stick. He heard the story (out of Reynard the Fox) read aloud, of how the wolf wanted to go fishing in the winter, and used his tail as a bait, and how in that way his tail was broken off in the ice. He learned the different names by which horses are distinguished, according to whether their sexual organs are intact or not. Thus he was occupied with thoughts about castration, but as yet he had no belief in it and no dread of it. Other sexual problems arose for him out of the fairy tales with which he became familiar at this time. In ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and ‘The Seven Little Goats’ the children were taken out of the wolf’s body. Was the wolf a female creature, then, or could men have children in their bodies as well? At this time the question was not yet settled. Moreover, at the time of these enquiries he had as yet no fear of wolves.

One of the patient’s pieces of information will make it easier for us to understand the alteration in his character which appeared during his parents’ absence as a somewhat indirect consequence of his seduction. He said that he gave up masturbating very soon after his Nanya’s refusal and threat. His sexual life, therefore, which was beginning to come under the sway of the genital zone, gave way before an external obstacle, and was thrown back by its influence into an earlier phase of pregenital organization. As a result of the suppression of his masturbation, the boy’s sexual life took on a sadistic-anal character. He became irritable and a tormentor, and gratified himself in this way at the expense of animals and humans. His principal object was his beloved Nanya, and he knew how to torment her till she burst into tears. In this way he revenged himself on her for the refusal he had met with, and at the same time gratified his sexual lust in the form which corresponded to his present regressive phase. He began to be cruel to small animals, to catch flies and pull off their wings, to crush beetles underfoot; in his imagination he liked beating large animals (horses) as well. All of these, then, were active and sadistic proceedings; we shall discuss his anal impulses at this period in a later connection.

It is a most important fact that some contemporary phantasies of quite another kind came up as well in the patient’s memory. The content of these was of boys being chastised and beaten, and especially being beaten on the penis. And from other phantasies, which represented the heir to the throne being shut up in a narrow room and beaten, it was easy to guess for whom it was that the anonymous figures served as whipping-boys. The heir to the throne was evidently he himself; his sadism had therefore turned round in phantasy against himself, and had been converted into masochism. The detail of the sexual organ itself receiving the beating justified the conclusion that a sense of guilt, which related to his masturbation, was already concerned in this transformation.

No doubt was left in the analysis that these passive trends had made their appearance at the same time as the active-sadistic ones, or very soon after them.¹ This is in accordance with the unusually clear, intense, and constant ambivalence of the patient, which was shown here for the first time in the even development of both members of the pairs of contrary component instincts. Such behaviour was also characteristic of his later life, and so was this further trait: no position of the libido which had once been established was ever completely replaced by a later one. It was rather left in existence side by side with all the others, and this allowed him to maintain an incessant vacillation which proved to be incompatible with the acquisition of a stable character.

¹ By passive trends I mean trends that have a passive sexual aim; but in saying this I have in mind a transformation not of the instinct but only of its aim.8

The boy’s masochistic trends lead on to another point, which I have so far avoided mentioning, because it can only be confirmed by means of the analysis of the subsequent phase of his development. I have already mentioned that after his refusal by his Nanya his libidinal expectation detached itself from her and began to contemplate another person as a sexual object. This person was his father, at that time away from home. He was no doubt led to this choice by a number of convergent factors, including such fortuitous ones as the recollection of the snake being cut to pieces; but above all he was in this way able to renew his first and most primitive object-choice, which, in conformity with a small child’s narcissism, had taken place along the path of identification. We have heard already that his father had been his admired model, and that when he was asked what he wanted to be he used to reply: a gentleman like his father. This object of identification of his active current became the sexual object of a passive current in his present anal-sadistic phase. It looks as though his seduction by his sister had forced him into a passive role, and had given him a passive sexual aim. Under the persisting influence of this experience he pursued a path from his sister via his Nanya to his father - from a passive attitude towards women to the same attitude towards men - and had, nevertheless, by this means found a link with his earlier and spontaneous phase of development. His father was now his object once more; in conformity with his higher stage of development, identification was replaced by object-choice; while the transformation of his active attitude into a passive one was the consequence and the record of the seduction which had occurred meanwhile. It would naturally not have been so easy to achieve an active attitude in the sadistic phase towards his all-powerful father. When his father came home in the late summer or autumn the patient’s fits of rage and scenes of fury were put to a new use. They had served for active sadistic ends in relation to his Nanya; in relation to his father their purpose was masochistic. By bringing his naughtiness forward he was trying to force punishments and beatings out of his father, and in that way to obtain from him the masochistic sexual satisfaction that he desired. His screaming fits were therefore simply attempts at seduction. In accordance, moreover, with the motives which underlie masochism, this beating would also have satisfied his sense of guilt. He had preserved a memory of how, during one of these scenes of naughtiness, he had redoubled his screams as soon as his father came towards him. His father did not beat him, however, but tried to pacify him by playing ball in front of him with the pillows of his cot.

I do not know how often parents and educators, faced with inexplicable naughtiness on the part of a child, might not have occasion to bear this typical state of affairs in mind. A child who behaves in this unmanageable way is making a confession and trying to provoke punishment. He hopes for a beating as a simultaneous means of setting his sense of guilt at rest and of satisfying his masochistic sexual trend.

We owe the further explanation of the case to a recollection which emerged with great distinctness. This was to the effect that the signs of an alteration in the patient’s character were not accompanied by any symptoms of anxiety until after the occurrence of a particular event. Previously, it seems, there was no anxiety, while directly after the event the anxiety expressed itself in the most tormenting shape. The date of this transformation can be stated with certainty; it was immediately before his fourth birthday. Taking this as a fixed point, we are able to divide the period of his childhood with which we are concerned into two phases: a first phase of naughtiness and perversity from his seduction at the age of three and a quarter up to his fourth birthday, and a longer subsequent phase in which the signs of neurosis predominated. But the event which makes this division possible was not an external trauma, but a dream, from which he awoke in a state of anxiety.

IV THE DREAM AND THE PRIMAL SCENE

I have already published this dream elsewhere,¹ on account of the quantity of material in it which is derived from fairy tales; and I will begin by repeating what I wrote on that occasion:

‘"I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.

‘"The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me. - I think this was my first anxiety-dream. I was three, four, or at most five years old at the time. From then until my eleventh or twelfth year I was always afraid of seeing something terrible in my dreams."

‘He added a drawing of the tree with the wolves, which confirmed his description (Fig. 1). The analysis of the dream brought the following material to light.

‘He had always connected this dream with the recollection that during these years of his childhood he was most tremendously afraid of the picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales. His elder sister, who was very much his superior, used to tease him by holding up this particular picture in front of him on some excuse or other, so that he was terrified and began to scream. In this picture the wolf was standing upright, striding out with one foot, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked. He thought this picture must have been an illustration to the story of "Little Red Riding-Hood".

¹ ‘The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales’ (1913d).1 Fig. 1

‘Why were the wolves white? This made him think of the sheep, large flocks of which were kept in the neighbourhood of the estate. His father occasionally took him with him to visit these flocks, and every time this happened he felt very proud and blissful. Later on - according to enquiries that were made it may easily have been shortly before the time of the dream - an epidemic broke out among the sheep. His father sent for a follower of Pasteur’s, who inoculated the animals, but after the inoculation even more of them died than before.

‘How did the wolves come to be on the tree? This reminded him of a story that he had heard his grandfather tell. He could not remember whether it was before or after the dream, but its subject is a decisive argument in favour of the former view. The story ran as follows. A tailor was sitting at work in his room, when the window opened and a wolf leapt in. The tailor hit after him with his yard - no (he corrected himself), caught him by his tail and pulled it off, so that the wolf ran away in terror. Some time later the tailor went into the forest, and suddenly saw a pack of wolves coming towards him; so he climbed up a tree to escape from them. At first the wolves were in perplexity; but the maimed one, which was among them and wanted to revenge himself on the tailor, proposed that they should climb one upon another till the last one could reach him. He himself - he was a vigorous old fellow - would be the base of the pyramid. The wolves did as he suggested, but the tailor had recognized the visitor whom he had punished, and suddenly called out as he had before: "Catch the grey one by his tail!" The tailless wolf, terrified by the recollection, ran away, and all the others tumbled down.

‘In this story the tree appears, upon which the wolves were sitting in the dream. But it also contains an unmistakable allusion to the castration complex. The old wolf was docked of his tail by the tailor. The fox-tails of the wolves in the dream were probably compensations for this taillessness.

‘Why were there six or seven wolves? There seemed to be no answer to this question, until I raised a doubt whether the picture that had frightened him could be connected with the story of "Little Red Riding-Hood". This fairy tale only offers an opportunity for two illustrations - Little Red Riding-Hood’s meeting with the wolf in the wood, and the scene in which the wolf lies in bed in the grandmother’s night-cap. There must therefore be some other fairy tale behind his recollection of the picture. He soon discovered that it could only be the story of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats". Here the number seven occurs, and also the number six, for the wolf only ate up six of the little goats, while the seventh hid itself in the clock case. The white, too, comes into this story, for the wolf had his paw made white at the baker’s after the little goats had recognized him on his first visit by his grey paw. Moreover, the two fairy tales have much in common. In both there is the eating up, the cutting open of the belly, the taking out of the people who have been eaten and their replacement by heavy stones, and finally in both of them the wicked wolf perishes. Besides all this, in the story of the little goats the tree appears. The wolf lay down under a tree after his meal and snored.

‘I shall have, for a special reason, to deal with this dream again elsewhere, and interpret it and consider its significance in greater detail. For it is the earliest anxiety-dream that the dreamer remembered from his childhood, and its content, taken in connection with other dreams that followed it soon afterwards and with certain events in his earliest years, is of quite peculiar interest. We must confine ourselves here to the relation of the dream to the two fairy tales which have so much in common with each other, "Little Red Riding-Hood" and "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats". The effect produced by these stories was shown in the little dreamer by a regular animal phobia. This phobia was only distinguished from other similar cases by the fact that the anxiety-animal was not an object easily accessible to observation (such as a horse or a dog), but was known to him only from stories and picture-books.

‘I shall discuss on another occasion the explanation of these animal phobias and the significance attaching to them. I will only remark in anticipation that this explanation is in complete harmony with the principal characteristic shown by the neurosis from which the present dreamer suffered later in his life. His fear of his father was the strongest motive for his falling ill, and his ambivalent attitude towards every father-surrogate was the dominating feature of his life as well as of his behaviour during the treatment.

‘If in my patient’s case the wolf was merely a first father surrogate, the question arises whether the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf that ate up the little goats and of "Little Red Riding-Hood" may not simply be infantile fear of the father.¹ Moreover, my patient’s father had the characteristic, shown by so many people in relation to their children, of indulging in "affectionate abuse"; and it is possible that during the patient’s earlier years his father (though he grew severe later on) may more than once, as he caressed the little boy or played with him, have threatened in fun to "gobble him up". One of my patients told me that her two children could never get to be fond of their grandfather, because in the course of his affectionate romping with them he used to frighten them by saying he would cut open their tummies.’

¹ ‘Compare the similarity between these two fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out by Rank (1912).’4 Leaving on one side everything in this quotation that anticipates the dream’s remoter implications, let us return to its immediate interpretation. I may remark that this interpretation was a task that dragged on over several years. The patient related the dream at a very early stage of the analysis and very soon came to share my conviction that the causes of his infantile neurosis lay concealed behind it. In the course of the treatment we often came back to the dream, but it was only during the last months of the analysis that it became possible to understand it completely, and only then thanks to spontaneous work on the patient’s part. He had always emphasized the fact that two factors in the dream had made the greatest impression on him: first, the perfect stillness and immobility of the wolves, and secondly, the strained attention with which they all looked at him. The lasting sense of reality, too, which the dream left behind it, seemed to him to deserve notice.

Let us take this last remark as a starting-point. We know from our experience in interpreting dreams that this sense of reality carries a particular significance along with it. It assures us that some part of the latent material of the dream is claiming in the dreamer’s memory to possess the quality of reality, that is, that the dream relates to an occurrence that really took place and was not merely imagined. It can naturally only be a question of the reality of something unknown; for instance, the conviction that his grandfather really told him the story of the tailor and the wolf, or that the stories of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and of ‘The Seven Little Goats’ were really read aloud to him, would not be of a nature to be replaced by this sense of reality that outlasted the dream. The dream seemed to point to an occurrence the reality of which was very strongly emphasized as being in marked contrast to the unreality of the fairy tales.

If it was to be assumed that behind the content of the dream there lay some such unknown scene - one, that is, which had already been forgotten at the time of the dream - then it must have taken place very early. The dreamer, it will be recalled, said: ‘I was three, four, or at most five years old at the time I had the dream.’ And we can add: ‘And I was reminded by the dream of something that must have belonged to an even earlier period.’5

The parts of the manifest content of the dream which were emphasized by the dreamer, the factors of attentive looking and of motionlessness, must lead to the content of this scene. We must naturally expect to find that this material reproduces the unknown material of the scene in some distorted form, perhaps even distorted into its opposite.

There were several conclusions, too, to be drawn from the raw material which had been produced by the patient’s first analysis of the dream, and these had to be fitted into the collocation of which we were in search. Behind the mention of the sheep-breeding, evidence was to be expected of his sexual researches, his interest in which he was able to gratify during his visits with his father; but there must also have been allusions to a fear of death, since the greater part of the sheep had died of the epidemic. The most obtrusive thing in the dream, the wolves on the tree, led straight to his grandfather’s story; and what was fascinating about this story and capable of provoking the dream can scarcely have been anything but its connection with the theme of castration.

We also concluded from the first incomplete analysis of the dream that the wolf may have been a father-surrogate; so that, in that case, this first anxiety-dream would have brought to light the fear of his father which from that time forward was to dominate his life. This conclusion, indeed, was in itself not yet binding. But if we put together as the result of the provisional analysis what can be derived from the material produced by the dreamer, we then find before us for reconstruction some such fragments as these:

A real occurrence - dating from a very early period - looking - immobility - sexual problems - castration - his father - something terrible.

One day the patient began to continue with the interpretation of the dream. He thought that the part of the dream which said that ‘suddenly the window opened of its own accord’ was not completely explained by its connection with the window at which the tailor was sitting and through which the wolf came into the room. ‘It must mean: "My eyes suddenly opened." I was asleep, therefore, and suddenly woke up, and as I woke I saw something: the tree with the wolves.’ No objection could be made to this; but the point could be developed further. He had woken up and had seen something. The attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the wolves, should rather be shifted on to him. At a decisive point, therefore, a transposition has taken place; and moreover this is indicated by another transposition in the manifest content of the dream. For the fact that the wolves were sitting on the tree was also a transposition, since in his grandfather’s story they were underneath, and were unable to climb on to the tree.

What, then, if the other factor emphasized by the dreamer were also distorted by means of a transposition or reversal? In that case instead of immobility (the wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him, but did not move) the meaning would have to be: the most violent motion. That is to say, he suddenly woke up, and saw in front of him a scene of violent movement at which he looked with strained attention. In the one case the distortion would consist in an interchange of subject and object, of activity and passivity: being looked at instead of looking. In the other case it would consist in a transformation into the opposite; rest instead of motion.

On another occasion an association which suddenly occurred to him carried us another step forward in our understanding of the dream: ‘The tree was a Christmas-tree.’ He now knew that he had dreamt the dream shortly before Christmas and in expectation of it. Since Christmas Day was also his birthday, it now became possible to establish with certainty the date of the dream and of the change in him which proceeded from it. It was immediately before his fourth birthday. He had gone to sleep, then, in tense expectation of the day which ought to bring him a double quantity of presents. We know that in such circumstances a child may easily anticipate the fulfilment of his wishes. So it was already Christmas in his dream; the content of the dream showed him his Christmas box, the presents which were to be his were hanging on the tree. But instead of presents they had turned into - wolves, and the dream ended by his being overcome by fear of being eaten by the wolf (probably his father), and by his flying for refuge to his nurse. Our knowledge of his sexual development before the dream makes it possible for us to fill in the gaps in the dream and to explain the transformation of his satisfaction into anxiety. Of the wishes concerned in the formation of the dream the most powerful must have been the wish for the sexual satisfaction which he was at that time longing to obtain from his father. The strength of this wish made it possible to revive a long-forgotten trace in his memory of a scene which was able to show him what sexual satisfaction from his father was like; and the result was terror, horror of the fulfilment of the wish, the repression of the impulse which had manifested itself by means of the wish, and consequently a flight from his father to his less dangerous nurse.

The importance of this date of Christmas Day had been preserved in his supposed recollection of having had his first fit of rage because he was dissatisfied with his Christmas presents. The recollection combined elements of truth and of falsehood. It could not be entirely right, since according to the repeated declarations of his parents his naughtiness had already begun on their return in the autumn and it was not a fact that they had not come on till Christmas. But he had preserved the essential connection between his unsatisfied love, his rage, and Christmas.

But what picture can the nightly workings of his sexual desire have conjured up that could frighten him away so violently from the fulfilment for which he longed? The material of the analysis shows that there is one condition which this picture must satisfy. It must have been calculated to create a conviction of the reality of the existence of castration. Fear of castration could then become the motive power for the transformation of the affect.

I have now reached the point at which I must abandon the support I have hitherto had from the course of the analysis. I am afraid it will also be the point at which the reader’s belief will abandon me.

What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents, copulation in circumstances which were not entirely usual and were especially favourable for observation. It gradually became possible to find satisfactory answers to all the questions that arose in connection with this scene; for in the course of the treatment the first dream returned in innumerable variations and new editions, in connection with which the analysis produced the information that was required. Thus in the first place the child’s age at the date of the observation was established as being about one and a half years.¹ He was suffering at the time from malaria, an attack of which used to come on every day at a particular hour.² From his tenth year onwards he was from time to time subject to moods of depression, which used to come on in the afternoon and reached their height at about five o’clock. This symptom still existed at the time of the analytic treatment. The recurring fits of depression took the place of the earlier attacks of fever or languor; five o’clock was either the time of the highest fever or of the observation of the intercourse, unless the two times coincided.³ Probably for the very reason of this illness, he was in his parents’ bedroom. The illness, the occurrence of which is also corroborated by direct tradition, makes it reasonable to refer the event to the summer, and, since the child was born on Christmas Day, to assume that his age was n + 1½ years. He had been sleeping in his cot, then, in his parents’ bedroom, and woke up, perhaps because of his rising fever, in the afternoon, possibly at five o’clock, the hour which was later marked out by depression. It harmonizes with our assumption that it was a hot summer’s day, if we suppose that his parents had retired, half undressed,4 for an afternoon siesta. When he woke up, he witnessed a coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated;5 he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance.6 Lastly he interrupted his parents’ intercourse in a manner which will be discussed later.

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