My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 3 страница

The time has now come, however, to dissipate the notion that with the expedient of hypnosis a period of easy miracle-working has dawned for the physician. A number of circumstances must be taken into account which are calculated to lower our expectations from hypnotic therapy considerably, and to reduce to their proper proportions the hopes that may have been raised in patients. First and foremost, one of the basic assumptions turns out to be untenable: namely, that hypnosis makes it possible to deprive patients of the interfering autocratic element in their mental behaviour. In fact they retain it, and manifest it even in their attitude to the attempt to hypnotize them. It was stated above that some eighty per cent of people can be hypnotized; but that high figure is only reached by including among the positive cases any that show the slightest sign of being influenced. Really deep hypnoses, with complete tractability, such as are chosen as examples in describing the state, are actually rare or at all events not as frequent as one would wish from the therapeutic point of view. The impression made by this fact can, however, in turn be modified when it is borne in mind that depth of hypnosis and tractability to suggestions do not go pari passu; so that one often sees good suggestive results where there is no more than a slight hypnotic insensibility. But even if we consider hypnotic tractability independently, as being the more essential feature of the condition, it has to be admitted that different people show their idiosyncrasies by only letting themselves be influenced up to a certain degree of tractability, at which point they come to a halt. Thus different people show a very varying degree of suitability for hypnotic treatment. If it were possible to find a means by which all these various grades of the hypnotic state could be intensified to(the point of complete hypnosis, the idiosyncrasies of patients would once more have been eliminated and the ideal of mental treatment would have been attained. But this advance has not yet been made; it still depends far more on the patient than on the physician with what degree of tractability a suggestion will be received - it depends once more, that is, upon the patient’s choice.

And there is another, still more important consideration. In describing the very remarkable results of suggestion, people are only too ready to forget that here, as in all mental operations, relative size and strength must be taken into account. If we put a healthy person into deep hypnosis and then tell him to take a bite out of a potato under the impression that it is a pear, or if we tell him that he is meeting one of his acquaintances and must greet him as such, he is likely to prove completely tractable, because the hypnotized subject has no serious reason for resisting the suggestion. But in the case of other instructions - if, for instance, we ask a naturally modest girl to uncover herself or if we ask an honest man to steal some valuable object - we may already find the subject putting up a resistance, which may even go to the length of his refusing to obey the suggestion. This teaches us that even in the best hypnosis suggestion does not exercise unlimited power but only power of a definite strength. The hypnotic subject will make small sacrifices, but, just as though he were awake, he hesitates before making great ones. If, then, we are dealing with a patient, and urge him by suggestion to give up his illness, we perceive that this means a great sacrifice to him and not a small one. Here the power of suggestion is contending against the force which created the symptom, and maintains them, and experience shows that that force is of quite a different order of strength from hypnotic influences. The same patient who is perfectly tractable in putting himself into any dream-situation one may suggest to him (if it is not actually objectionable) may remain completely recalcitrant towards a suggestion which denies the reality of, let us say, an imaginary paralysis. There is the further fact, moreover, that precisely neurotic patients are for the most part bad hypnotic subjects, so that the struggle against the powerful forces by which the illness is rooted in the patient’s mind has to be waged not by a complete hypnotic influence but only by a fragment of it.

Thus suggestion is not certain as a matter of course of defeating the illness as soon as hypnosis (even deep hypnosis) has been achieved. A further battle has to be fought, and its outcome is very often uncertain. A single hypnotic treatment will accordingly effect nothing against severe disturbances of mental origin. If, however, hypnosis is repeated, it loses some of the miraculous effect which the patient may perhaps have anticipated. A succession of hypnoses may eventually bring about by degrees the influence over the illness which was lacking at first, till in the end a satisfactory result is achieved. But a hypnotic treatment such as this may be just as tedious and wearisome as a treatment of any other kind.

There is yet another way in which the relative weakness of suggestion is betrayed as compared with the illnesses it has to combat. It is true that suggestion can bring about a cessation of the symptoms of an illness - but only for a short time. At the end of this time they return and have to be repelled once again by renewed hypnosis and suggestion. If this course of events is repeated often enough, it usually exhausts the patience both of the patient and the physician and ends in the abandonment of hypnotic treatment. These, too, are the cases in which the patient becomes dependent on the physician and a kind of addiction to hypnosis is established.

It is a good thing for patients to be aware of these weaknesses in hypnotic therapy and of the possibilities of disappointment in its use. The curative power of hypnotic suggestion is something real and it needs no exaggerated recommendation. On the other hand, it is not surprising that physicians, to whom hypnotic mental treatment promised so much more than it could give, are indefatigable in their search for other procedures, which would make possible a deeper, or at least a less unpredictable, influence on a patient’s mind. It may safely be anticipated that systematic modern mental treatment, which is a quite recent revival of ancient therapeutic methods, will provide physicians with far more powerful weapons for the fight against illness. A deeper insight into the processes of mental life, the beginnings of which are based precisely on hypnotic experience, will point out the ways and means to this end.

PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTERS ON THE STAGE (1942 [1905 or 1906])

If, as has been assumed since the time of Aristotle, the purpose of drama is to arouse ‘terror and pity’ and so ‘to purge the emotions’, we can describe that purpose in rather more detail by saying that it is a question of opening up sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our emotional life, just as, in the case of intellectual activity, joking or fun open up similar sources, many of which that activity had made inaccessible. In this connection the prime factor is unquestionably the process of getting rid of one’s own emotions by ‘blowing off steam’; and the consequent enjoyment corresponds on the one hand to the relief produced by a thorough discharge and on the other hand, no doubt, to an accompanying sexual excitation; for the latter, as we may suppose, appears as a by-product whenever an affect is aroused, and gives people the sense, which they so much desire, of a raising of the potential of their psychical state. Being present as an interested spectator at a spectacle or play does for adults what play does for children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-up people do are in that way gratified. The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a ‘poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen’, who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires - in short, to be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero. They spare him something, too. For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct such as this would be impossible for him without pains and sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out the enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that he has only one life and that he might perhaps perish even in a single such struggle against adversity. Accordingly, his enjoyment is based on an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on the stage, and, secondly, that after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security. In these circumstances he can allow himself to enjoy being a ‘great man’, to give way without a qualm to such suppressed impulses as a craving for freedom in religious, political, social and sexual matters, and to ‘blow off steam’ in every direction in the various grand scenes that form part of the life represented on the stage.

Several other forms of creative writing, however, are equally subject to these same preconditions for enjoyment. Lyric poetry serves the purpose, more than anything, of giving vent to intense feelings of many sorts - just as was at one time the case with dancing. Epic poetry aims chiefly at making it possible to feel the enjoyment of a great heroic character in his hour of triumph. But drama seeks to explore emotional possibilities more deeply and to give an enjoyable shape even to forebodings of misfortune; for this reason it depicts the hero in his struggles, or rather (with masochistic satisfaction) in defeat. This relation to suffering and misfortune might be taken as characteristic of drama, whether, as happens in serious plays, it is only concern that is aroused, and afterwards allayed, or whether, as happens in tragedies, the suffering is actually realized. The fact that drama originated out of sacrificial rites (cf. the goat and the scapegoat) in the cult of the gods cannot be unrelated to this meaning of drama. It appeases, as it were, a rising rebellion against the divine regulation of the universe, which is responsible for the existence of suffering. Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine; and pleasure is derived, as it seems, from the affliction of a weaker being in the face of divine might - a pleasure due to masochistic satisfaction as well as to direct enjoyment of a character whose greatness is insisted upon in spite of everything. Here we have a mood like that of Prometheus, but alloyed with a paltry readiness to let oneself be soothed for the moment by a temporary satisfaction.

Suffering of every kind is thus the subject-matter of drama, and from this suffering it promises to give the audience pleasure. Thus we arrive at a first precondition of this form of art: that it should not cause suffering to the audience, that it should know how to compensate, by means of the possible satisfactions involved, for the sympathetic suffering which is aroused. (Modern writers have particularly often failed to obey this rule.) But the suffering represented is soon restricted to mental suffering; for no one wants physical suffering who knows how quickly all mental enjoyment is brought to an end by the changes in somatic feeling that physical suffering brings about. If we are sick we have one wish only: to be well again and to be quit of our present state. We call for the doctor and medicine, and for the removal of the inhibition on the play of phantasy which has pampered us into deriving enjoyment even from our own sufferings. If a spectator puts himself in the place of someone who is physically ill he finds himself without any capacity for enjoyment or psychical activity. Consequently a person who is physically ill can only figure on the stage as a piece of stage property and not as a hero, unless, indeed, some peculiar physical aspects of his illness make psychical activity possible - such, for instance, as the sick man’s forlorn state in the Philoctetes or the hopelessness of the sufferers in the class of plays that centre round consumptives.

People are acquainted with mental suffering principally in connection with the circumstances in which it is acquired; accordingly, dramas dealing with it require some event out of which the illness shall arise and they open with an exposition of this event. It is only an apparent exception that some plays, such as the Ajax and the Philoctetes, introduce the mental illness as already fully established; for in Greek tragedies, owing to the familiarity of the material, the curtain rises, as one might say, in the middle of the play. It is easy to give an exhaustive account of the preconditions governing an event of the kind that is here in question. It must be an event involving conflict and it must include an effort of will together with resistance. This precondition found its first and grandest fulfilment in a struggle against divinity. I have already said that a tragedy of this kind is one of rebellion, in which the dramatist and the audience take the side of the rebel. The less belief there comes to be in divinity, the more important becomes the human regulation of affairs; and it is this which, with increasing insight, comes to be held responsible for suffering. Thus the hero’s next struggle is against human society, and here we have the class of social tragedies. Yet another fulfilment of the necessary precondition is to be found in a struggle between individual men. Such are tragedies of character, which exhibit all the excitement of an ‘agon’, and which are best played out between outstanding characters who have freed themselves from the bond of human institutions - which, in fact, must have two heroes. Fusions between these two last classes, with a hero struggling against institutions embodied in powerful characters, are of course admissible without question. Pure tragedies of character lack the rebellious source of enjoyment, but this emerges once again no less forcibly in social dramas (in Ibsen for instance) than it did in the historical plays of the Greek classical tragedians.

Thus religious drama, social drama and drama of character differ essentially in the terrain on which the action that leads to the suffering is fought out. And we can now follow the course of drama on to yet another terrain, where it becomes psychological drama. Here the struggle that causes the suffering is fought out in the hero’s mind itself - a struggle between different impulses, and one which must have its end in the extinction, not of the hero, but of one of his impulses; it must end, that is to say, in a renunciation. Combinations of any kind between this precondition and the earlier types are, of course, possible; thus institutions, for instance, can themselves be the cause of internal conflicts. And this is where we have tragedies of love; for the suppression of love by social culture, by human conventions, or the struggle between ‘love and duty’, which is so familiar to us in opera, are the starting-point of almost endless varieties of situations of conflict: just as endless, in fact, as the erotic day-dreams of men.

But the series of possibilities grows wider; and psychological drama turns into psychopathological drama when the source of the suffering in which we take part and from which we are meant to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict between two almost equally conscious impulses but between a conscious impulse and a repressed one. Here the precondition of enjoyment is that the spectator should himself be a neurotic, for it is only such people who can derive pleasure instead of simple aversion from the revelation and the more or less conscious recognition of a repressed impulse. In anyone who is not neurotic this recognition will meet only with aversion and will call up a readiness to repeat the act of repression which has earlier been successfully brought to bear on the impulse: for in such people a single expenditure of repression has been enough to hold the repressed impulse completely in check. But in neurotics the repression is on the brink of failing; it is unstable and needs a constant renewal of expenditure, and this expenditure is spared if recognition of the impulse is brought about. Thus it is only in neurotics that a struggle can occur of a kind which can be made the subject of a drama; but even in them the dramatist will provoke not merely an enjoyment of the liberation but a resistance to it as well.

The first of these modern dramas is Hamlet. It has as its subject the way in which a man who has so far been normal becomes neurotic owing to the peculiar nature of the task by which he is faced, a man, that is, in whom an impulse that has hitherto been successfully suppressed endeavours to make its way into action. Hamlet is distinguished by three characteristics which seem important in connection with our present discussion. (1) The hero is not psychopathic, but only becomes psychopathic in the course of the action of the play. (2) The repressed impulse is one of those which are similarly repressed in all of us, and the repression of which is part and parcel of the foundations of our personal evolution. It is this repression which is shaken up by the situation in the play. As a result of these two characteristics it is easy for us to recognize ourselves in the hero: we are susceptible to the same conflict as he is, since ‘a person who does not lose his reason under certain conditions can have no reason to lose’. (3) It appears as a necessary precondition of this form of art that the impulse that is struggling into consciousness, however clearly it is recognizable, is never given a definite name; so that in the spectator too the process is carried through with his attention averted, and he is in the grip of his emotions instead of taking stock of what is happening. A certain amount of resistance is no doubt saved in this way, just as, in an analytic treatment, we find derivatives of the repressed material reaching consciousness, owing to a lower resistance, while the repressed material itself is unable to do so. After all, the conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left to me to unearth it.

It may be in consequence of disregarding these three preconditions that so many other psychopathic characters are as unserviceable on the stage as they are in real life. For the victim of a neurosis is someone into whose conflict we can gain no insight if we first meet it in a fully established state. But, per contra, if we recognize the conflict, we forget that he is a sick man, just as, if he himself recognizes it, he ceases to be ill. It would seem to be the dramatist’s business to induce the same illness in us; and this can best be achieved if we are made to follow the development of the illness along with the sufferer. This will be especially necessary where the repression does not already exist in us but has first to be set up; and this represents a step further than Hamlet in the use of neurosis on the stage. If we are faced by an unfamiliar and fully established neurosis, we shall be inclined to send for the doctor (just as we do in real life) and pronounce the character inadmissible to the stage.

This last mistake seems to occur in Bahr’s Die Andere, apart from a second one which is implicit in the problem presented in the play - namely, that it is impossible for us to put ourselves with conviction into the position of believing that one particular person has a prescriptive right to give the girl complete satisfaction. So that her case cannot become ours. Moreover, there remains a third mistake: namely that there is nothing left for us to discover and that our entire resistance is mobilized against this predetermined condition of love which is so unacceptable to us. Of the three formal preconditions that I have been discussing, the most important seems to be that of the diversion of attention.

In general, it may perhaps be said that the neurotic instability of the public and the dramatist’s skill in avoiding resistances and offering fore-pleasures can alone determine the limits set upon the employment of abnormal characters on the stage.3

JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS (1905)

Anyone who has at any time had occasion to enquire from the literature of aesthetics and psychology what light can be thrown on the nature of jokes and on the position they occupy will probably have to admit that jokes have not received nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view of the part they play in our mental life. Only a small number of thinkers can be named who have entered at all deeply into the problems of jokes. Among those who have discussed jokes, however, are such famous names as those of the novelist Jean Paul (Richter) and of the philosophers Theodor Vischer, Kuno Fischer and Theodor Lipps. But even with these writers the subject of jokes lies in the background, while the main interest of their enquiry is turned to the more comprehensive and attractive problem of the comic.

The first impression one derives from the literature is that it is quite impracticable to deal with jokes otherwise than in connection with the comic.

According to Lipps (1898),¹ a joke is ‘something comic which is entirely subjective’ - that is, something comic ‘which we produce, which is attached to action of ours as such, to which we invariably stand in the relation of subject and never of object, not even of voluntary object’ (ibid., 80). This is explained further by a remark to the effect that in general we call a joke ‘any conscious and successful evocation of what is comic, whether the comic of observation or of situation’ (ibid., 78).

¹ It is this book that has given me the courage to undertake this attempt as well as the possibility of doing so.6

Fischer (1889) illustrates the relation of jokes to the comic with the help of caricature, which in his account he places between them. The comic is concerned with the ugly in one of its manifestations: ‘If it is concealed, it must be uncovered in the light of the comic way of looking at things; if it is noticed only a little or scarcely at all, it must be brought forward and made obvious, so that it lies clear and open to the light of day... In this way caricature comes about.’ (Ibid., 45.) - ’Our whole spiritual world, the intellectual kingdom of our thoughts and ideas, does not unfold itself before the gaze of external observation, it cannot be directly imagined pictorially and visibly; and yet it too contains its inhibitions, its weaknesses and its deformities - a wealth of ridiculous and comic contrasts. In order to emphasize these and make them accessible to aesthetic consideration, a force is necessary which is able not merely to imagine objects directly but itself to reflect on these images and to clarify them: a force that can illuminate thoughts. The only such force is judgement. A joke is a judgement which produces a comic contrast; it has already played a silent part in caricature, but only in judgement does it attain its peculiar form and the free sphere of its unfolding.’ (Ibid., 49-50.)

It will be seen that the characteristic which distinguishes the joke within the class of the comic is attributed by Lipps to action, to the active behaviour of the subject, but by Fischer to its relation to its object, which he considers is the concealed ugliness of the world of thoughts. It is impossible to test the validity of these definitions of the joke - indeed, they are scarcely intelligible - unless they are considered in the context from which they have been torn. It would therefore be necessary to work through these authors’ accounts of the comic before anything could be learnt from them about jokes. Other passages, however, show us that these same authors are able to describe essential and generally valid characteristics of the joke without any regard to its connection with the comic.

The characterization of jokes which seems best to satisfy Fischer himself is as follows: ‘A joke is a playful judgement.’ (Ibid., 51.) By way of illustration of this, we are given an analogy: ‘just as aesthetic freedom lies in the playful contemplation of things’ (ibid., 50). Elsewhere (ibid., 20) the aesthetic attitude towards an object is characterized by the condition that we do not ask anything of the object, especially no satisfaction of our serious needs, but content ourselves with the enjoyment of contemplating it. The aesthetic attitude is playful in contrast to work. - ‘It might be that from aesthetic freedom there might spring too a sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations, which, on account of its origin, I will call a "playful judgement", and that in this concept is contained the first determinant, if not the whole formula, that will solve our problem. "Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom", wrote Jean Paul. "Joking is merely playing with ideas."' (Ibid., 24.)

A favourite definition of joking has long been the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things - that is, hidden similarities. Jean Paul has expressed this thought itself in a joking form: ‘Joking is the disguised priest who weds every couple.’ Vischer carries this further: ‘He likes best to wed couples whose union their relatives frown upon.’ Vischer objects, however, that there are jokes where there is no question of comparing - no question, therefore, of finding a similarity. So he, slightly diverging from Jean Paul, defines joking as the ability to bind into a unity, with surprising rapidity, several ideas which are in fact alien to one another both in their internal content and in the nexus to which they belong. Fischer, again, stresses the fact that in a large number of joking judgements differences rather than similarities are found, and Lipps points out that these definitions relate to joking as an ability possessed by the joker and not to the jokes which he makes.

Other more or less interrelated ideas which have been brought up as defining or describing jokes are: ‘a contrast of ideas’, ‘sense in nonsense’, ‘bewilderment and illumination’.

Definitions such as that of Kraepelin lay stress on contrasting ideas. A joke is ‘the arbitrary connecting or linking, usually by means of a verbal association, of two ideas which in some way contrast with each other’. A critic like Lipps had no difficulty in showing the total inadequacy of this formula; but he does not himself exclude the factor of contrast, but merely displaces it elsewhere. ‘The contrast remains, but it is not some contrast between the ideas attached to the words, but a contrast or contradiction between the meaning and the meaninglessness of the words.’ (Lipps, 1898, 87.) He gives examples to show how this is to be understood. ‘A contrast arises only because... we grant its words a meaning which, again, we nevertheless cannot grant them.’ (Ibid., 90.)

If this last point is developed further, the contrast between ‘sense and nonsense’ becomes significant. ‘What at one moment has seemed to us to have a meaning, we now see is completely meaningless. That is what, in this case, constitutes the comic process... A remark seems to us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it that has psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny it again. Various things can be understood by this "significance". We attach sense to a remark and know that logically it cannot have any. We discover truth in it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of experience or our general habits of thought, we cannot find in it. We grant it logical or practical consequences in excess of its true content, only to deny these consequences as soon as we have clearly recognized the nature of the remark. In every instance, the psychological process which the joking remark provokes in us, and on which the feeling of the comic rests, consists in the immediate transition, from this attaching of sense, from this discovering of truth, and from this granting of consequences, to the consciousness or impression of relative nothingness.’ (Ibid., 85.)

However penetrating this discussion may sound the question may be raised here whether the contrast between what has meaning and what is meaningless, on which the feeling of the comic is said to rest, also contributes to defining the concept of the joke in so far as it differs from that of the comic.

The factor of ‘bewilderment and illumination’, too, leads us deep into the problem of the relation of the joke to the comic. Kant says of the comic in general that it has the remarkable characteristic of being able to deceive us only for a moment. Heymans (1896) explains how the effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of Heine’s, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal - quite ‘famillionairely’. Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by understanding the word. Lipps (1898, 95) adds to this that this first stage of enlightenment - that the bewildering word means this or that - is followed by a second stage, in which we realize that this meaningless word has bewildered us and has then shown us its true meaning. It is only this second illumination, this discovery that a word which is meaningless by normal linguistic usage has been responsible for the whole thing - this resolution of the problem into nothing - it is only this second illumination that produces the comic effect.

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