Psycho-analysis and the establishment of the facts in legal proceedings 4 страница

This method of psycho-analytic investigation, which leads from the conspicuous symptoms to the hidden unconscious phantasies, tells us everything that can be known about the sexuality of psychoneurotics, including the fact which is to be the main subject-matter of this short preliminary publication.6

Owing, probably, to the difficulties which the unconscious phantasies meet with in their endeavour to find expression, the relationship of the phantasies to the symptoms is not simple, but on the contrary, complicated in many ways.¹ As a rule - when, that is, the neurosis is fully developed and has persisted for some time - a particular symptom corresponds, not to a single unconscious phantasy, but to several such phantasies; and it does so not in an arbitrary manner but in accordance with a regular pattern. At the beginning of the illness these complications are, no doubt, not all fully developed.

For the sake of general interest I will at this point go outside the framework of this paper and interpolate a series of formulas which attempt to give a progressively fuller description of the nature of hysterical symptoms. These formulas do not contradict one another, but some represent an increasingly complete and precise approach to the facts, while others represent the application of different points of view: (1) Hysterical symptoms are mnemic symbols of certain operative (traumatic) impressions and experiences.

(2) Hysterical symptoms are substitutes, produced by ‘conversion’, for the associative return of these traumatic experiences.

(3) Hysterical symptoms are - like other psychical structures - an expression of the fulfilment of a wish.

(4) Hysterical symptoms are the realization of an unconscious phantasy which serves the fulfilment of a wish.

(5) Hysterical symptoms serve the purpose of sexual satisfaction and represent a portion of the subject’s sexual life (a portion which corresponds to one of the constituents of his sexual instinct).

(6) Hysterical symptoms correspond to a return of a mode of sexual satisfaction which was a real one in infantile life and has since been repressed.

(7) Hysterical symptoms arise as a compromise between two opposite affective and instinctual impulses, of which one is attempting to bring to expression a component instinct or a constituent of the sexual constitution, and the other is attempting to suppress it.

(8) Hysterical symptoms may take over the representation of various unconscious impulses which are not sexual, but they can never be without a sexual significance.

¹ The same is true of the relation between the ‘latent’ dream-thoughts and the elements of the ‘manifest’ content of a dream. See the section of my Interpretation of Dreams which deals with the ‘dream-work’.7

Among these various definitions the seventh brings out the nature of hysterical symptoms most completely as the realization of an unconscious phantasy; and the eighth recognizes the proper significance of the sexual factor. Some of the preceding formulas lead up to these two and are contained in them.

This connection between symptoms and phantasies makes it easy to arrive from a psycho-analysis of the former at a knowledge of the components of the sexual instincts which dominate the individual, as I have demonstrated in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In some cases, however, investigation by this means yields an unexpected result. It shows that there are many symptoms where the uncovering of a sexual phantasy (or of a number of phantasies, one of which, the most significant and the earliest, is of a sexual nature) is not enough to bring about a resolution of the symptoms. To resolve it one has to have two sexual phantasies, of which one has a masculine and the other a feminine character. Thus one of these phantasies springs from a homosexual impulse. This new finding does not alter our seventh formula. It remains true that a hysterical symptom must necessarily represent a compromise between a libidinal and a repressing impulse; but it may also represent a union of two libidinal phantasies of an opposite sexual character.

I shall refrain from giving examples in support of this thesis. I have found from experience that short analyses, condensed into extracts, can never have the convincing effect which they are designed to produce. And on the other hand, accounts of fully analysed cases must be left for another occasion.

I will therefore content myself with stating the following formula and explaining its significance:

(9) Hysterical symptoms are the expression on the one hand of a masculine unconscious sexual phantasy, and on the other hand of a feminine one.

I must expressly state that I cannot claim the same general validity for this formula as I have done for the others. As far as I can see, it applies neither to all the symptoms of a given case nor to all cases. On the contrary, it is not hard to adduce cases in which the impulses belonging to the opposite sexes have found separate symptomatic expression, so that the symptoms of heterosexuality and those of homosexuality can be as clearly distinguished from each other as the phantasies concealed behind them. Nevertheless, the condition of things stated in the ninth formula is common enough, and, when it occurs, important enough to deserve special emphasis. It seems to me to mark the highest degree of complexity to which the determination of a hysterical symptom can attain, and one may therefore only expect to find it in a neurosis which has persisted for a long time and within which a great deal of organization has taken place.¹

The bisexual nature of hysterical symptoms, which can in any event be demonstrated in numerous cases, is an interesting confirmation of my view that the postulated existence of an innate bisexual disposition in man is especially clearly visible in the analysis of psychoneurotics.² An exactly analogous state of affairs occurs in the same field when a person who is masturbating tries in his conscious phantasies to have the feelings both of the man and of the woman in the situation which he is picturing. Further counterparts are to be found in certain hysterical attacks in which the patient simultaneously plays both parts in the underlying sexual phantasy. In one case which I observed, for instance, the patient pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman), while she tried to tear it off with the other (as the man). This simultaneity of contradictory actions serves to a large extent to obscure the situation, which is otherwise so plastically portrayed in the attack, and it is thus well suited to conceal the unconscious phantasy that is at work.

¹ Sadger (1907) has recently discovered this formula independently in his own psycho-analyses. He, however, maintains that it has general validity.

² Cf. my Three Essays.9

In psycho-analytic treatment it is very important to be prepared for a symptom’s having a bisexual meaning. We need not then be surprised or misled if a symptom seems to persist undiminished although we have already resolved one of its sexual meanings; for it is still being maintained by the - perhaps unsuspected - one belonging to the opposite sex. In the treatment of such cases, moreover, one may observe how the patient avails himself, during the analysis of the one sexual meaning, of the convenient possibility of constantly switching his associations, as though on to an adjoining track, into the field of the contrary meaning.

CHARACTER AND ANAL EROTISM (1908)

Among those whom we try to help by our psycho-analytic efforts we often come across a type of person who is marked by the possession of a certain set of character-traits, while at the same time our attention is drawn to the behaviour in his childhood of one of his bodily functions and the organ concerned in it. I cannot say at this date what particular occasions began to give me an impression that there was some organic connection between this type of character and this behaviour of an organ, but I can assure the reader that no theoretical expectation played any part in that impression.

Accumulated experience has so much strengthened my belief in the existence of such a connection that I am venturing to make it the subject of a communication.

The people I am about to describe are noteworthy for a regular combination of the three following characteristics. They are especially orderly, parsimonious and obstinate. Each of these words actually covers a small group or series of interrelated character-traits. ‘Orderly’ covers the notion of bodily cleanliness, as well as of conscientiousness in carrying out small duties and trustworthiness. Its opposite would be ‘untidy’ and ‘neglectful’. Parsimony may appear in the exaggerated form of avarice; and obstinacy can go over into defiance, to which rage and revengefulness are easily joined. The two latter qualities - parsimony and obstinacy are linked with each other more closely than they are with the first - with orderliness. They are, also, the more constant element of the whole complex. Yet it seems to me incontestable that all three in some way belong together.

It is easy to gather from these people’s early childhood history that they took a comparatively long time to overcome their infantile incontinentia alvi [faecal incontinence], and that even in later childhood they suffered from isolated failures of this function. As infants, they seem to have belonged to the class who refuse to empty their bowels when they are put on the pot because they derive a subsidiary pleasure from defaecating;¹ for they tell us that even in somewhat later years they enjoyed holding back their stool, and they remember - though more readily about their brothers and sisters than about themselves - doing all sorts of unseemly things with the faeces that had been passed. From these indications we infer that such people are born with a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong. But since none of these weaknesses and idiosyncracies are to be found in them once their childhood has been passed, we must conclude that the anal zone had lost its erotogenic significance in the course of development; and it is to be suspected that the regularity with which this triad of properties is present in their character may be brought into relation with the disappearance of their anal erotism.

I know that no one is prepared to believe in a state of things so long as it appears to be unintelligible and to offer no angle from which an explanation can be attempted. But we can at least bring the underlying factors nearer to our understanding by the help of the postulates I laid down in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. I there attempted to show that the sexual instinct of man is highly complex and is put together from contributions made by numerous constituents and component instincts. Important contributions to ‘sexual excitation’ are furnished by the peripheral excitations of certain specially designated parts of the body (the genitals, mouth, anus, urethra), which therefore deserve to be described as ‘erotogenic zones’. But the amounts of excitation coming in from these parts of the body do not all undergo the same vicissitudes, nor is the fate of all of them the same at every period of life. Generally speaking, only a part of them is made use of in sexual life; another part is deflected from sexual aims and directed towards others - a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’. During the period of life which may be called the period of ‘sexual latency’ - i.e. from the completion of the fifth year to the first manifestations of puberty (round about the eleventh year) - reaction-formations, or counter-forces, such as shame, disgust and morality, are created in the mind. They are actually formed at the expense of the excitations proceeding from the erotogenic zones, and they rise like dams to oppose the later activity of the sexual instincts. Now anal erotism is one of the components of the instinct which, in the course of development and in accordance with the education demanded by our present civilization, have become unserviceable for sexual aims. It is therefore plausible to suppose that these character-traits of orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy, which are so often prominent in people who were formerly anal erotics, are to be regarded as the first and most constant results of the sublimation of anal erotism.²

¹ Cf. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

² Since it is precisely the remarks in my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality about the anal erotism of infants that have particularly scandalized uncomprehending readers, I venture at this point to interpolate an observation for which I have to thank a very intelligent patient. ‘A friend of mine’, he told me, ‘who has read your Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, was talking about the book. He entirely agreed with it, but there was one passage, which - though of course he accepted and understood its meaning like that of the rest - struck him as so grotesque and comic that he sat down and laughed over it for a quarter of an hour. This passage ran: "One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty his bowels when he is put on the pot - that is, when his nurse wants him to - and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defaecating." The picture of this baby sitting on the pot and deliberating whether he would put up with a restriction of this kind upon his personal freedom of will, and feeling anxious, too, not to miss the pleasure attached to defaecating, - this caused my friend the most intense amusement. About twenty minutes afterwards, as we were having some cocoa, he suddenly remarked without any preliminary: "I say, seeing the cocoa in front of me has suddenly made me think of an idea that I always had when I was a child. I used always to pretend to myself that I was the cocoa-manufacturer Van Houten" (he pronounced the name Van "Hauten") "and that I possessed a great secret for the manufacture of this cocoa. Everybody was trying to get hold of this secret that was a boon to humanity but I kept it carefully to myself. I don’t know why I should have hit specially upon Van Houten. Probably his advertisements impressed me more than any others." Laughing, and without thinking at the time that my words had any deep meaning, I said: "Wann haut’n die Mutter?" [‘When does mother smack?’ The first two words in the German phrase are pronounced exactly like ‘Van Houten’.] It was only later that I realized that my pun in fact contained the key to the whole of my friend’s sudden childhood recollection, and I then recognized it as a brilliant example of a screen-phantasy. My friend’s phantasy, while keeping to the situation, actually involved (the nutritional process) and making use of phonetic associations ("Kakao" [‘cocoa’. - ‘Kaka’ is the common German nursery word for ‘faeces’] and "Wann haut’n"), pacified his sense of guilt by making a complete reversal in the content of his recollection: there was a displacement from the back of the body to the front, excreting food became taking food in, and something that was shameful and had to be concealed became a secret that was a boon to humanity. I was interested to see how, only a quarter of an hour after my friend had fended the phantasy off (though, it is true, in the comparatively mild form of raising an objection on formal grounds) - he was, quite involuntarily, presented with the most convincing evidence by his own unconscious.’

The intrinsic necessity for this connection is not clear, of course, even to myself. But I can make some suggestions which may help towards an understanding of it. Cleanliness, orderliness and trustworthiness give exactly the impression of a reaction-formation against an interest in what is unclean and disturbing and should not be part of the body. (‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place.’)¹ To relate obstinacy to an interest in defaecation would seem no easy task; but it should be remembered that even babies can show self-will about parting with their stool, as we have seen above, and that it is a general practice in children’s upbringing to administer painful stimuli to the skin of the buttocks which is linked up with the erotogenic anal zone - in order to break their obstinacy and make them submissive. An invitation to a caress of the anal zone is still used to-day, as it was in ancient times, to express defiance or defiant scorn, and thus in reality signifies an act of tenderness that has been overtaken by repression. An exposure of the buttocks represents a softening down of this spoken invitation into a gesture; in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen both words and gesture are introduced at the most appropriate point as an expression of defiance.

The connections between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation, which seem so dissimilar, appear to be the most extensive of all. Every doctor who has practised psycho-analysis knows that the most refractory and long-standing cases of what is described as habitual constipation in neurotics can be cured by that form of treatment. This is less surprising if we remember that that function has shown itself similarly amenable to hypnotic suggestion. But in psycho-analysis one only achieves this result if one deals with the patients’ money complex and induces them to bring it into consciousness with all its connections. It might be supposed that the neurosis is here only following as indication of common usage in speech, which calls a person who keeps too careful a hold on his money ‘dirty’ or ‘filthy’.² But this explanation would be far too superficial. In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist - in the ancient civilizations, in myths, fairy tales and superstitions, in unconscious thinking, in dreams and in neuroses - money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt. We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure, and the devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life.³ We also know about the superstition which connects the finding of treasure with defaecation, and everyone is familiar with the figure of the ‘shitter of ducats [Dukatenscheisser]’.4 Indeed, even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine gold is ‘the faeces of Hell’ (Mammon = ilu manman5). Thus in following the usage of language, neurosis, here as elsewhere, is taking words in their original, significant sense, and where it appears to be using a word figuratively it is usually simply restoring its old meaning.

¹ [In English in the original.]

² [The English ‘filthy’ as well as the German ‘filzig’ appears in the original.]

³ Compare hysterical possession and demoniac epidemics.

4 [A term vulgarly used for a wealthy spendthrift.]

5 Cf. Jeremias (1904, 115n.).’"Mamon" ("Mammon") is "Manman" in Babylonian and is another name for Nergal, the God of the Underworld. According to Oriental mythology, which has passed over into popular legends and fairy tales, gold is the excrement of Hell.’

It is possible that the contrast between the most precious substance known to men and the most worthless, which they reject as waste matter (‘refuse’¹), has led to this specific identification of gold with faeces.

Yet another circumstance facilitates this equation in neurotic thought. The original erotic interest in defaecation is, as we know, destined to be extinguished in later years. In those years the interest in money makes its appearance as a new interest which had been absent in childhood. This makes it easier for the earlier impulsion, which is in process of losing its aim, to be carried over to the newly emerging aim.

If there is any basis in fact for the relation posited here between anal erotism and this triad of character-traits, one may expect to find no very marked degree of ‘anal character’ in people who have retained the anal zone’s erotogenic character in adult life, as happens, for instance, with certain homosexuals. Unless I am much mistaken, the evidence of experience tallies quite well on the whole with this inference.

We ought in general to consider whether other character complexes, too, do not exhibit a connection with the excitations of particular erotogenic zones. At present I only know of the intense ‘burning’ ambition of people who earlier suffered from enuresis. We can at any rate lay down a formula for the way in which character in its final shape is formed out of the constituent instincts: the permanent character-traits are either unchanged prolongations of the original instincts, or sublimations of those instincts, or reaction-formations against them.

¹ [In English in the original.]6

‘CIVILIZED’ SEXUAL MORALITY AND MODERN NERVOUS ILLNESS (1908)

In his recently published book, Sexual Ethics, Von Ehrenfels (1907) dwells on the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘civilized’ sexual morality. By natural sexual morality we are to understand, according to him, a sexual morality under whose dominance a human stock is able to remain in lasting possession of health and efficiency, while civilized sexual morality is a sexual morality obedience to which, on the other hand, spurs men on to intense and productive cultural activity. This contrast, he thinks, is best illustrated by comparing the innate character of a people with their cultural attainments. I may refer the reader to Von Ehrenfels’s own work for a more extensive consideration of this significant line of thought, and I shall extract from it here only as much as I need as a starting-point for my own contribution to the subject.

It is not difficult to suppose that under the domination of a civilized sexual morality the health and efficiency of single individuals may be liable to impairment and that ultimately this injury to them, caused by the sacrifices imposed on them, may reach such a pitch that, by this indirect path, the cultural aim in view will be endangered as well. And Von Ehrenfels does in fact attribute a number of ill-effects to the sexual morality which dominates our Western society to-day, ill-effects for which he is obliged to make that morality responsible; and, although he fully acknowledges its high aptitude for the furtherance of civilization, he is led to convict it of standing in need of reform. In his view, what is characteristic of the civilized sexual morality that dominates us is that the demands made on women are carried over to the sexual life of men and that all sexual intercourse is prohibited except in monogamous marriage. Nevertheless, consideration of the natural difference between the sexes makes it necessary to visit men’s lapses with less severity and thus in fact to admit a double morality for them. But a society which accepts this double morality cannot carry ‘the love of truth, honesty and humanity’ (Von Ehrenfels, ibid. 32 ff.) beyond a definite and narrow limit, and is bound to induce in its members concealment of the truth, false optimism, self-deception and deception of others. And civilized sexual morality has still worse effects, for, by glorifying monogamy, it cripples the factor of selection by virility - the factor whose influence alone can bring about an improvement of the individual’s innate constitution, since in civilized peoples selection by vitality has been reduced to a minimum by humanity and hygiene (ibid., 35).

Among the damaging effects which are here laid at the door of civilized sexual morality, the physician will miss a particular one whose significance will be discussed in detail in the present paper. I refer to the increase traceable to it of modern nervous illness - of the nervous illness, that is, which is rapidly spreading in our present-day society. Occasionally a nervous patient will himself draw the doctor’s attention to the part played in the causation of his complaint by the opposition between his constitution and the demands of civilization and will say: ‘In our family we’ve all become neurotic because we wanted to be something better than what, with our origin, we are capable of being.’ Often, too, the physician finds food for thought in observing that those who succumb to nervous illness are precisely the offspring of fathers who, having been born of rough but vigorous families, living in simple, healthy, country conditions, had successfully established themselves in the metropolis, and in a short space of time had brought their children to a high level of culture. But, above all, nerve specialists themselves have loudly, proclaimed the connection between ‘increasing nervous illness’ and modern civilized life. The grounds to which they attribute this connection will be shown by a few extracts from statements that have been made by some eminent observers.

W. Erb (1893): ‘The original question, then, is whether the causes of nervous illness that have been put before you are present in modern life to such a heightened degree as to account for a marked increase in that form of illness. The question can be answered without hesitation in the affirmative, as a cursory glance at our present-day existence and its features will show.

‘This is already clearly demonstrated by a number of general facts. The extraordinary achievements of modern times, the discoveries and inventions in every sphere, the maintenance of progress in the face of increasing competition - these things have only been gained, and can only be held, by great mental effort. The demands made on the efficiency of the individual in the struggle for existence have greatly increased and it is only by putting out all his mental powers that he can meet them. At the same time, the individual’s needs and his demands for the enjoyments of life have increased in all classes; unprecedented luxury has spread to strata of the population who were formerly quite untouched by it; irreligion, discontent and covetousness have grown up in wide social spheres. The immense extension of communications which has been brought about by the network of telegraphs and telephones that encircle the world has completely altered the conditions of trade and commerce. All is hurry and agitation; night is used for travel, day for business, even ‘holiday trips’ have become a strain on the nervous system. Important political, industrial and financial crises carry excitement into far wider circles of people than they used to do; political life is engaged in quite generally; political, religious and social struggles, party-politics, electioneering, and the enormous spread of trade-unionism inflame tempers, place an ever greater strain on the mind, and encroach upon the hours for recreation, sleep and rest. City life is constantly becoming more sophisticated and more restless. The exhausted nerves seek recuperation in increased stimulation and in highly-spiced pleasures, only to become more exhausted than before. Modern literature is predominantly concerned with the most questionable problems which stir up all the passions, and which encourage sensuality and a craving for pleasure, and contempt for every fundamental ethical principle and every ideal. It brings before the reader’s mind pathological figures and problems concerned with psychopathic sexuality, and revolutionary and other subjects. Our ears are excited and overstimulated by large doses of noisy and insistent music. The theatres captivate all our senses with their exciting performances. The plastic arts, too, turn by preference to what is repellent, ugly and suggestive, and do not hesitate to set before our eyes with revolting fidelity the most horrible sights that reality has to offer.

‘This general description is already enough to indicate a number of dangers presented by the evolution of our modern civilization. Let me now fill in the picture with a few details.’0

Binswanger (1896): ‘Neurasthenia in particular has been described as an essentially modern disorder, and Beard, to whom we are indebted for a first comprehensive account of it believed that he had discovered a new nervous disease which had developed specifically on American soil. This supposition was of course a mistaken one; nevertheless, the fact that it was an American physician who was first able to grasp and describe the peculiar features of this illness, as the fruit of a wide experience, indicates, no doubt, the close connections which exist between it and modern life, with its unbridled pursuit of money and possessions, and its immense advances in the field of technology which have rendered illusory every obstacle, whether temporal or spatial, to our means of intercommunication.’

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