Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning 5 страница

² In Schlegel’s translation this allusion is quite lost; indeed, it is given the opposite meaning: ‘Dein schlichtes Wesen spricht beredt mich an.’ [‘Thy plainness speaks to me with eloquence.‘]

³ [Literally: ‘The third one, ah! the third one... the third one said nothing. She won the prize all the same.’]

If we decide to regard the peculiarities of our ‘third one’ as concentrated in her ‘dumbness’, then psycho-analysis will tell us that in dreams dumbness is a common representation of death.¹

More than ten years ago a highly intelligent man told me a dream which he wanted to use as evidence of the telepathic nature of dreams. In it he saw an absent friend from whom he had received no news for a very long time, and reproached him energetically for his silence. The friend made no reply. It afterwards turned out that he had met his death by suicide at about the time of the dream. Let us leave the problem of telepathy on one side: there seems, however, not to be any doubt that here the dumbness in the dream represented death. Hiding and being unfindable - a thing which confronts the prince in the fairly tale of Cinderella three times, is another unmistakable symbol of death in dreams; so, too, is a marked pallor, of which the ‘paleness’ of the lead in one reading of Shakespeare’s text is a reminder.² It would be very much easier for us to transpose these interpretations from the language of dreams to the mode of expression used in the myth that is now under consideration if we could make it seem probable that dumbness must be interpreted as a sign of being dead in productions other than dreams.

At this point I will single out the ninth story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which bears the title ‘The Twelve Brothers’. A king and a queen have twelve children, all boys. The king declares that if the thirteenth child is a girl, the boys will have to die. In expectation of her birth he has twelve coffins made. With their mother’s help the twelve sons take refuge in a hidden wood, and swear death to any girl they may meet. A girl is born, grows up, and learns one day from her mother that she has had twelve brothers. She decides to seek them out, and in the wood she finds the youngest; he recognizes her, but is anxious to hide her on account of the brothers’ oath. The sister says: ‘I will gladly die, if by so doing I can save my twelve brothers.’ The brothers welcome her affectionately, however, and she stays with them and looks after their house for them. In a little garden beside the house grow twelve lilies. The girl picks them and gives one to each brother. At that moment the brothers are changed into ravens, and disappear, together with the house and garden. (Ravens are spirit-birds; the killing of the twelve brothers by their sister is represented by the picking of the flowers, just as it is at the beginning of the story by the coffins and the disappearance of the brothers.) The girl, who is once more ready to save her brothers from death, is now told that as a condition she must be dumb for seven years, and not speak a single word. She submits to the test, which brings her herself into mortal danger. She herself, that is, dies for her brothers, as she promised to do before she met them. By remaining dumb she succeeds at last in setting the ravens free.

¹ In Stekel’s Sprache des Traumes, too, dumbness is mentioned among the ‘death’ symbols (1911a, 351).

² Stekel (1911a), loc. cit.9

In the story of ‘The Six Swans’ the brothers who are changed into birds are set free in exactly the same way - they are restored to life by their sister’s dumbness. The girl has made a firm resolve to free her brothers, ‘even if it should cost her her life’; and once again (being the wife of the king) she risks her own life because she refuses to give up her dumbness in order to defend herself against evil accusations.

It would certainly be possible to collect further evidence from fairy tales that dumbness is to be understood as representing death. These indications would lead us to conclude that the third one of the sisters between whom the choice is made is a dead woman. But she may be something else as well - namely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death. Thanks to a displacement that is far from infrequent, the qualities that a deity imparts to men are ascribed to the deity himself. Such a displacement will surprise us least of all in relation to the Goddess of Death, since in modern versions and representations, which these stories would thus be forestalling, Death itself is nothing other than a dead man.

If the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, the sisters are known to us. They are the Fates, the Moerae, the Parcae or the Norns, the third of whom is called Atropos, the inexorable.0

II

We will for the time being put aside the task of inserting the interpretation that we have found into our myth, and listen to what the mythologists have to teach us about the role and origin of the Fates.¹

The earliest Greek mythology (in Homer) only knew a single, personifying inevitable fate. The further development of this one Moera into a company of three (or less often two) sister-goddesses probably came about on the basis of other divine figures to which the Moerae were closely related - the Graces and the Horae [the Seasons].

The Horae were originally goddesses of the waters of the sky, dispensing rain and dew, and of the clouds from which rain falls; and, since the clouds were conceived of as something that has been spun, it came about that these goddesses were looked upon as spinners, an attribute that then became attached to the Moerae. In the sun-favoured Mediterranean lands it is the rain on which the fertility of the soil depends, and thus the Horae became vegetation goddesses. The beauty of flowers and the abundance of fruit was their doing, and they were accredited with a wealth of agreeable and charming traits. They became the divine representatives of the Seasons, and it is possibly owing to this connection that there were three of them, if the sacred nature of the number three is not a sufficient explanation. For the peoples of antiquity at first distinguished only three seasons: winter, spring and summer. Autumn was only added in late Graeco-Roman times, after which the Horae were often represented in art as four in number.

The Horae retained their relation to time. Later they presided over the times of day, as they did at first over the times of the year; and at last their name came to be merely a designation of the hours (heure, ora). The Norns of German mythology are akin to the Horae and the Moerae and exhibit this time signification in their names. It was inevitable, however, that a deeper view should come to be taken of the essential nature of these deities, and that their essence should be transposed on to the regularity with which the seasons change. The Horae thus became the guardians of natural law and of the divine Order which causes the same thing to recur in Nature in an unalterable sequence.

¹ What follows is taken from Roscher’s lexicon, under the relevant headings.1

This discovery of Nature reacted on the conception of human life. The nature-myth changed into a human myth: the weather-goddesses became goddesses of Fate. But this aspect of the Horae found expression only in the Moerae, who watch over the necessary ordering of human life as inexorably as do the Horae over the regular order of nature. The ineluctable severity of Law and its relation to death and dissolution, which had been avoided in the charming figures of the Horae, were now stamped upon the Moerae, as though men had only perceived the full seriousness of natural law when they had to submit their own selves to it.

The names of the three spinners, too, have been significantly explained by mythologists. Lachesis, the name of the second, seems to denote ‘the accidental that is included in the regularity of destiny’¹ - or, as we should say, ‘experience’; just as Atropos stands for ‘the ineluctable’ - Death. Clotho would then be left to mean the innate disposition with its fateful implications.

But now it is time to return to the theme which we are trying to interpret - the theme of the choice between three sisters. We shall be deeply disappointed to discover how unintelligible the situations under review become and what contradictions of their apparent content result, if we apply to them the interpretation that we have found. On our supposition the third of the sisters is the Goddess of Death, Death itself. But in the Judgement of Paris she is the Goddess of Love, in the tale of Apuleius she is someone comparable to the goddess for her beauty, in The Merchant of Venice she is the fairest and wisest of women, in King Lear she is the one loyal daughter. We may ask whether there can be a more complete contradiction. Perhaps, improbable though it may seem, there is a still more complete one lying close at hand. Indeed, there certainly is; since, whenever our theme occurs, the choice between the women is free, and yet it falls on death. For, after all, no one chooses death, and it is only by a fatality that one falls a victim to it.

¹ Roscher, quoting Preller, ed. Robert (1894).2

However, contradictions of a certain kind - replacements by the precise opposite - offer no serious difficulty to the work of analytic interpretation. We shall not appeal here to the fact that contraries are so often represented by one and the same element in the modes of expression used by the unconscious, as for instance in dreams. But we shall remember that there are motive forces in mental life which bring about replacement by the opposite in the form of what is known as reaction-formation; and it is precisely in the revelation of such hidden forces as these that we look for the reward of this enquiry. The Moerae were created as a result of a discovery that warned man that he too is a part of nature and therefore subject to the immutable law of death. Something in man was bound to struggle against this subjection, for it is only with extreme unwillingness that he gives up his claim to an exceptional position. Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy. So his imagination rebelled against the recognition of the truth embodied in the myth of the Moerae, and constructed instead the myth derived from it, in which the Goddess of Death was replaced by the Goddess of Love and by what was equivalent to her in human shape. The third of the sisters was no longer Death; she was the fairest, best, most desirable and most lovable of women. Nor was this substitution in any way technically difficult: it was prepared for by an ancient ambivalence, it was carried out along a primaeval line of connection which could not long have been forgotten. The Goddess of Love herself, who now took the place of the Goddess of Death, had once been identical with her. Even the Greek Aphrodite had not wholly relinquished her connection with the underworld, although she had long surrendered he: chthonic role to other divine figures, to Persephone, or to the tri-form Artemis-Hecate. The great Mother-goddesses of the oriental peoples, however, all seem to have been both creators and destroyers - both goddesses of life and fertility and goddesses of death. Thus the replacement by a wishful opposite in our theme harks back to a primaeval identity.

The same consideration answers the question how the feature of a choice came into the myth of the three sisters. Here again there has been a wishful reversal. Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.

On closer inspection we observe, to be sure, that the original myth is not so thoroughly distorted that traces of it do not show through and betray its presence. The free choice between the three sisters is, properly speaking, no free choice, for it must necessarily fall on the third if every kind of evil is not to come about, as it does in King Lear. The fairest and best of women, who has taken the place of the Death-goddess, has kept certain characteristics that border on the uncanny, so that from there we have been able to guess at what lies beneath.¹

So far we have been following out the myth and its transformation, and it is to be hoped that we have correctly indicated the hidden causes of the transformation. We may now turn our interest to the way in which the dramatist has made use of the theme. We get an impression that a reduction of the theme to the original myth is being carried out in his work, so that we once more have a sense of the moving significance which had been weakened by the distortion. It is by means of this reduction of the distortion, this partial return to the original, that the dramatist achieves his more profound effect upon us.

To avoid misunderstandings, I should like to say that it is not my purpose to deny that King Lear’s dramatic story is intended to inculcate two wise lessons: that one should not give up one’s possessions and rights during one’s lifetime, and that one must guard against accepting flattery at its face value. These and similar warnings are undoubtedly brought out by the play; but it seems to me quite impossible to explain the overpowering effect of King Lear from the impression that such a train of thought would produce, or to suppose that the dramatist’s personal motives did not go beyond the intention of teaching these lessons. It is suggested, too, that his purpose was to present the tragedy of ingratitude, the sting of which he may well have felt in his own heart, and that the effect of the play rests on the purely formal element of its artistic presentation; but this cannot, so it seems to me, take the place of the understanding brought to us by the explanation we have reached of the theme of the choice between the three sisters.

¹ The Psyche of Apuleius’s story has kept many traits that remind us of her relation with death. Her wedding is celebrated like a funeral, she has to descend into the underworld, and afterwards she sinks into a death-like sleep (Otto Rank). - On the significance of Psyche as goddess of the spring and as ‘Bride of Death’, cf. Zinzow (1881). - In another of Grimm’s Tales (‘The Goose-girl at the Fountain’, No. 179) there is, as in ‘Cinderella’, an alternation between the beautiful and the ugly aspect of the third sister, in which one may no doubt see an indication of her double nature - before and after the substitution. This third daughter is repudiated by her father, after a test which is almost the same as the one in King Lear. Like her sisters, she has to declare how fond she is of their father, but can find no expression for her love but a comparison with salt. (Kindly communicated by Dr. Hanns Sachs.)

Lear is an old man. It is for this reason, as we have already said, that the three sisters appear as his daughters. The relationship of a father to his children, which might be a fruitful source of many dramatic situations, is not turned to further account in the play. But Lear is not only an old man: he is a dying man. In this way the extraordinary premiss of the division of his inheritance loses all its strangeness. But the doomed man is not willing to renounce the love of women; he insists on hearing how much he is loved. Let us now recall the moving final scene, one of the culminating points of tragedy in modern drama. Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body on to the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying.

The dramatist brings us nearer to the ancient theme by representing the man who makes the choice between the three sisters as aged and dying. The regressive revision which he has thus applied to the myth, distorted as it was by wishful transformation, allows us enough glimpses of its original meaning to enable us perhaps to reach as well a superficial allegorical interpretation of the three female figures in the theme. We might argue that what is represented here are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman - the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him; or that they are the three forms taken by the figure of the mother in the course of a man’s life - the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly the Mother Earth who receives him once more. But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.

TWO LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN (1913)

We can understand children telling lies, when in doing so, they are imitating the lies told by grown-up people. But a number of lies told by well-brought-up children have a particular significance and should cause those in charge of them to reflect rather than be angry. These lies occur under the influence of excessive feelings of love, and become momentous when they lead to a misunderstanding between the child and the person it loves.

I

A girl of seven (in her second year at school) had asked her father for some money to buy colours for painting Easter eggs. Her father had refused, saying he had no money. Shortly afterwards the girl asked her father for some money for a contribution towards a wreath for the funeral of their reigning princess, who had recently died. Each of the schoolchildren was to bring fifty pfennigs. Her father gave her ten marks; she paid her contribution, put nine marks on her father’s writing-table, and with the remaining fifty pfennigs bought some paints, which she hid in her toy cupboard. At dinner her father asked suspiciously what she had done with the missing fifty pfennigs, and whether she had not bought paints with them after all. She denied it; but her brother, who was two years her elder and with whom she had planned to paint the eggs, betrayed her; the paints were found in the cupboard. The angry father handed the culprit over to her mother for punishment, and it was severely administered. Afterwards her mother was herself much shaken, when she saw how great the child’s despair was. She caressed the little girl after the punishment, and took her for a walk to console her. But the effects of the experience, which were described by the patient herself as the ‘turning-point in her life’, proved to be ineradicable. Up to then she had been a wild, self-confident child, afterwards she became shy and timid. When she was engaged to be married and her mother undertook the purchase of her furniture and her trousseau, she flew into a rage which was incomprehensible even to herself. She had a feeling that after all it was her money, and no one else ought to buy anything with it. As a young wife she was shy of asking her husband for any expenditure on her personal needs, and made an uncalled-for distinction between ‘her’ money and his. During the treatment it happened now and again that her husband’s remittances to her were delayed, so that she was left without resources in a foreign city. After she had told me this once, I made her promise that if it happened again she would borrow the small sum necessary from me. She promised to do so; but on the next occasion of financial embarrassment she did not keep her promise, but preferred to pawn her jewellery. She explained that she could not take money from me.

The appropriation of the fifty pfennigs in her childhood had had a significance which her father could not guess. Some time before she began going to school she had played a singular prank with money. A neighbour with whom they were friendly had sent the girl out with a small sum of money, in the company of her own little boy who was even younger, to buy something in a shop. Being the elder of the two, she was bringing the change back home. But, meeting the neighbour’s servant in the street, she threw the money down on the pavement. In the analysis of this action, which she herself found inexplicable, the thought of Judas occurred to her, who threw down the thirty pieces of silver which he had been given for betraying his Master. She said she was certainly acquainted with the story of the Passion before she went to school. But in what way could she identify herself with Judas?

When she was three and a half she had a nursemaid of whom she was extremely fond. This girl became involved in a love affair with a doctor whose surgery she visited with the child. It appears that at that time the child witnessed various sexual proceedings. It is not certain whether she saw the doctor give the girl money; but there is no doubt that, to make sure of the child’s keeping silence, the girl gave her some small coins, with which purchases were made (probably of sweets) on the way home. It is possible too that the doctor himself occasionally gave the child money. Nevertheless the child betrayed the girl to her mother out of jealousy. She played so ostentatiously with the coins she had brought home that her mother could not help asking: ‘Where did you get that money?’ The girl was dismissed.

To take money from anyone had thus early come to mean to her a physical surrender, an erotic relation. To take money from her father was equivalent to a declaration of love. The phantasy that her father was her lover was so seductive that with its help her childish wish for paints for the Easter eggs easily put itself into effect in spite of the prohibition. She could not admit, however, that she had appropriated the money; she was obliged to disavow it, because her motive for the deed, which was unconscious to herself, could not be admitted. Her father’s punishment was thus a rejection of the tenderness she was offering him - a humiliation - and so it broke her spirit. During the treatment a period of severe depression occurred (whose explanation led to her remembering the events described here) when on one occasion I was obliged to reproduce this humiliation by asking her not to bring me any more flowers.

For psycho-analysts I need hardly emphasize the fact that in this little experience of the child’s we have before us one of those extremely common cases in which early anal erotism persists into later erotic life. Even her desire to paint the eggs with colours derived from the same source.9

II

A woman who is now seriously ill in consequence of a frustration in life was in her earlier years a particularly capable, truth-loving, serious and virtuous girl, and became an affectionate wife. But still earlier, in the first years of her life, she had been a wilful and discontented child, and, though she had changed fairly quickly into an excessively good and conscientious one, there were occurrences in her schooldays, which, when she fell ill, caused her deep self-reproaches, and were regarded by her as proofs of fundamental depravity. Her memory told her that in those days she had often bragged and lied. Once on the way to school a school-fellow had said boastfully: ‘Yesterday we had ice at dinner.’ She replied: ‘Oh we have ice every day.’ In reality she did not know what ice at dinner could mean; she only knew ice in the long blocks in which it is carted about, but she assumed that there must be something grand in having it for dinner, so she refused to be outdone by her school-fellow.

When she was ten years old, they were set the task in the drawing lesson of making a free-hand drawing of a circle. But she used a pair of compasses, thus easily producing a perfect circle, and showed her achievement in triumph to her neighbour in class. The mistress came up, heard her boasting, discovered the marks of the compasses in the circle, and questioned the girl. But she stubbornly denied what she had done, would not give way to any evidence, and took refuge in sullen silence. The mistress consulted with her father about it. They were both influenced by the girl’s usually good behaviour into deciding not to take any further steps about the matter.

Both the child’s lies were instigated by the same complex. As the eldest of five children, the little girl early developed an unusually strong attachment to her father, which was destined when she was grown up to wreck her happiness in life. But she could not long escape the discovery that her beloved father was not so great a personage as she was inclined to think him. He had to struggle against money difficulties; he was not so powerful or so distinguished as she had imagined. But she could not put up with this departure from her ideal. Since, as women do, she based all her ambition on the man she loved, she became too strongly dominated by the motive of supporting her father against the world. So she boasted to her school-fellows, in order not to have to belittle her father. When, later on, she learned to translate ice for dinner by ‘

glace’, her self-reproaches about this reminiscence led her by an easy path into a pathological dread of pieces or splinters of glass.

Her father was an excellent draughtsman, and had often enough excited the delight and admiration of the children by exhibitions of his skill. It was as an identification of herself with her father that she had drawn the circle at school - which she could only do successfully by deceitful methods. It was as though she wanted to boast: ‘Look at what my father can do!’ The sense of guilt that was attached to her excessive fondness for her father found its expression in connection with her attempted deception; an admission was impossible for the same reason that was given in the first of these observations: it would inevitably have been an admission of her hidden incestuous love.

0 We should not think lightly of such episodes in the life of children. It would be a serious mistake to read into childish misdemeanours like these a prognosis of the development of a bad character. Nevertheless, they are intimately connected with the most powerful motive forces in children’s minds, and give notice of dispositions that will lead to later eventualities in their lives or to future neuroses.1

THE DISPOSITION TO OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE OF NEUROSIS (1913)

The problem of why and how a person may fall ill of a neurosis is certainly among those to which psycho-analysis should offer a solution. But it will probably be necessary to find a solution first to another and narrower problem - namely, why it is that this or that person must fall ill of a particular neurosis and of none other. This is the problem of ‘choice of neurosis’.

What do we know so far about this problem? Strictly speaking, only one single general proposition can be asserted on the subject with certainty. It will be recalled that we divide the pathogenic determinants concerned in the neuroses into those which a person brings along with him into his life and those which life brings to him - the constitutional and the accidental - by whose combined operation alone the pathogenic determinant is as a rule established. The general proposition, then, which I have alluded to above, lays it down that the grounds for determining the choice of neurosis are entirely of the former kind - that is, that they are in the nature of dispositions and are independent of experiences which operate pathogenically.

Where are we to look for the source of these dispositions? We have become aware that the psychical functions concerned - above all, the sexual function, but various important ego-functions too - have to undergo a long and complicated development before reaching the state characteristic of the normal adult. We can assume that these developments are not always so smoothly carried out that the total function passes through this regular progressive modification. Wherever a portion of it clings to a previous stage, what is known as a ‘point of fixation’ results, to which the function may regress if the subject falls ill through some external disturbance.

Thus our dispositions are inhibitions in development. We are confirmed in this view by the analogy of the facts of general pathology of other illnesses. But before the question as to what factors can bring about such disturbances of development the work of psycho-analysis comes to a stop: it leaves that problem to biological research.¹

Already a few years back we ventured, with the help of these hypotheses, to approach the problem of choice of neurosis. Our method of work, which aims at discovering normal conditions by studying their disturbances, led us to adopt a very singular and unexpected line of attack. The order in which the main forms of psychoneurosis are usually enumerated - Hysteria, Obsessional Neurosis, Paranoia, Dementia Praecox - corresponds (even though not quite exactly) to the order of the ages at which the onset of these disorders occurs. Hysterical forms of illness can be observed even in earliest childhood; obsessional neurosis usually shows its first symptoms in the second period of childhood (between the ages of six and eight); while the two other psychoneuroses, which I have brought together under the heading of ‘paraphrenia’, do not appear until after puberty and during adult life. It is these disorders - the last to emerge - which were the first to show themselves accessible to our enquiry into the dispositions that result in the choice of neurosis. The characteristics peculiar to both of them - megalomania, turning away from the world of objects, increased difficulty in transference - have obliged us to conclude that their dispositional fixation is to be looked for in a stage of libidinal development before object-choice has been established - that is in the phase of auto-erotism and of narcissism. Thus these forms of illness, which make their appearance so late, go back to very early inhibitions and fixations.

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