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When I analysed his ceremonial of breathing out whenever he saw cripples, beggars, and such people, I was able to show that that symptom could also be traced back to his father, whom he had felt sorry for when he visited him as a patient in the sanatorium. The analysis made it possible to follow this thread even further back. At a very early period, probably before his seduction (at the age of three and a quarter), there had been on the estate an old day-Iabourer whose business it was to carry the water into the house. He could not speak, ostensibly because his tongue had been cut out. (He was probably a deaf mute.) The little boy was very fond of him and pitied him deeply. When he died, he looked for him in the sky.² Here, then, was the first of the cripples for whom he had felt sympathy, and, as was shown by the context and the point at which the episode came out in the analysis, an undoubted father-surrogate.

¹ Among the most tormenting, though at the same time the most grotesque, symptoms of his later illness was his relation to every tailor from whom he ordered a suit of clothes: his deference and timidity in the presence of this high functionary, his attempts to get into his good books by giving him extravagant tips, and his despair over the results of the work however it might in fact have turned out.

² In this connection I may mention some dreams which he had, later than the anxiety-dream, but while he was still on the first estate. These dreams represented the scene of coition as an event taking place between heavenly bodies.

In the analysis this man was associated with the recollection of other servants whom the patient had liked and about whom he emphasized the fact that they had been either sickly or Jews (which implied circumcision). The footman, too, who had helped to clean him after his accident at four and a half, had been a Jew and a consumptive and had been an object of his compassion. All of these figures belong to the period before his visit to his father at the sanatorium, that is, before the formation of the symptom; the latter must therefore rather have been intended to ward off (by means of the breathing out) any identification with the object of the patient’s pity. Then suddenly, in connection with a dream, the analysis plunged back into the prehistoric period, and led him to assert that during the copulation in the primal scene he had observed the penis disappear, that he had felt compassion for his father on that account, and had rejoiced at the reappearance of what he thought had been lost. So here was a fresh emotional impulse, starting once again from the primal scene. Moreover, the narcissistic origin of compassion (which is confirmed by the word itself) is here quite unmistakably revealed.

VIII FRESH MATERIAL FROM THE PRIMAL PERIOD - SOLUTION

It happens in many analyses that as one approaches their end new recollections emerge which have hitherto been kept carefully concealed. Or it may be that on one occasion some unpretentious remark is thrown out in an indifferent tone of voice as though it were superfluous; that then, on another occasion, something further is added, which begins to make the physician prick his ears; and that at last he comes to recognize this despised fragment of a memory as the key to the weightiest secrets that the patient’s neurosis has veiled.

Early in the analysis my patient had told me of a memory of the period in which his naughtiness had been in the habit of suddenly turning into anxiety. He was chasing a beautiful big butterfly with yellow stripes and large wings which ended in pointed projections - a swallow-tail, in fact. Suddenly, when the butterfly had settled on a flower, he was seized with a dreadful fear of the creature, and ran away screaming.

This memory recurred occasionally during the analysis, and called for an explanation; but for a long time none was to be found. Nevertheless it was to be assumed as a matter of course that a detail like this had not kept its place in his recollection on its own account, but that it was a screen-memory, representing something of more importance with which it was in some way connected. One day he told me that in his language a butterfly was called ‘babushka’, ‘granny’. He added that in general butterflies had seemed to him like women and girls, and beetles and caterpillars like boys. So there could be little doubt that in this anxiety scene a recollection of some female person had been aroused. I will not hide the fact that at that time I put forward the possibility that the yellow stripes on the butterfly had reminded him of similar stripes on a piece of clothing worn by some woman. I only mention this as an illustration to show how inadequate the physician’s constructive efforts usually are for clearing up questions that arise, and how unjust it is to attribute the results of analysis to the physician imagination and suggestion.

Many months later, in quite another connection, the patient remarked that the opening and shutting of the butterfly’s wings while it was settled on the flower had given him an uncanny feeling. It had looked, so he said, like a woman opening her legs, and the legs then made the shape of a Roman V, which, as we know, was the hour at which, in his boyhood, and even up to the time of the treatment, he used to fall into a depressed state of mind.

This was an association which I could never have arrived at myself, and which gained importance from a consideration of the thoroughly infantile nature of the train of association which it revealed. The attention of children, as I have often noticed, is attracted far more readily by movements than by forms at rest; and they frequently base associations upon a similarity of movement which is overlooked or neglected by adults.

After this the little problem was once more left untouched for a long time; but I may mention the facile suspicion that the points or stick-like projections of the butterfly’s wings might have had the meaning of genital symbols.

One day there emerged, timidly and indistinctly, a kind of recollection that at a very early age, even before the time of the nurse, he must have had a nursery-maid who was very fond of him. Her name had been the same as his mother’s. He had no doubt returned her affection. It was, in fact, a first love that had faded into oblivion. But we agreed that something must have occurred at that time that became of importance later on.

Then on another occasion he emended this recollection. She could not have had the same name as his mother; that had been a mistake on his part, and it showed, of course, that in his memory she had become fused with his mother. Her real name, he went on, had occurred to him in a roundabout way. He had suddenly thought of a store-room, on the first estate, in which fruit was kept after it had been picked, and of a particular sort of pear with a most delicious taste - a big pear with yellow stripes on its skin. The word for ‘pear’ in his language was ‘grusha’, and that had also been the name of the nursery-maid.

It thus became clear that behind the screen memory of the hunted butterfly the memory of the nursery-maid lay concealed. But the yellow stripes were not on her dress, but on the pear whose name was the same as hers. What, however, was the origin of the anxiety which had arisen when the memory of her had been activated? The obvious answer to this might have been the crude hypothesis that it had been this girl whom, when he was a small child, he had first seen making the movements with her legs which he had fixed in his mind with the Roman V - movements which allow access to the genitals. We spared ourselves such theorizing as this and waited for more material.

Very soon after this there came the recollection of a scene, incomplete, but, so far as it was preserved, definite. Grusha was kneeling on the floor, and beside her a pail and a short broom made of a bundle of twigs; he was also there, and she was teasing him or scolding him.

The missing elements could easily be supplied from other directions. During the first months of the treatment he had told me of how he had suddenly fallen in love in a compulsive manner with a peasant girl from whom, in his eighteenth year, he had contracted the precipitating cause of his later illness. When he told me this he had displayed a most extraordinary unwillingness to give me the girl’s name. It was an entirely isolated instance of resistance, for apart from it he obeyed the fundamental rule of analysis unreservedly. He asserted, however, that the reason for his being so much ashamed of mentioning the name was that it was a purely peasant name and that no girl of gentle birth could possibly be called by it. When eventually the name was produced, it turned out to be Matrona, which has a motherly ring about it. The shame was evidently displaced. He was not ashamed of the fact that these love-affairs were invariably concerned with girls of the humblest origin; he was ashamed only of the name. If it should turn out that the affair with Matrona had something in common with the Grusha scene, then the shame would have to be transferred back to that early episode.

He had told me another time that when he heard the story of John Huss he had been greatly moved, and that his attention had been held by the bundles of firewood that were dragged up when he was burnt at the stake. Now his sympathy for Huss created a perfectly definite suspicion in my mind, for I have often come upon this sympathy in youthful patients and I have always been able to explain it in the same way. One such patient even went so far as to produce a dramatized version of Huss’s career; he began to write his play on the day on which he lost the object with whom he was secretly in love. Huss perished by fire, and (like others who possess the same qualification) he becomes the hero of people who have at one time suffered from enuresis. My patient himself connected the bundles of firewood used for the execution of Huss with the nursery-maid’s broom or bundle of twigs.

This material fitted together spontaneously and served to fill in the gaps in the patient’s memory of the scene with Grusha. When he saw the girl scrubbing the floor he had micturated in the room and she had rejoined, no doubt jokingly, with a threat of castration.¹

I do not know if my readers will have already guessed why it is that I have given such a detailed account of this episode from the patient’s early childhood.² It provides an important link between the primal scene and the later compulsive love which came to be of such decisive significance in his subsequent career, and it further shows us a condition upon which his falling in love depended and which elucidates that compulsion.

When he saw the girl on the floor engaged in scrubbing it, and kneeling down, with her buttocks projecting and her back horizontal, he was faced once again with the posture which his mother had assumed in the copulation scene. She became his mother to him; he was seized with sexual excitement owing to the activation of this picture;³ and, like his father (whose action he can only have regarded at the time as micturition), he behaved in a masculine way towards her. His micturition on the floor was in reality an attempt at a seduction, and the girl replied to it with a threat of castration, just as though she had understood what he meant.

¹ It is very remarkable that the reaction of shame should be so intimately connected with involuntary emptying of the bladder (whether in the day-time or at night) and not equally so, as one would have expected, with incontinence of the bowels. Experience leaves no room for doubt upon the point. The regular relation that is found to exist between incontinence of the bladder and fire also provides matter for reflection. It is possible that these reactions and relations represent precipitates from the history of human civilization derived from a lower stratum than anything that is preserved for us in the traces surviving in myths or folklore.

² It may be assigned to a time at which he was about two and a half: between his supposed observation of intercourse and his seduction.

³ This was before the dream.5

The compulsion which proceeded from the primal scene was transferred on to this scene with Grusha and was carried forward by it. But the condition upon which his falling in love depended underwent a change which showed the influence of the second scene: it was transferred from the woman’s posture to the occupation on which she was engaged while in that posture. This was clear, for instance, in the episode of Matrona. He was walking through the village which formed part of their (later) estate, when he saw a peasant girl kneeling by the pond and employed in washing clothes in it. He fell in love with the girl instantly and with irresistible violence, although he had not yet been able to get even a glimpse of her face. By her posture and occupation she had taken the place of Grusha for him. We can now see now it was that the shame which properly related to the content of the scene with Grusha could become attached to the name of Matrona.

Another attack of falling in love, dating from a few years earlier, shows even more clearly the compelling influence of the Grusha scene. A young peasant girl, who was a servant in the house, had long attracted him, but he succeeded in keeping himself from approaching her. One day, when he came upon her in a room by herself, he was overwhelmed by his love. He found her kneeling on the floor and engaged in scrubbing it, with a pail and a broom beside her - in fact, exactly as he had seen the girl in his childhood.

Even his final choice of object, which played such an important part in his life, is shown by its details (though they cannot be adduced here) to have been dependent upon the same condition and to have been an offshoot of the compulsion which, starting from the primal scene and going on to the scene with Grusha, had dominated his love-choice. I have remarked on an earlier page that I recognize in the patient an endeavour to debase his love-object. This is to be explained as a reaction against pressure from the sister who was so much his superior. But I promised at the same time (see p. 3515) to show that this self-assertive motive was not the only determinant, but that it concealed another and deeper one based on purely erotic motives. These were brought to light by the patient’s memory of the nursery-maid scrubbing the floor - physically debased too, by the by. All his later love-objects were surrogates for this one person, who through the accident of her attitude had herself become his first mother-surrogate. The patient’s first association in connection with the problem of his fear of the butterfly can now easily be explained retrospectively as a distant allusion to the primal scene (the hour of five). He confirmed the connection between the Grusha scene and the threat of castration by a particularly ingenious dream, which he himself succeeded in deciphering. ‘I had a dream,’ he said, ‘of a man tearing off the wings of an Espe.’ ‘Espe?’ I asked; ‘what do you mean by that?’ ‘You know; that insect with yellow stripes on its body, that stings.’ I could now put him right: ‘So what you mean is a Wespe [wasp].’ ‘Is it called a Wespe? I really thought it was called an Espe.’ (Like so many other people, he used his difficulties with a foreign language as a screen for symptomatic acts.) ‘But Espe, why, that’s myself: S. P.’ (which were his initials). The Espe was of course a mutilated Wespe. The dream said clearly that he was avenging himself on Grusha for her threat of castration.

The action of the two-and-a-half-year-old boy in the scene with Grusha is the earliest effect of the primal scene which has come to our knowledge. It represents him as copying his father, and shows us a tendency towards development in a direction which would later deserve the name of masculine. His seduction drove him into passivity - for which, in any case, the way was prepared by his behaviour when he was a witness of his parents’ intercourse.6

I must here turn for a moment to the history of the treatment. When once the Grusha scene had been assimilated - the first experience that he could really remember, and one which he had remembered without any conjectures or intervention on my part - the problem of the treatment had every appearance of having been solved. From that time forward there were no more resistances; all that remained to be done was to collect and to co-ordinate. The old trauma theory of the neuroses, which was after all built up upon impressions gained from psycho-analytic practice, had suddenly come to the front once more. Out of critical interest I made one more attempt to force upon the patient another view of his story, which might commend itself more to sober common sense. It was true that there could be no doubt about the scene with Grusha, but, I suggested, in itself that scene meant nothing; it had been emphasized ex post facto by a regression from the circumstances of his object choice, which, as a result of his intention to debase, had been diverted from his sister on to servant girls. On the other hand, his observation of intercourse, I argued, was a phantasy of his later years; its historical nucleus may perhaps have been an observation or an experience by the patient of the administration of an innocent enema. Some of my readers will possibly be inclined to think that with such hypotheses as these I was for the first time beginning to approach an understanding of the case; but the patient looked at me uncomprehendingly and a little contemptuously when I put this view before him, and he never reacted to it again. I have already stated my own arguments against any such rationalization at their proper point in the discussion.

[Thus ¹ the Grusha scene, by explaining the conditions governing the patient’s object-choice - conditions which were of decisive importance in his life - prevents our over-estimating the significance of his intention to debase women. But it does more than this. It affords me a justification for having refused on an earlier page (see p. 3545) to adopt unhesitatingly, as the only tenable explanation, the view that the primal scene was derived from an observation made upon animals shortly before the dream. The Grusha scene emerged in the patient’s memory spontaneously and through no effort of mine. His fear of the yellow-striped butterfly, which went back to that scene, proved that the scene had had a significant content, or that he had been able to attach this significance to its content subsequently. By means of the accompanying associations and the inferences that followed from them, it was possible with certainty to supply this significant element which was lacking in the patient’s memory. It then appeared that his fear of the butterfly was in every respect analogous to his fear of the wolf; in both cases it was a fear of castration, which was, to begin with, referred to the person who had first uttered the threat of castration, but was then transposed on to another person to whom it was bound to become attached in accordance with phylogenetic precedent. The scene with Grusha had occurred when the patient was two and a half, but the anxiety-episode with the yellow butterfly was certainly subsequent to the anxiety-dream. It was easy to understand how the patient’s later comprehension of the possibility of castration had retrospectively brought out the anxiety in the scene with Grusha. But that scene in itself contained nothing objectionable or improbable; on the contrary, it consisted entirely of commonplace details which gave no grounds for scepticism. There was nothing in it which could lead one to attribute its origin to the child’s imagination; such a supposition, indeed, seemed scarcely possible.

¹ [Freud’s square brackets.]7

The question now arises whether we are justified in regarding the fact that the boy micturated, while he stood looking at the girl on her knees scrubbing the floor, as a proof of sexual excitement on his part. If so, the excitement would be evidence of the influence of an earlier impression, which might equally have been the actual occurrence of the primal scene or an observation made upon animals before the age of two and a half. Or are we to conclude that the situation as regards Grusha was entirely innocent, that the child’s emptying his bladder was purely accidental, and that it was not until later that the whole scene became sexualized in his memory, after he had come to recognize the importance of similar situations?

On these issues I can venture upon no decision. I must confess, however, that I regard it as greatly to the credit of psycho-analysis that it should even have reached the stage of raising such questions as these. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that the scene with Grusha, the part it played in the analysis, and the effects that followed from it in the patient’s life can be most naturally and completely explained if we consider that the primal scene, which may in other cases be a phantasy, was a reality in the present one. After all, there is nothing impossible about it; and the hypothesis of its reality is entirely compatible with the inciting action of the observations upon animals which are indicated by the sheep-dogs in the dream-picture.

I will now turn from this unsatisfactory conclusion to a consideration of the problem which I have attempted in my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient’s case was a phantasy or a real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account, I must admit that the answer to this question is not in fact a matter of very great importance. These scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic heritage, but they may just as easily be acquired by personal experience. With my patient, his seduction by his elder sister was an indisputable reality; why should not the same have been true of his observation of his parents’ intercourse?

All that we find in the prehistory of neuroses is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors. I fully agree with Jung ¹ in recognizing the existence of this phylogenetic heritage; but I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted. I cannot see any reason for obstinately disputing the importance of infantile prehistory while at the same time freely acknowledging the importance of ancestral prehistory. Nor can I overlook the fact that phylogenetic motives and productions themselves stand in need of elucidation, and that in quite a number of instances this is afforded by factors in the childhood of the individual. And, finally, I cannot feel surprised that what was originally produced by certain circumstances in prehistoric times and was then transmitted in the shape of a predisposition to its re-acquirement should, since the same circumstances persist, emerge once more as a concrete event in the experience of the individual.]

¹ Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse, 1917. This was published too late for it to have influenced my Introductory Lectures.8 Room must also be found in the interval between the primal scene and the seduction (from the age of one and a half to the age of three and a quarter) for the dumb water-carrier. He served the patient as a father-surrogate just as Grusha served him as a mother-surrogate. I do not think there is any justification for regarding this as an example of the intention to debase, even though it is true that both parents have come to be represented by servants. A child pays no regard to social distinctions, which have little meaning for him as yet; and he classes people of inferior rank with his parents if such people love him as his parents do. Nor is the intention to debase any more responsible for the substitution of animals for a child’s parents, for children are very far indeed from taking a disparaging view of animals. Uncles and aunts are used as parent-surrogates without any regard to the question of debasing, and this was in fact done by our present patient, as many of his recollections showed.

There also belongs in this period a phase, which was obscurely remembered, in which he would not eat anything except sweet things, until alarm was felt on the score of his health. He was told about one of his uncles who had refused to eat in the same way and had wasted away to death while he was still young. He was also informed that when he himself was three months old he had been so seriously ill (with pneumonia?) that his winding-sheet had been got ready for him. In this way they succeeded in alarming him, so that he began eating again; and in the later years of his childhood he used actually to overdo this duty, as though to guard himself against the threat of death The fear of death, which was evoked at that time for his own protection, made its reappearance later when his mother warned him of the danger of dysentery. Later still, it brought on an attack of his obsessional neurosis (see p. 3551). We shall try below to go into its origins and meanings.

I am inclined to the opinion that this disturbance of appetite should be regarded as the very first of the patient’s neurotic illnesses. If so, the disturbance of appetite, the wolf phobia, and the obsessional piety would constitute the complete series of infantile disorders which laid down the predisposition for his neurotic break-down after he had passed the age of puberty. It will be objected that few children escape such disorders as a temporary loss of appetite or an animal phobia. But this argument is exactly what I should wish for. I am ready to assert that every neurosis in an adult is built upon a neurosis which has occurred in his childhood but has not invariably been severe enough to strike the eye and be recognized as such. This objection only serves to emphasize the theoretical importance of the part which infantile neuroses must play in our view of those later disorders which we treat as neuroses and endeavour to attribute entirely to the effects of adult life. If our present patient had not suffered from obsessional piety in addition to his disturbance of appetite and his animal phobia, his story would not have been noticeably different from that of other children, and we should have been the poorer by the loss of precious material which may guard us against certain plausible errors.

The analysis would be unsatisfactory if it failed to explain the phrase used by the patient for summing up the troubles of which he complained. The world, he said, was hidden from him by a veil; and our psycho-analytic training forbids our assuming that these words can have been without significance or have been chosen at haphazard. The veil was torn, strange to say, in one situation only; and that was at the moment when, as a result of an enema, he passed a motion through his anus. He then felt well again, and for a very short while he saw the world clearly. The interpretation of this ‘veil’ progressed with as much difficulty as we met with in clearing up his fear of the butterfly. Nor did he keep to the veil. It became still more elusive, as a feeling of twilight, ‘ténèbres’, and of other impalpable things,

It was not until just before taking leave of the treatment that he remembered having been told that he was born with a caul. He had for that reason always looked on himself as a special child of fortune whom no ill could befall. He did not lose that conviction until he was forced to realize that his gonorrhoeal infection constituted a serious injury to his body. The blow to his narcissism was too much for him and he went to pieces. It may be said that in so doing he was repeating a mechanism that he had already brought into play once before. For his wolf phobia had broken out when he found himself faced by the fact that such a thing as castration was possible; and he clearly classed his gonorrhoea as castration.

Thus the caul was the veil which hid him from the world and hid the world from him. The complaint that he made was in reality a fulfilled wishful phantasy: it exhibited him as back once more in the womb, and was, in fact, a wishful phantasy of flight from the world. It can be translated as follows: ‘Life makes me so unhappy! I must get back into the womb!’

But what can have been the meaning of the fact that this veil, which was now symbolic but had once been real, was torn at the moment at which he evacuated his bowels after an enema, and that under this condition his illness left him? The context enables us to reply. If this birth-veil was torn, then he saw the world and was re-born. The stool was the child, as which he was born a second time, to a happier life. Here, then, we have the phantasy of re-birth, to which Jung has recently drawn attention and to which he has assigned such a dominating position in the imaginative life of neurotics.

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