Contributions to the neue freie presse 11 страница

For the situation is clear. This elementary neurosis of childhood already involved a problem and an apparent absurdity, like any complicated neurosis of maturity. What can have been the meaning of the child’s idea that if he had this lascivious wish his father would be bound to die? Was it sheer nonsense? Or are there means of understanding the words and of perceiving them as a necessary consequence of earlier events and premises?

If we apply knowledge gained elsewhere to this case of childhood neurosis, we shall not be able to avoid a suspicion that in this instance as in others (that is to say, before the child had reached his sixth year) there had been conflicts and repressions, which had themselves been overtaken by amnesia, but had left behind them as a residuum the particular content of this obsessive fear. Later on we shall learn how far it is possible for us to rediscover those forgotten experiences or to reconstruct them with some degree of certainty. In the meantime stress may be laid on the fact, which is probably more than a mere coincidence, that the patient’s infantile amnesia ended precisely with his sixth year.

To find a chronic obsessional neurosis beginning like this in early childhood, with lascivious wishes of this sort connected with uncanny apprehensions and an inclination to the performance of defensive acts, is no new thing to me. I have come across it in a number of other cases. It is absolutely typical, although probably not the only possible type. Before proceeding to the events of the second session, I should like to add one more word on the subject of the patient’s early sexual experiences. It will hardly be disputed that they may be described as having been considerable both in themselves and in their consequences. But it has been the same with the other cases of obsessional neurosis that I have had the opportunity of analysing. Such cases, unlike those of hysteria, invariably possess the characteristic of premature sexual activity. Obsessional neuroses make it much more obvious than hysterias that the factors which go to form a psychoneurosis are to be found in the patient’s infantile sexual life and not in his present one. The current sexual life of an obsessional neurotic may often appear perfectly normal to a superficial observer; indeed, it frequently offers to the eye far fewer pathogenic elements and abnormalities than in the instance we are now considering.(C) THE GREAT OBSESSIVE FEAR

‘I think I will begin to-day with the experience which was the immediate occasion of my coming to you. It was in August, during the manoeuvres in ---. I had been suffering before, and tormenting myself with all kinds of obsessional thoughts, but they had quickly passed off during the manoeuvres. I was keen to show the regular officers that people like me had not only learnt a good deal but could stand a good deal too. One day we started from --- on a short march. During a halt I lost my pince-nez, and, although I could easily have found them, I did not want to delay our start, so I gave them up. But I wired to my opticians in Vienna to send me another pair by the next post. During that same halt I sat between two officers, one of whom, a captain with a Czech name, was to be of no small importance to me. I had a kind of dread of him, for he was obviously fond of cruelty. I do not say he was a bad man, but at the officers’ mess he had repeatedly defended the introduction of corporal punishment, so that I had been obliged to disagree with him very sharply. Well, during this halt we got into conversation, and the captain told me he had read of a specially horrible punishment used in the East...’

Here the patient broke off, got up from the sofa, and begged me to spare him the recital of the details. I assured him that I myself had no taste whatever for cruelty, and certainly had no desire to torment him, but that naturally I could not grant him something which was beyond my power. He might just as well ask me to give him the moon. The overcoming of resistances was a law of the treatment, and on no consideration could it be dispensed with. (I had explained the idea of ‘resistance’ to him at the beginning of the hour, when he told me there was much in himself which he would have to overcome if he was to relate this experience of his.) I went on to say that I would do all I could, nevertheless, to guess the full meaning of any hints he gave me. Was he perhaps thinking of impalement? - ‘No, not that;... the criminal was tied up...’ - he expressed himself so indistinctly that I could not immediately guess in what position - ‘a pot was turned upside down on his buttocks... some rats were put into it... and they...’ - he had again got up, and was showing every sign of horror and resistance - ‘... bored their way in...’ - Into his anus, I helped him out.

At all the more important moments while he was telling his story his face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware. He proceeded with the greatest difficulty: ‘At that moment the idea flashed through my mind that this was happening to a person who was very dear to me.’¹ In answer to a direct question he said that it was not he himself who was carrying out the punishment, but that it was being carried out as it were impersonally. After a little prompting I learnt that the person to whom this ‘idea’ of his related was the lady whom he admired.

¹ He said ‘idea’ - the stronger and more significant term ‘wish’, or rather ‘fear’, having evidently been censored. Unfortunately I am not able to reproduce the peculiar indeterminateness of all his remarks.7

He broke off his story in order to assure me that these thoughts were entirely foreign and repugnant to him, and to tell me that everything which had followed in their train had passed through his mind with the most extraordinary rapidity. Simultaneously with the idea there always appeared a ‘sanction’, that is to say, the defensive measure which he was obliged to adopt in order to prevent the phantasy from being fulfilled. When the captain had spoken of this ghastly punishment, he went on, and these ideas had come into his head, by employing his usual formulas (a ‘but’ accompanied by a gesture of repudiation, and the phrase ‘whatever are you thinking of?’) he had just succeeded in warding off both of them.

This ‘both’ took me aback, and it has no doubt also mystified the reader. For so far we have heard only of one idea - of the rat punishment being carried out upon the lady. He was now obliged to admit that a second idea had occurred to him simultaneously, namely, the idea of the punishment being applied to his father. As his father had died many years previously, this obsessive fear was much more nonsensical even than the first, and accordingly it had attempted to escape being confessed to for a little while longer.

That evening, he continued, the same captain had handed him a packet that had arrived by the post and had said: ‘Lieutenant A.¹ has paid the charges for you. You must pay him back.’ The packet had contained the pince-nez that he had wired for. At that instant, however, a ‘sanction’ had taken shape in his mind, namely, that he was not to pay back the money or it would happen - (that is, the phantasy about the rats would come true as regards his father and the lady). And immediately, in accordance with a type of procedure with which he was familiar, to combat this sanction there had arisen a command in the shape of a vow: ‘You must pay back the 3.80 Kronen to Lieutenant A.’ He had said these words to himself almost half aloud.

Two days later the manoeuvres had come to an end. He had spent the whole of the intervening time in efforts at repaying Lieutenant A. the small amount in question; but a succession of difficulties of an apparently external nature had arisen to prevent it. First he had tried to effect the payment though another officer who had been going to the post office. But he had been much relieved when this officer brought him back the money, saying that he had not met Lieutenant A. there, for this method of fulfilling his vow had not satisfied him, as it did not correspond with the wording, which ran: ‘You must pay back the money to Lieutenant A.’ Finally, he had met Lieutenant A., the person he was looking for; but that officer had refused to accept the money, declaring that he had not paid anything for him, and had nothing whatever to do with the post, which was the business of Lieutenant B. This had thrown my patient into great perplexity, for it meant that he was unable to keep his vow, since it had been based upon false premises. He had excogitated a very curious means of getting out of his difficulty, namely, that he should go to the post office with both the men, A. and B., that A. should give the young lady there the 3.80 kronen, that the young lady should give them to B., and that then he himself should pay back the 3.80 kronen to A. according to the wording of his vow.

¹ The names are of little consequence here.9

It would not surprise me to hear that at this point the reader had ceased to be able to follow. For even the detailed account which the patient gave me of the external events of these days and of his reactions to them was full of self-contradictions and sounded hopelessly confused. It was only when he told the story for the third time that I could get him to realize its obscurities and could lay bare the errors of memory and the displacements in which he had become involved. I shall spare myself the trouble of reproducing these details, the essentials of which we shall easily be able to pick up later on, and I will only add that at the end of this second session the patient behaved as though he were dazed and bewildered. He repeatedly addressed me as ‘Captain’, probably because at the beginning of the hour I had told him that I myself was not fond of cruelty like Captain N., and that I had no intention of tormenting him unnecessarily.

The only other piece of information that I obtained from him during this hour was that from the very first, on all the previous occasions on which he had had a fear that something would happen to people he loved no less than on the present one, he had referred the punishments not only to our present life but also to eternity - to the next world. Up to his fourteenth or fifteenth year he had been devoutly religious, but from that time on he had gradually developed into the free-thinker that he was to-day. He reconciled the contradiction between his beliefs and his obsessions by saying to himself: ‘What do you know about the next world? Nothing can be known about it. You’re not risking anything - so do it.’ This form of argument seemed unobjectionable to a man who was in other respects particularly clear-headed, and in this way he exploited the uncertainty of reason in the face of these questions to the benefit of the religious attitude which he had outgrown.

0 At the third session he completed his very characteristic story of his efforts at fulfilling his obsessional vow. That evening the last gathering of officers had taken place before the end of the manoeuvres. It had fallen to him to reply to the toast of ‘The Gentlemen of the Reserve’. He had spoken well, but as if he were in a dream, for at the back of his mind he was being incessantly tormented by his vow. He had spent a terrible night. Arguments and counter-arguments had struggled with one another. The chief argument, of course, had been that the premise upon which his vow had been based - that Lieutenant A. had paid the money for him - had proved to be false. However, he had consoled himself with the thought that the business was not yet finished, as A. would be riding with him next morning part of the way to the railway station at P--, so that he would still have time to ask him the necessary favour. As a matter of fact he had not done this, and had allowed A. to go off without him; but he had given instructions to his orderly to let A. know that he intended to pay him a visit that afternoon. He himself had reached the station at half-past nine in the morning. He had deposited his luggage there and had seen to various things he had to do in the small town, with the intention of afterwards paying his visit to A. The village in which A. was stationed was about an hour’s drive from the town of P--. The railway journey to the place where the post office was would take three hours. He had calculated, therefore, that the execution of his complicated plan would just leave him time to catch the evening train from P--- to Vienna. The ideas that were struggling within him had been, on the one hand, that he was simply being cowardly and was obviously only trying to save himself the unpleasantness of asking A. to make the sacrifice in question and of cutting a foolish figure before him, and that that was why he was disregarding his vow; and, on the other hand, that it would, on the contrary, be cowardly of him to fulfil his vow, since he only wanted to do so in order to be left in peace by his obsessions. When in the course of his deliberations, the patient added, he found the arguments so evenly balanced as these, it was his custom to allow his actions to be decided by chance events as though by the hand of God. When, therefore, a porter at the station had addressed him with the words, ‘Ten o’clock train, sir? ‘ he had answered ‘Yes’, and in fact had gone off by the ten o’clock train. In this way he had produced fait accompli and felt greatly relieved. He had proceeded to book a seat for luncheon in the restaurant car. At the first station they had stopped at it had suddenly struck him that he still had time to get out, wait for the next down train, travel back in it to P--, drive to the place where Lieutenant A. was quartered, from there make the three hours’ train journey with him to the post office, and so forth. It had only been the consideration that he had booked his seat for luncheon with the steward of the restaurant car that had prevented his carrying out this design. He had not abandoned it, however; he had only put off getting out until a later stop. In this way he had struggled through from station to station, till he had reached one at which it had seemed to him impossible to get out because he had relatives living there. He had then determined to travel through to Vienna, to look up his friend there and lay the whole matter before him, and then, after his friend had made his decision, to catch the night train back to P--. When I expressed a doubt whether this would have been feasible, he assured me that he would have had half an hour to spare between the arrival of the one train and the departure of the other. When he had arrived in Vienna, however, he had failed to find his friend at the restaurant at which he had counted on meeting him, and had not reached his friend’s house till eleven o’clock at night. He told him the whole story that very night. His friend had held up his hands in amazement to think that he could still be in doubt whether he was suffering from an obsession, and had calmed him down for the night, so that he had slept excellently. Next morning they had gone together to the post office, to dispatch the 3.80 kronen to the post office at which the packet containing the pince-nez had arrived.

It was this last statement which provided me with a starting-point from which I could begin straightening out the various distortions involved in his story. After his friend had brought him to his senses he had dispatched the small sum of money in question neither to Lieutenant A. nor to Lieutenant B., but direct to the post office. He must therefore have known that he owed the amount of the charges due upon the packet to no one but the official at the post office, and he must have known this before he started on his journey. It turned out that in fact he had known it before the captain made his request and before he himself made his vow; for he now remembered that a few hours before meeting the cruel captain he had had occasion to introduce himself to another captain, who had told him how matters actually stood. This officer, on hearing his name, had told him that he had been at the post office a short time before, and that the young lady there had asked him whether he knew a Lieutenant L. (the patient, that is), for whom a packet had arrived, to be paid for on delivery. The officer had replied that he did not, but the young lady had been of opinion that she could trust the unknown lieutenant and had said that in the meantime she would pay the charges herself. It had been in this way that the patient had come into possession of the pince-nez he had ordered. The cruel captain had made a mistake when, as he handed him over the packet, he had asked him to pay back the 3.80 kronen to A., and the patient must have known it was a mistake. In spite of this he had made a vow founded upon this mistake, a vow that was bound to be a torment to him. In so doing he had suppressed to himself, just as in telling the story he had suppressed to me, the episode of the other captain and the existence of the trusting young lady at the post office. I must admit that when this correction has been made his behaviour becomes even more senseless and unintelligible than before.

After he had left his friend and returned to his family his doubts had overtaken him afresh. His friend’s arguments, he saw, had been no different from his own, and he was under no delusion that his temporary relief was attributable to anything more than his friend’s personal influence. His determination to consult a doctor was woven into his delirium in the following ingenious manner. He thought he would get a doctor to give him a certificate to the effect that it was necessary for him, in order to recover his health, to perform some such action as he had planned in connection with Lieutenant A.; and the lieutenant would no doubt let himself be persuaded by the certificate into accepting the 3.80 crowns from him. The chance that one of my books happened to fall into his hands just at that moment directed his choice to me. There was no question of getting a certificate from me, however; all that he asked of me was, very reasonably, to be freed of his obsessions. Many months later, when his resistance was at its height, he once more felt a temptation to travel to P-- after all, to look up Lieutenant A. and to go through the farce of returning him the money.

(D) INITIATION INTO THE NATURE OF THE TREATMENT

The reader must not expect to hear at once what light I have to throw upon the patient’s strange and senseless obsessions about the rats. The true technique of psycho-analysis requires the physician to suppress his curiosity and leaves the patient complete freedom in choosing the order in which topics shall succeed each other during the treatment. At the fourth session, accordingly, I received the patient with the question: ‘And how do you intend to proceed to-day?’

‘I have decided to tell you something which I consider most important and which has tormented me from the very first.’ He then told me at great length the story of the last illness of his father, who had died of emphysema nine years previously. One evening, thinking that the condition was one which would come to a crisis, he had asked the doctor when the danger could be regarded as over. ‘The evening of the day after to-morrow’, had been the reply. It had never entered his head that his father might not survive that limit. At half-past eleven at night he had lain down for an hour’s rest. He had woken up at one o’clock, and had been told by a medical friend that his father had died. He had reproached himself with not having been present at his death; and the reproach had been intensified when the nurse told him that his father had spoken his name once during the last days, and had said to her as she came up to the bed: ‘Is that Paul?’ He had thought he noticed that his mother and sisters had been inclined to reproach themselves in a similar way; but they had never spoken about it. At first, however, the reproach had not tormented him. For a long time he had not realized the fact of his father’s death. It had constantly happened that, when he heard a good joke, he would say to himself: ‘I must tell Father that.’ His imagination, too, had been occupied with his father, so that often, when there was a knock at the door, he would think: ‘Here comes Father’, and when he walked into a room he would expect to find his father in it. And although he had never forgotten that his father was dead, the prospect of seeing a ghostly apparition of this kind had had no terrors for him; on the contrary, he had greatly desired it. It had not been until eighteen months later that the recollection of his neglect had recurred to him and begun to torment him terribly, so that he had come to treat himself as a criminal. The occasion of this happening had been the death of an aunt by marriage and of a visit of condolence that he had paid at her house. From that time forward he had extended the structure of his obsessional thoughts so as to include the next world. The immediate consequence of this development had been that he became seriously incapacitated from working.¹ He told me that the only thing that had kept him going at that time had been the consolation given him by his friend, who had always brushed his self-reproaches aside on the ground that they were grossly exaggerated. Hearing this, I took the opportunity of giving him a first glance at the underlying principles of psycho-analytic therapy. When there is a mésalliance, I began, between an affect and its ideational content (in this instance, between the intensity of the self-reproach and the occasion for it), a layman will say that the affect is too great for the occasion - that it is exaggerated and that consequently the inference following from the self-reproach (the inference that the patient is a criminal) is false. On the contrary, the physician says: ‘No. The affect is justified. The sense of guilt is not in itself open to further criticism. But it belongs to some other content, which is unknown (

unconscious), and which requires to be looked for. The known ideational content has only got into its actual position owing to a false connection. We are not used to feeling strong affects without their having any ideational content, and therefore, if the content is missing, we seize as a substitute upon some other content which is in some way or other suitable, much as our police, when they cannot catch the right murderer, arrest a wrong one instead. Moreover, this fact of there being a false connection is the only way of accounting for the powerlessness of logical processes to combat the tormenting idea.’ I concluded by admitting that this new way of looking at the matter gave immediate rise to some hard problems; for how could he admit that his self-reproach of being a criminal towards his father was justified, when he must know that as a matter of fact he had never committed any crime against him?

¹ A more detailed description of the episode, which the patient gave me later on, made it possible to understand the effect that it produced on him. His uncle, lamenting the loss of his wife, had exclaimed: ‘Other men allow themselves every possible indulgence, but I lived for this woman alone!’ The patient had assumed that his uncle was alluding to his father and was casting doubts upon his conjugal fidelity; and although his uncle had denied this construction of his words most positively, it was no longer possible to counteract their effect.

3 At the next session the patient showed great interest in what I had said, but ventured, so he told me, to bring for ward a few doubts. - How, he asked, could the information that the self-reproach, the sense of guilt, was justified have a therapeutic effect? - I explained that it was not the information that had this effect, but the discovery of the unknown content to which the self-reproach was really attached. - Yes, he said, that was the precise point to which his question had been directed. - I then made some short observations upon the psychological differences between the conscious and the unconscious, and upon the fact that everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques standing about in my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation: the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that it had been dug up. - Was there any guarantee, he next enquired, of what one’s attitude would be towards what was discovered? One man, he thought, would no doubt behave in such a way as to get the better of his self-reproach, but another would not. - No, I said, it followed from the nature of the circumstances that in every case the affect would be overcome - for the most part during the progress of the work itself. Every effort was made to preserve Pompeii, whereas people were anxious to be rid of tormenting ideas like his. - He had said to himself, he went on, that a self-reproach could only arise from a breach of a person’s own inner moral principles and not from that of any external ones. - I agreed, and said that the man who merely breaks an external law often regards himself as a hero. - Such an occurrence, he continued, was thus only possible where a disintegration of the personality was already present. Was there a possibility of his effecting a reintegration of his personality? If this could be done, he thought he would be able to make a success of his life, perhaps more of one than most people. - I replied that I was in complete agreement with this notion of a splitting of his personality. He had only to assimilate this new contrast, between a moral self and an evil one, with the contrast I had already mentioned, between the conscious and the unconscious. The moral self was the conscious, the evil self was the unconscious.¹ - He then said that, though he considered himself a moral person, he could quite definitely remember having done things in his childhood which came from his other self. - I remarked that here he had incidentally hit upon one of the chief characteristics of the unconscious, namely, its relation to the infantile. The unconscious, I explained, was the infantile; it was that part of the self which had become separated off from it in infancy, which had not shared the later stages of its development, and which had in consequence become repressed. It was the derivatives of this repressed unconscious that were responsible for the involuntary thoughts which constituted his illness. He might now, I added, discover yet another characteristic of the unconscious; it was a discovery which I should be glad to let him make for himself. - He found nothing more to say in this immediate connection, but instead he expressed a doubt whether it was possible to undo modifications of such long standing. What, in particular, could be done against his idea about the next world, for it could not be refuted by logic? - I told him I did not dispute the gravity of his case nor the significance of his pathological constructions; but at the same time his youth was very much in his favour as well as the intactness of his personality. In this connection I said a word or two upon the good opinion I had formed of him, and this gave him visible pleasure.

¹ All of this is of course only true in the roughest way, but it serves as a first introduction to the subject.4 At the next session he began by saying that he must tell me an event in his childhood. From the age of seven, as he had already told me, he had had a fear that his parents guessed his thoughts, and this fear had in fact persisted all through his life. When he was twelve years old he had been in love with a little girl, the sister of a friend of his. (In answer to a question he said that his love had not been sensual; he had not wanted to see her naked for she was too small.) But she had not shown him as much affection as he had desired. And thereupon the idea had come to him that she would be kind to him if some misfortune were to befall him; and as an instance of such a misfortune his father’s death had forced itself upon his mind. He had at once rejected the idea with energy. And even now he could not admit the possibility that what had arisen in this way could have been a ‘wish’; it had clearly been no more than a ‘train of thought’¹ - By way of objection I asked him why, if it had not been a wish, he had repudiated it. - Merely, he replied, on account of the content of the idea, the notion that his father might die. - I remarked that he was treating the phrase as though it were one that involved lèse-majesté; it was well known, of course, that it was equally punishable to say ‘The Emperor is an ass’ or to disguise the forbidden words by saying ‘If any one says, etc.,... then he will have me to reckon with.’ I added that I could easily insert the idea which he had so energetically repudiated into a context which would exclude the possibility of any such repudiation: for instance, ‘If my father dies, I shall kill myself upon his grave.’ - He was shaken, but did not abandon his objection. I therefore broke off the argument with the remark that I felt sure this had not been the first occurrence of his idea of his father’s dying; it had evidently originated at an earlier date, and some day we should have to trace back its history. - He then proceeded to tell me that a precisely similar thought had flashed through his mind a second time, six months before his father’s death. At that time² he had already been in love with his lady, but financial obstacles made it impossible to think of an alliance with her. The idea had then occurred to him that his father’s death might make him rich enough to marry her. In defending himself against this idea he had gone to the length of wishing that his father might leave him nothing at all, so that he might have no compensation for his terrible loss. The same idea, though in a much milder form, had come to him for a third time, on the day before his father’s death. He had then thought: ‘Now I may be going to lose what I love most’; and then had come the contradiction: ‘No, there is some one else whose loss would be even more painful to you.’³ These thoughts surprised him very much, for he was quite certain that his father’s death could never have been an object of his desire but only of his fear. - After his forcible enunciation of these words I thought it advisable to bring a fresh piece of theory to his notice. According to psycho-analytic theory, I told him, every fear corresponded to a former wish which was now repressed; we were therefore obliged to believe the exact contrary of what he had asserted. This would also fit in with another theoretical requirement, namely, that the unconscious must be the precise contrary of the conscious. - He was much agitated at this and very incredulous. He wondered how he could possibly have had such a wish, considering that he loved his father more than any one else in the world; there could be no doubt that he would have renounced all his own prospects of happiness if by so doing he could have saved his father’s life. - I answered that it was precisely such intense love as his that was the necessary precondition of the repressed hatred. In the case of people to whom he felt indifferent he would certainly have no difficulty in maintaining side by side inclinations to a moderate liking and to an equally moderate dislike: supposing, for instance, that he were an official, he might think that his chief was agreeable as a superior, but at the same time pettifogging as a lawyer and inhuman as a judge. (Shakespeare makes Brutus speak in a similar way of Julius Caesar: ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’ But these words already strike us as rather strange, and for the very reason that we had imagined Brutus’s feeling for Caesar as something deeper.) In the case of some one who was closer to him, of his wife for instance, he would wish his feelings to be unmixed, and consequently, as was only human, he would overlook her faults, since they might make him dislike her - he would ignore them as though he were blind to them. So it was precisely the intensity of his love that would not allow his hatred - though to give it such a name was to caricature the feeling - to remain conscious. To be sure, the hatred must have a source, and to discover that source was certainly a problem; his own statements pointed to the time when he was afraid that his parents guessed his thoughts. On the other hand, too, it might be asked why this intense love of his had not succeeded in extinguishing his hatred, as usually happened where there were two opposing impulses. We could only presume that the hatred must flow from some source, must be connected with some particular cause, which made it indestructible. On the one hand, then, some connection of this sort must be keeping his hatred for his father alive, while on the other hand, his intense love prevented it from becoming conscious. Therefore nothing remained for it but to exist in the unconscious, though it was able from time to time to flash out for a moment into consciousness.

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