The psychical disorders of male potency 13 страница

¹ Fear of castration plays an extremely large part, in the case of the youthful neurotics whom we come across, as an interference in their relations with their father. The illuminating instance reported by Ferenczi (1913a) has shown us how a little boy took as his totem the beast that had pecked at his little penis. When our children come to hear of ritual circumcision, they equate it with castration. The parallel in social psychology to this reaction by children has not yet been worked out, so far as I am aware. In primaeval times and in primitive races, where circumcision is so frequent, it is performed at the age of initiation into manhood and it is at that age that its significance is to be found; it was only as a secondary development that it was shifted back to the early years of life. It is of very great interest to find that among primitive peoples circumcision is combined with cutting the hair and knocking out teeth or is replaced by them, and that our children, who cannot possibly have any knowledge of this, in fact treat these two operations, in the anxiety with which they react to them, as equivalents of castration.

When Christianity first penetrated into the ancient world it met with competition from the religion of Mithras and for a time it was doubtful which of the two deities would gain the victory. In spite of the halo of light surrounding his form, the youthful Persian god remains obscure to us. We may perhaps infer from the sculptures of Mithras slaying a bull that he represented a son who was alone in sacrificing his father and thus redeemed his brothers from their burden of complicity in the deed. There was an alternative method of allaying their guilt and this was first adopted by Christ. He sacrificed his own life and so redeemed the company of brothers from original sin.

The doctrine of original sin was of Orphic origin. It formed a part of the mysteries, and spread from them to the schools of philosophy of ancient Greece. (Reinach, 1905-12, 2, 75 ff.) Mankind, it was said, were descended from the Titans, who had lulled the young Dionysus-Zagreus and had torn him to pieces. The burden of this crime weighed on them. A fragment of Anaximander relates how the unity of the world was broken by a primaeval sin,¹ and that whatever issued from it must bear the punishment. The tumultuous mobbing, the killing and the tearing in pieces by the Titans reminds us clearly enough of the totemic sacrifice described by St. Nilus - as, for the matter of that, do many other ancient myths, including, for instance, that of the death of Orpheus himself. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing difference in the fact of the murder having been committed on a youthful god.

¹ ‘Une sorte de péché proethnique’ (Reinach, 1905-12, 2, 76).4

There can be no doubt that in the Christian myth the original sin was one against God the Father. If, however, Christ redeemed mankind from the burden of original sin by the sacrifice of his own life, we are driven to conclude that the sin was a murder. The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to blood-guilt.¹ And if this sacrifice of a life brought about atonement with God the Father, the crime to be expiated can only have been the murder of the father.

In the Christian doctrine, therefore, men were acknowledging in the most undisguised manner the guilty primaeval deed, since they found the fullest atonement for it in the sacrifice of this one son. Atonement with the father was all the more complete since the sacrifice was accompanied by a total renunciation of the women on whose account the rebellion against the father was started. But at that point the inexorable psychological law of ambivalence stepped in. The very deed in which the son offered the greatest possible atonement to the father brought him at the same time to the attainment of his wishes against the father. He himself became God, beside, or, more correctly, in place of, the father. A son-religion displaced the father-religion. As a sign of this substitution the ancient totem meal was revived in the form of communion, in which the company of brothers consumed the flesh and blood of the son - no longer the father - obtained sanctity thereby and identified themselves with him. Thus we can trace through the ages the identity of the totem meal with animal sacrifice, with theanthropic human sacrifice and with the Christian Eucharist, and we can recognize in all these rituals the effect of the crime by which men were so deeply weighed down but of which they must none the less feel so proud. The Christian communion, however, is essentially a fresh elimination of the father, a repetition of the guilty deed. We can see the full justice of Frazer’s pronouncement that ‘the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity’.²

¹ We find that impulses to suicide in a neurotic turn out regularly to be self-punishments for wishes for someone else’s death.

² Frazer (1912, 2, 51). No one familiar with the literature of the subject will imagine that the derivation of Christian communion from the totem meal is an idea originating from the author of the present essay.5

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An event such as the elimination of the primal father by the company of his sons must inevitably have left ineradicable traces in the history of humanity; and the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise.¹ I shall resist the temptation of pointing out these traces in mythology, where they are not hard to find, and shall turn in another direction and take up a suggestion made by Salomon Reinach in a most instructive essay on the death of Orpheus.²

In the history of Greek art we come upon a situation which shows striking resemblances to the scene of the totem meal as identified by Robertson Smith, and not less profound differences from it. I have in mind the situation of the most ancient Greek tragedy. A company of individuals, named and dressed alike, surrounded a single figure, all hanging upon his words and deeds: they were the Chorus and the impersonator of the Hero. He was originally the only actor. Later, a second and third actor were added, to play as counterpart to the Hero and as characters split off from him; but the character of the Hero himself and his relation to the Chorus remained unaltered. The Hero of tragedy must suffer; to this day that remains the essence of a tragedy. He had to bear the burden of what was known as ‘tragic guilt’; the basis of that guilt is not always easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is often no guilt at all. As a rule it lay in rebellion against some divine or human authority; and the Chorus accompanied the Hero with feelings of sympathy, sought to hold him back, to warn him and to sober him, and mourned over him when he had met with what was felt as the merited punishment for his rash undertaking.

But why had the Hero of tragedy to suffer? and what was the meaning of his ‘tragic guilt’? I will cut the discussion short and give a quick reply. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the Hero of the great primaeval tragedy which was being re-enacted with a tendentious twist; and the tragic guilt was the guilt which he had to take on himself in order to relieve the Chorus from theirs. The scene upon the stage was derived from the historical scene through a process of systematic distortion - one might even say, as the product of a refined hypocrisy. In the remote reality it had actually been the members of the Chorus who caused the Hero’s suffering; now, however, they exhausted themselves with sympathy and regret and it was the Hero himself who was responsible for his own sufferings. The crime which was thrown on to his shoulders, presumptuousness and rebelliousness against a great authority, was precisely the crime for which the members of the Chorus, the company of brothers, were responsible. Thus the tragic Hero became, though it might be against his will, the redeemer of the Chorus

In Greek tragedy the special subject-matter of the performance was the sufferings of the divine goat, Dionysus, and the lamentation of the goats who were his followers and who identified themselves with him. That being so, it is easy to understand how drama, which had become extinct, was kindled into fresh life in the Middle Ages around the Passion of Christ.

¹ In Ariel’s words from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

² ‘La mort d’Orphée’, contained in the volume which I have so often quoted (1905-12, 2, 100 ff.).6 At the conclusion, then, of this exceedingly condensed inquiry, I should like to insist that its outcome shows that the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement with the psycho-analytic finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our present knowledge goes. It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one single concrete point - man’s relation to his father. It is even possible that yet another psychological problem belongs in this same connection. I have often had occasion to point out that emotional ambivalence in the proper sense of the term - that is, the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object - lies at the root of many important cultural institutions. We know nothing of the origin of this ambivalence. One possible assumption is that it is a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But it seems to me quite worth considering another possibility, namely that originally it formed no part of our emotional life but was acquired by the human race in connection with their father-complex,¹ precisely where the psycho-analytic examination of modern individuals still finds it revealed at its strongest.²

Before I bring my remarks to a close, however, I must find room to point out that, though my arguments have led to a high degree of convergence upon a single comprehensive nexus of ideas, this fact cannot blind us to the uncertainties of my premises or the difficulties involved in my conclusions. I will only mention two of the latter which may have forced themselves on the notice of a number of my readers.

No one can have failed to observe, in the first place, that I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual. In particular, I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that action. I have supposed that an emotional process, such as might have developed in generations of sons who were ill-treated by their father, has extended to new generations which were exempt from such treatment for the very reason that their father had been eliminated. It must be admitted that these are grave difficulties; and any explanation that could avoid presumptions of such a kind would seem to be preferable.

¹ Or, more correctly, their parental complex.

² Since I am used to being misunderstood, I think it worth while to insist explicitly that the derivations which I have proposed in these pages do not in the least overlook the complexity of the phenomena under review. All that they claim is to have added a new factor to the sources, known or still unknown, of religion, morality and society - a factor based on a consideration of the implications of psycho-analysis. I must leave to others the task of synthesizing the explanation into a unity. It does, however, follow from the nature of the new contribution that it could not play any other than a central part in such a synthesis, even though powerful emotional resistance might have to be overcome before its great importance was recognized.

Further reflection, however, will show that I am not alone in the responsibility for this bold procedure. Without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general cannot exist. Unless psychical processes were continued from one generation to another, if each generation were obliged to acquire its attitude to life anew, there would be no progress in this field and next to no development. This gives rise to two further questions: how much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations? and what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one? I shall not pretend that these problems are sufficiently explained or that direct communication and tradition - which are the first things that occur to one - are enough to account for the process. Social psychology shows very little interest, on the whole, in the manner in which the required continuity in the mental life of successive generations is established. A part of the problem seems to be met by the inheritance of psychical dispositions which, however, need to be given some sort of impetus in the life of the individual before they can be roused into actual operation. This may be the meaning of the poet’s words:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.¹

The problem would seem even more difficult if we had to admit that mental impulses could be so completely suppressed as to leave no trace whatever behind them. But that is not the case. Even the most ruthless suppression must leave room for distorted surrogate impulses and for reactions resulting from them. If so, however, we may safely assume that no generation is able to conceal any of its more important mental processes from its successor. For psycho-analysis has shown us that everyone possesses in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him to interpret other people’s reactions, that is, to undo the distortions which other people have imposed on the expression of their feelings. An unconscious understanding such as this of all the customs, ceremonies and dogmas left behind by the original relation to the father may have made it possible for later generations to take over their heritage of emotion.

¹ [‘What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine.’]8

Another difficulty might actually be brought forward from psycho-analytic quarters. The earliest moral precepts and restrictions in primitive society have been explained by us as reactions to a deed which gave those who performed it the concept of ‘crime’. They felt remorse for the deed and decided that it should never be repeated and that its performance should bring no advantage. This creative sense of guilt still persists among us. We find it operating in an asocial manner in neurotics, and producing new moral precepts and persistent restrictions, as an atonement for crimes that have been committed and as a precaution against the committing of new ones.¹ If, however, we inquire among these neurotics to discover what were the deeds which provoked these reactions, we shall be disappointed. We find no deeds, but only impulses and emotions, set upon evil ends but held back from their achievement. What lie behind the sense of guilt of neurotics are always psychical realities and never factual ones. What characterizes neurotics is that they prefer psychical to factual reality and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do to realities.

May not the same have been true of primitive men? We are justified in believing that, as one of the phenomena of their narcissistic organization, they overvalued their psychical acts to an extraordinary degree.² Accordingly the mere hostile impulse against the father, the mere existence of a wishful phantasy of killing and devouring him, would have been enough to produce the moral reaction that created totemism and taboo. In this way we should avoid the necessity for deriving the origin of our cultural legacy, of which we justly feel so proud, from a hideous crime, revolting to all our feelings. No damage would thus be done to the causal chain stretching from the beginning to the present day, for psychical reality would be strong enough to bear the weight of these consequences. To this it may be objected that an alteration in the form of society from a patriarchal horde to a fraternal clan did actually take place. This is a powerful argument, but not a conclusive one. The alteration might have been effected in a less violent fashion and none the less have been capable of determining the appearance of the moral reaction. So long as the pressure exercised by the primal father could be felt, the hostile feelings towards him were justified, and remorse on their account would have to await a later day. And if it is further argued that everything derived from the ambivalent relation to the father - taboo and the sacrificial ordinance - is characterized by the deepest seriousness and the most complete reality, this further objection carries just as little weight. For the ceremonials and inhibitions of obsessional neurotics show these same characteristics and are nevertheless derived only from psychical reality - from intentions and not from their execution. We must avoid transplanting a contempt for what is merely thought or wished from our commonplace world, with its wealth of material values, into the world of primitive men and neurotics, of which the wealth lies only within themselves.

¹ Cf. the essay on taboo, the second in this work.

² Cf. the third essay in this work.9

Here we are faced by a decision which is indeed no easy one. First, however, it must be confessed that the distinction, which may seem fundamental to other people, does not in our judgement affect the heart of the matter. If wishes and impulses have the full value of facts for primitive men, it is our business to give their attitude our understanding attention instead of correcting it in accordance with our own standards. Let us, then, examine more closely the case of neurosis - comparison with which led us into our present uncertainty. It is not accurate to say that obsessional neurotics, weighed down under the burden of an excessive morality, are defending themselves only against psychical reality and are punishing themselves for impulses which were merely felt. Historical reality has a share in the matter as well. In their childhood they had these evil impulses pure and simple, and turned them into acts so far as the impotence of childhood allowed. Each of these excessively virtuous individuals passed though an evil period in his infancy - a phase of perversion which was the forerunner and precondition of the later period of excessive morality. The analogy between primitive men and neurotics will therefore be far more fully established if we suppose that in the former instance, too, psychical reality - as to the form taken by which we are in no doubt - coincided at the beginning with factual reality: that primitive men actually did what all the evidence shows that they intended to do.

Nor must we let ourselves be influenced too far in our judgement of primitive men by the analogy of neurotics. There are distinctions, too, which must be borne in mind. It is no doubt true that the sharp contrast that we make between thinking and doing is absent in both of them. But neurotics are above all inhibited in their actions: with them the thought is a complete substitute for the deed. Primitive men, on the other hand, are uninhibited: thought passes directly into action. With them it is rather the deed that is a substitute for the thought. And that is why, without laying claim to any finality of judgement, I think that in the case before us it may safely be assumed that ‘in the beginning was the Deed’.

THE CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO SCIENTIFIC INTEREST (1913)

Psycho-analysis is a medical procedure which aims at the cure of certain forms of nervous disease (the neuroses) by a psychological technique. In a small volume published in 1910.¹ I described the evolution of psycho-analysis from Josef Breuer’s cathartic procedure and its relation to the theories of Charcot and Pierre Janet.

We may give as instances of disorders that are accessible to psycho-analytic treatment hysterical convulsions and paralyses as well as the various symptoms of obsessional neurosis (obsessive ideas and actions). All of these are conditions which are occasionally subject to spontaneous recovery and are dependent on the personal influence of the physician in a haphazard fashion which has not yet been explained. Psycho-analysis has no therapeutic effect on the severer forms of mental disorder properly so called. But - for the first time in the history of medicine - psycho-analysis has made it possible to get some insight into the origin and mechanism alike of the neuroses and psychoses.

This medical significance of psycho-analysis would not, however, justify me in bringing it to the notice of a circle of savants concerned in the synthesis of the sciences. And such a plan must seem particularly premature so long as a large number of psychiatrists and neurologists are opposed to the new therapeutic method and reject both its postulates and its findings. If, nevertheless, I regard the experiment as a legitimate one, it is because psycho-analysis can also claim to be of interest to others than psychiatrists, since it touches upon various other spheres of knowledge and reveals unexpected relations between them and the pathology of mental life.

Accordingly in my present paper I shall leave the medical interest of psycho-analysis on one side and illustrate what I have just asserted of the young science by a series of examples.

¹ Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.3 There are a large number of phenomena related to facial and other expressive movements and to speech, as well as many processes of thought (both in normal and sick people), which have hitherto escaped the notice of psychology because they have been regarded as no more than the results of organic disorder or of some abnormal failure in function of the mental apparatus. What I have in mind are ‘parapraxes’ (slips of the tongue or pen, forgetfulness, etc.), haphazard actions and dreams in normal people, and convulsive attacks, deliria, visions, and obsessive ideas or acts in neurotic subjects. These phenomena (in so far as they were not entirely neglected, as was the case with the parapraxes) were relegated to pathology and an attempt was made to find ‘physiological’ explanations of them, though these were invariably unsatisfactory. Psycho-analysis, on the contrary, has been able to show that all these things can be explained by means of hypotheses of a purely psychological nature and can be fitted into the chain of psychical events already known to us. Thus on the one hand psycho-analysis has narrowed the region subject to the physiological point of view and on the other hand has brought a large section of pathology into the sphere of psychology. In this instance the normal phenomena provide the more convincing evidence. Psycho-analysis cannot be accused of having applied to normal cases findings arrived at from pathological material. The evidence in the latter and in the former was reached independently and shows that normal processes and what are described as pathological ones follow the same rules.

I shall now discuss in greater detail two of the normal phenomena with which we are here concerned (phenomena, that is, which can be observed in normal people) - namely, parapraxes and dreams.4 By parapraxes, then, I understand the occurrence in healthy and normal people of such events as forgetting words and names that are normally familiar to one, forgetting what one intends to do, making slips of the tongue and pen, misreading, mislaying things and being unable to find them, losing things, making mistakes against one’s better knowledge, and certain habitual gestures and movements. All of these have on the whole had little attention paid to them by psychology; they have been classed as instances of ‘absent-mindedness’ and have been attributed to fatigue, to distracted attention or to the contributory effects of certain slight illnesses. Analytic enquiry, however, shows with enough certainty to satisfy every requirement that these latter factors merely operate as facilitating factors and may be absent. Parapraxes are full-blown psychical phenomena and always have a meaning and an intention. They serve definite purposes which, owing to the prevailing psychological situation, cannot be expressed in any other way. These situations as a rule involve a psychical conflict which prevents the underlying intention from finding direct expression and diverts it along indirect paths. A person who is guilty of a parapraxis may notice it or overlook it; the suppressed intention underlying it may well be familiar to him; but he is usually unaware, without analysis, that that intention is responsible for the parapraxis in question. Analyses of parapraxes are often quite easily and quickly made. If a person’s attention is drawn to a blunder, the next thought that occurs to him provides its explanation.

Parapraxes are the most convenient material for anyone who wishes to convince himself of the trustworthiness of psycho-analytic explanations. In a small work, first published in book form in 1904, I presented a large number of examples of this kind, and since then I have been able to add to my collection many contributions from other observers.¹

The commonest motive for suppressing an intention, which has thereafter to be content with finding its expression in a parapraxis, turns out to be the avoidance of unpleasure. Thus, one obstinately forgets a proper name if one nourishes a secret grudge against its owner; one forgets to carry out an intention if one has in fact only formed it unwillingly - only, for instance, under the pressure of some convention; one loses an object, if one has quarrelled with someone of whom the object reminds one - with its original donor, for instance; one gets into the wrong train if one is making a journey unwillingly and would rather be somewhere else. This motive of avoiding unpleasure is seen most clearly where the forgetting of impressions and experiences is concerned - a fact which had already been observed by many writers before psycho-analysis existed. Memory shows its partiality by being ready to prevent the reproduction of impressions with a distressing affect, even though this purpose cannot be achieved in every case.

¹ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Cf. also works on the subject by Maeder, Brill, Jones, Rank, etc.5

In other instances the analysis of a parapraxis is less simple and requires less obvious explanations, on account of the intrusion of a process which we describe as ‘displacement’. One may, for instance, forget the name of someone against whom one has no objection; analysis will show, however, that the name has stirred up the memory of someone else, who has the same or a similar-sounding name and whom one has good reason to dislike. This connection has led to the innocent person’s name being forgotten; the intention to forget has, as it were, been displaced along some line of association.

Nor is the intention to avoid unpleasure the only one which can find its outlet in parapraxes. In many cases analysis reveals other purposes which have been suppressed in the particular situation and which can only make themselves felt, so to say, as background disturbances. Thus a slip of the tongue will often serve to betray opinions which the speaker wishes to conceal from his interlocutor. Slips of the tongue have been understood in this sense by various great writers and employed for this purpose in their works. The loss of precious objects often turns out to be an act of sacrifice intended to avert some expected evil; and many other superstitions too survive in educated people in the form of parapraxes. The mislaying of objects means as a rule getting rid of them; damage is done to one’s possessions (ostensibly by accident) so as to make it necessary to acquire something better - and so on.

Nevertheless, in spite of the apparent triviality of these phenomena, the psycho-analytic explanation of parapraxes involves some slight modifications in our view of the world. We find that even normal people are far more frequently moved by contradictory motives than we should have expected. The number of occurrences that can be described as ‘accidental’ is considerably diminished. It is almost a consolation to be able to exclude the loss of objects from among the chance events of life; our blunders often turn out to be a cover for our secret intentions. But - what is more important - many serious accidents that we should otherwise have ascribed entirely to chance reveal under analysis the participation of the subject’s own volition, though without its being clearly admitted by him. The distinction between a chance accident and deliberate self-destruction, which in practice is so often hard to draw, becomes even more dubious when looked at from an analytic point of view.

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