PARAPRAXES 40 страница

This would be all very well, if it were the whole story. But certain details of the situation, and a due regard for the connection between it and this particular patient’s life-history, compel us to pursue the interpretation further. The necessary condition of his re-birth was that he should have an enema administered to him by a man. (It was not until later on that he was driven by necessity to take this man’s place himself.) This can, only have meant that he had identified himself with his mother, that the man was acting as his father, and that the enema was repeating the act of copulation, as the fruit of which the excrement-baby (which was once again himself) would be born. The phantasy of re-birth was therefore bound up closely with the necessary condition of sexual satisfaction from a man. So that the translation now runs to this effect: only on condition that he took the woman’s place and substituted himself for his mother, and thus let himself be sexually satisfied by his father and bore him a child - only on that condition would his illness leave him. Here, therefore, the phantasy of re-birth was simply a mutilated and censored version of the homosexual wishful phantasy.

If we look into the matter more closely we cannot help remarking that in this condition which he laid down for his recovery the patient was simply repeating the state of affairs at the time of the ‘primal scene’. At that moment he had wanted to substitute himself for his mother; and, as we assumed long ago, it was he himself who, in the scene in question, had produced the excrement-baby. He still remained fixated, as though by a spell, to the scene which had such a decisive effect on his sexual life, and the return of which during the night of the dream brought the onset of his illness. The tearing of the veil was analogous to the opening of his eyes and to the opening of the window. The primal scene had become transformed into the necessary condition for his recovery.

It is easy to make a unified statement of what was expressed on the one hand by the complaint he made and on the other hand by the single exceptional condition under which the complaint no longer held good, and thus to make clear the whole meaning that underlay the two factors: he wished he could be back in the womb, not simply in order that he might then be re-born, but in order that he might be copulated with there by his father, might obtain sexual satisfaction from him, and might bear him a child.

The wish to be born of his father (as he had at first believed was the case), the wish to be sexually satisfied by him, the wish to present him with a child - and all of this at the price of his own masculinity, and expressed in the language of anal erotism - these wishes complete the circle of his fixation upon his father. In them homosexuality has found its furthest and most intimate expression.¹

This instance, I think, throws light on the meaning and origin of the womb-phantasy as well as that of re-birth. The former, the womb-phantasy, is frequently derived (as it was in the present case) from an attachment to the father. There is a wish to be inside the mother’s womb in order to replace her during intercourse - in order to take her place in regard to the father. The phantasy of re-birth, on the other hand, is in all probability regularly a softened substitute (a euphemism, one might say) for the phantasy of incestuous intercourse with the mother; to make use of Silberer’s expression, it is an anagogic abbreviation of it. There is a wish to be back in a situation in which one was in the mother’s genitals; and in this connection the man is identifying himself with his own penis and is using it to represent himself. Thus the two phantasies are revealed as each other’s counterparts: they give expression, according as the subject’s attitude is feminine or masculine, to his wish for sexual intercourse with his father or with his mother. We cannot dismiss the possibility that in the complaint made by our present patient and in the necessary condition laid down for his recovery the two phantasies, that is to say the two incestuous wishes, were united.

¹ A possible subsidiary explanation, namely that the veil represented the hymen which is torn at the moment of intercourse with a man, does not harmonize completely with the necessary condition for his recovery. Moreover it has no bearing on the life of the patient, for whom virginity carried no significance.1

I will make a final attempt at re-interpreting the last findings of this analysis in accordance with the scheme of my opponents. The patient lamented his flight from the world in a typical womb-phantasy and viewed his recovery as a typically conceived re-birth. In accordance with the predominant side of his disposition, he expressed the latter in anal symptoms. He next concocted, on the model of his anal phantasy of re-birth, a childhood scene which repeated his wishes in an archaic symbolic medium of expression. His symptoms were then strung together as though they had been derived from a primal scene of that kind. He was driven to embark on this long backward course either because he had come up against some task in life which he was too lazy to perform, or because he had every reason to be aware of his own inferiority and thought he could best protect himself from being slighted by elaborating such contrivances as these.

All this would be very nice, if only the unlucky wretch had not had a dream when he was no more than four years old, which signalized the beginning of his neurosis, which was instigated by his grandfather’s story of the tailor and the wolf, and the interpretation of which necessitates the assumption of this primal scene. All the alleviations which the theories of Jung and Adler seek to afford us come to grief, alas, upon such paltry but unimpeachable facts as these. As things stand, it seems to me more probable that the phantasy of re-birth was a derivative of the primal scene than that, conversely, the primal scene was a reflection of the phantasy of re-birth. And we may perhaps suppose, too, that the patient, at a time only four years after his birth, may after all have been too young to be already wishing to be born again. But no, I must take this last argument back; for my own observations show that we have rated the powers of children too low and that there is no knowing what they cannot be given credit for.¹

¹ I admit that this is the most delicate question in the whole domain of psycho-analysis. I did not require the contributions of Adler or Jung to induce me to consider the matter with a critical eye, and to bear in mind the possibility that what analysis puts forward as being forgotten experiences of childhood (and of an improbably early childhood) may on the contrary be based upon phantasies created on occasions occurring late in life. According to this view, wherever we seemed in analyses to see traces of the after-effects of an infantile impression of the kind in question, we should rather have to assume that we were faced by the manifestation of some constitutional factor or of some disposition that had been phylogenetically maintained. On the contrary, no doubt has troubled me more; no other uncertainty has been more decisive in holding me back from publishing my conclusions. I was the first - a point to which none of my opponents have referred - to recognize both the part played by phantasies in symptom-formation and also the ‘retrospective phantasying’ of late impressions into childhood and their sexualization after the event. (See my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), First Edition, p. 559idhp. 05049, and ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, (1909d).) If, in spite of this, I have held to the more difficult and more improbable view, it has been as a result of arguments such as are forced upon the investigator by the case described in these pages or by any other infantile neurosis - arguments which I once again lay before my readers for their decision.

IXRECAPITULATIONS AND PROBLEMS

I do not know if the reader of this report of an analysis will have succeeded in forming a clear picture of the origin and development of the patient’s illness. I fear that, on the contrary, this will not have been the case. But though on other occasions I have said very little on behalf of my powers in the art of exposition, I should like in the present instance to plead mitigating circumstances. The description of such early phases and of such deep strata of mental life has been a task which has never before been attacked; and it is better to perform that task badly than to take flight before it - a proceeding which would moreover (or so we are told) involve the coward in risks of a certain kind. I prefer, therefore, to put a bold face on it and show that I have not allowed myself to be held back by a sense of my own inferiority.

The case itself was not a particularly favourable one. The advantage of having a wealth of information about the patient’s childhood (an advantage which was made possible by the fact that the child could be studied through the medium of the adult) had to be purchased at the expense of the analysis being most terribly disjointed and of the exposition showing corresponding gaps. Personal peculiarities in the patient and a national character that was foreign to ours made the task of feeling one’s way into his mind a laborious one. The contrast between the patient’s agreeable and affable personality, his acute intelligence and his nice-mindedness on the one hand, and his completely unbridled instinctual life on the other, necessitated an excessively long process of preparatory education, and this made a general perspective more difficult. But the patient himself has no responsibility for that feature of the case which put the severest obstacles in the way of any description of it. In the psychology of adults we have fortunately reached the point of being able to divide mental processes into conscious and unconscious and of being able to give a clearly-worded description of both. With children this distinction leaves us almost completely in the lurch. It is often embarrassing to decide what one would choose to call conscious and what unconscious. Processes which have become the dominant ones, and which from their subsequent behaviour must be equated with conscious ones, have nevertheless not been conscious in the child. It is easy to understand why. In children the conscious has not yet acquired all its characteristics; it is still in process of development, and it does not as yet fully possess the capacity for transposing itself into verbal images. We are constantly guilty of making a confusion between the phenomenon of emergence as a perception in consciousness and the fact of belonging to a hypothetical psychical system to which we ought to assign some conventional name, but which we in fact also call ‘consciousness’ (the system Cs.). This confusion does no harm when we are giving a psychological description of an adult, but it is misleading when we are dealing with that of a young child. Nor should we be much assisted here if we introduced the ‘preconscious’; for a child’s preconscious may, in just the same way, fail to coincide with an adult’s. We must be content, therefore, with having clearly recognized the obscurity.

It is obvious that a case such as that which is described in these pages might be made an excuse for dragging into the discussion every one of the findings and problems of psycho-analysis. But this would be an endless and unjustifiable labour. It must be recognized that everything cannot be learnt from a single case and that everything cannot be decided by it; we must content ourselves with exploiting whatever it may happen to show most clearly. There are in any case narrow limits to what a psycho-analysis is called upon to explain. For, while it is its business to explain the striking symptoms by revealing their genesis, it is not its business to explain but merely to describe the psychical mechanisms and instinctual processes to which one is led by that means. In order to derive fresh generalizations from what has thus been established with regard to the mechanisms and instincts, it would be essential to have at one’s disposal numerous cases as thoroughly and deeply analysed as the present one. But they are not easily to be had, and each one of them requires years of labour. So that advances in these spheres of knowledge must necessarily be slow. There is no doubt a great temptation to content oneself with ‘scratching’ the mental surface of a number of people and of replacing what is left undone by speculation - the latter being put under the patronage of some school or other of philosophy. Practical requirements may also be adduced in favour of this procedure; but no substitute can satisfy the requirements of science.

I shall now attempt to sketch out a synthetic survey of my patient’s sexual development, beginning from its earliest indications. The first that we hear of it is in the disturbance of his appetite; for, taking other observations into account, I am inclined, though with due reservations, to regard that as a result of some process in the sphere of sexuality. I have been driven to regard as the earliest recognizable sexual organization the so-called ‘cannibalistic’ or ‘oral’ phase, during which the original attachment of sexual excitation to the nutritional instinct still dominates the scene. It is not to be expected that we should come upon direct manifestations of this phase, but only upon indications of it where disturbances have been set up. Impairment of the nutritional instinct (though this can of course have other causes) draws our attention to a failure on the part of the organism to master its sexual excitation. In this phase the sexual aim could only be cannibalism - devouring; it makes its appearance with our present patient through regression from a higher stage, in the form of fear of ‘being eaten by the wolf’. We were, indeed, obliged to translate this into a fear of being copulated with by his father. It is well known that there is a neurosis in girls which occurs at a much later age, at the time of puberty or soon afterwards, and which expresses aversion to sexuality by means of anorexia. This neurosis will have to be brought into relation with the oral phase of sexual life. The erotic aim of the oral organization further makes its appearance at the height of a lover’s paroxysm (in such phrases as ‘I could eat you up with love’) and in affectionate relations with children, when the grown-up person is pretending to be a child himself. I have elsewhere given voice to a suspicion that the father of our present patient used himself to indulge in ‘affectionate abuse’, and may have played at wolf or dog with the little boy and have threatened as a joke to gobble him up (p. 3524). The patient confirmed this suspicion by his curious behaviour in the transference. Whenever he shrank back on to the transference from the difficulties of the treatment, he used to threaten me with eating me up and later with all kinds of other ill-treatment - all of which was merely an expression of affection.

Permanent marks have been left by this oral phase of sexuality upon the usages of language. People commonly speak for instance, of an ‘appetizing’ love-object, and describe persons they are fond of as ‘sweet’. It will be remembered, too, that our little patient would only eat sweet things. In dreams sweet things and sweetmeats stand regularly for caresses or sexual gratifications.

It appears, moreover, that there is an anxiety belonging to this phase (only, of course, where some disturbance has arisen) which manifests itself as a fear of death and may be attached to anything that is pointed out to the child as being suitable for the purpose. With our patient it was employed to induce him to overcome his loss of appetite and indeed to overcompensate for it. A possible origin of this disturbance of his appetite will be found, if we bear in mind (basing ourselves on the hypothesis that we have so often discussed) that his observation of copulation at the age of one and a half, which produced so many deferred effects, certainly occurred before the time of these difficulties in his eating. So we may perhaps suppose that it accelerated the processes of sexual maturing and consequently did in fact also produce immediate effects, though these were insignificant in appearance.

I am of course aware that it is possible to explain the symptoms of this period (the wolf anxiety and the disturbance of appetite) in another and simpler manner, without any reference to sexuality or to a pregenital stage of its organization. Those who like to neglect the indications of neurosis and the interconnections between events will prefer this other explanation, and I shall not be able to prevent their doing so. It is hard to discover any cogent evidence in regard to these beginnings of sexual life except by such roundabout paths as I have indicated.

In the scene with Grusha (at the age of two and a half) we see the little boy at the beginning of a development which, except perhaps for its prematureness, deserves to be considered normal; thus we find in it identification with his father, and urethral erotism representing masculinity. It was also completely under the sway of the primal scene. We have hitherto regarded his identification with his father as being narcissistic; but if we take the content of the primal scene into account we cannot deny that it had already reached the stage of genital organization. His male genital organ had begun to play its part and it continued to do so under the influence of his seduction by his sister.

But his seduction gives the impression not merely of having encouraged his sexual development but of having, to an even greater extent, disturbed and diverted it. It offered him a passive sexual aim, which was ultimately incompatible with the action of his male genital organ. At the first external obstacle, the threat of castration from his Nanya, his genital organization, half-hearted as it still was, broke down (at the age of three and a half) and regressed to the stage which had preceded it, namely to that of the sadistic-anal organization, which he might otherwise have passed through, perhaps, with as slight indications as other children.

The sadistic-anal organization can easily be regarded as a continuation and development of the oral one. The violent muscular activity, directed upon the object, by which it is characterized, is to be explained as an action preparatory to eating. The eating then ceases to be a sexual aim, and the preparatory action becomes a sufficient aim in itself. The essential novelty, as compared with the previous stage, is that the receptive passive function becomes disengaged from the oral zone and attached to the anal zone. In this connection we can hardly fail to think of biological parallels or of the theory that the pregenital organizations in man should be regarded as vestiges of conditions which have been permanently retained in several classes of animals. The building up of the instinct for research out of its various components is another characteristic feature of this stage of development.

The boy’s anal erotism was not particularly noticeable. Under the influence of his sadism the affectionate significance of faeces gave place to an aggressive one. A part was played in the transformation of his sadism into masochism by a sense of guilt, the presence of which points to developmental processes in spheres other than the sexual one.5

His seduction continued to make its influence felt, by maintaining the passivity of his sexual aim. It transformed his sadism to a great extent into the masochism which was its passive counterpart. But it is questionable whether the seduction can be made entirely responsible for this characteristic of passivity, for the child’s reaction to his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half was already preponderantly a passive one. His sympathetic sexual excitement expressed itself by his passing a stool, though it is true that in this behaviour an active element is also to be distinguished. Side by side with the masochism which dominated his sexual impulsions and also found expression in phantasies, his sadism, too, persisted and was directed against small animals. His sexual researches had set in from the time of the seduction and had been concerned, in essence, with two problems: the origin of children and the possibility of losing the genitals. These researches wove themselves into the manifestations of his instinctual impulses, and directed his sadistic propensities on to small animals as being representatives of small children.

We have now carried our account down to about the time of the boy’s fourth birthday, and it was at that point that the dream brought into deferred operation his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a half. It is not possible for us completely to grasp or adequately to describe what now ensued. The activation of the picture, which, thanks to the advance in his intellectual development, he was now able to understand, operated not only like a fresh event, but like a new trauma, like an interference from outside analogous to the seduction. The genital organization which had been broken off was re-established at a single blow; but the advance that was achieved in the dream could not be maintained. On the contrary, there came about, by means of a process that can only be equated with a repression, a repudiation of the new element and its replacement by a phobia.

Thus the sadistic-anal organization continued to exist during the phase of the animal phobia which now set in, only it suffered an admixture of anxiety-phenomena. The child persisted in his sadistic as well as in his masochistic activities, but he reacted with anxiety to a portion of them; the conversion of his sadism into its opposite probably made further progress.6

The analysis of the anxiety-dream shows us that the repression was connected with his recognition of the existence of castration. The new element was rejected because its acceptance would have cost him his penis. Closer consideration leads us to some such conclusion as the following. What was repressed was the homosexual attitude understood in the genital sense, an attitude which had been formed under the influence of this recognition of castration. But that attitude was retained as regards the unconscious and set up as a dissociated and deeper stratum. The motive force of the repression seems to have been the narcissistic masculinity which attached to the boy’s genitals, and which had come into a long-prepared conflict with the passivity of his homosexual sexual aim. The repression was thus a result of his masculinity.

One might be tempted at this point to introduce a slight alteration into psycho-analytic theory. It would seem palpably obvious that the repression and the formation of the neurosis must have originated out of the conflict between masculine and feminine tendencies, that is out of bisexuality. This view of the situation, however is incomplete. Of the two conflicting sexual impulses one was ego-syntonic, while the other offended the boy’s narcissistic interest; it was on that account that the latter underwent repression. So that in this case, too, it was the ego that put the repression into operation, for the benefit of one of the sexual tendencies. In other cases there is no such conflict between masculinity and femininity; there is only a single sexual tendency present, which seeks for acceptance, but offends against certain forces of the ego and is consequently repelled. Indeed, conflicts between sexuality and the moral ego trends are far more common than such as take place within the sphere of sexuality; but a moral conflict of this kind is lacking in our present case. To insist that bisexuality is the motive force leading to repression is to take too narrow a view; whereas if we assert the same of the conflict between the ego and the sexual tendencies (that is, the libido) we shall have covered all possible cases.

The theory of the ‘masculine protest’, as it has been developed by Adler, is faced by the difficulty that repression by no means always takes the side of masculinity against femininity; there are quite large classes of cases in which it is masculinity that has to submit to repression by the ego.7

Moreover, a juster appreciation of the process of repression in our present case would lead us to deny that narcissistic masculinity was the sole motive force. The homosexual attitude which came into being during the dream was of such overwhelming intensity that the little boy’s ego found itself unable to cope with it and so defended itself against it by the process of repression. The narcissistic masculinity which attached to his genitals, being opposed to the homosexual attitude, was drawn in, in order to assist the ego in carrying out the task. Merely to avoid misunderstandings, I will add that all narcissistic impulses operate from the ego and have their permanent seat in the ego, and that repressions are directed against libidinal object cathexes.

Let us now leave the process of repression, though we have perhaps not succeeded in dealing with it exhaustively, and let us turn to the boy’s state when he awoke from the dream. If it had really been his masculinity that had triumphed over his homosexuality (or femininity) during the dream-process, then we should necessarily find that the dominant trend was an active sexual trend of a character already explicitly masculine. But there is no question of this having happened. The essentials of the sexual organization had not been changed; the sadistic-anal phase persisted, and remained the dominant one. The triumph of his masculinity was shown only in this: that thenceforward he reacted with anxiety to the passive sexual aims of the dominant organization - aims which were masochistic but not feminine. We are not confronted by a triumphant masculine sexual trend, but only by a passive one and a struggle against it.

I can well imagine the difficulties that the reader must find in the sharp distinction (unfamiliar but essential) which I have drawn between ‘active’ and ‘masculine’ and between ‘passive’ and ‘feminine’. I shall therefore not hesitate to repeat myself. The state of affairs, then, after the dream, may be described as follows. The sexual trends had been split up; in the unconscious the stage of the genital organization had been reached, and a very intense homosexuality set up; on the top of this (virtually in the conscious) there persisted the earlier sadistic and predominantly masochistic sexual current; the ego had on the whole changed its attitude towards sexuality, for it now repudiated sexuality and rejected the dominant masochistic aims with anxiety, just as it had reacted to the deeper homosexual aims with the formation of a phobia. Thus the result of the dream was not so much the triumph of a masculine current, as a reaction against a feminine and passive one. It would be very forced to ascribe the quality of masculinity to this reaction. The truth is that the ego has no sexual currents, but only an interest in its own self-protection and in the preservation of its narcissism.

Let us now consider the phobia. It came into existence on the level of the genital organization, and shows us the relatively simple mechanism of an anxiety-hysteria. The ego, by developing anxiety, was protecting itself against what it regarded as an overwhelming danger, namely, homosexual satisfaction. But the process of repression left behind it a trace which cannot be overlooked. The object to which the dangerous sexual aim had been attached had to have its place taken in consciousness by another one. What became conscious was fear not of the father but of the wolf. Nor did the process stop at the formation of a phobia with a single content. A considerable time afterwards the wolf was replaced by the lion. Simultaneously with sadistic impulses against small animals there was a phobia directed towards them, in their capacity of representatives of the boy’s rivals, the possible small children. The origin of the butterfly phobia is of especial interest. It was like a repetition of the mechanism that produced the wolf phobia in the dream. Owing to a chance stimulus an old experience, the scene with Grusha, was activated; her threat of castration thus produced deferred effects, though at the time it was uttered it had made no impression.¹

¹ The Grusha scene was, as I have said, a spontaneous product of the patient’s memory, and no construction or stimulation by the physician played any part in evoking it. The gaps in it were filled up by the analysis in a fashion which must be regarded as unexceptionable, if any value at all is attached to the analytic method of work. The only possible rationalistic explanation of the phobia would be the following. There is nothing extraordinary, it might be said, in a child that was inclined to be nervous having had an anxiety attack in connection with a yellow-striped butterfly, probably as a result of some inherited tendency to anxiety.(See Stanley Hall, ‘A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear’, 1914.) In ignorance of the true causation of his fear, this explanation would proceed, the patient looked about for something in his childhood to which he could connect it; he made use of the chance similarity of names and the recurrence of the stripes as a ground for the construction of an imaginary adventure with the nursery-maid whom he still remembered. When, however, we observe that the trivial details of this went (which, according to this view, was in itself an innocent one) - the scrubbing, the pail and the broom - had enough power over the patient’s later life to determine his object-choice permanently and compulsively, then the butterfly phobia seems to have acquired an inexplicable importance. The state of things on this hypothesis is thus seen to be at least as remarkable as on mine, and any advantage that might be claimed for a rationalistic reading of the scene has melted away. The Grusha scene is of particular value to us, since in relation to it we can prepare our judgement upon the less certain primal scene.

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