On the occasion of the opening of the Hebrew University 7 страница

Meanwhile we have been able to establish another point with certainty. The instinctual impulse which underwent repression in ‘Little Hans’ was a hostile one against his father. Proof of this was obtained in his analysis while the idea of the biting horse was being followed up. He had seen a horse fall down and he had also seen a playmate, with whom he was playing at horses, fall down and hurt himself. Analysis justified the inference that he had a wishful impulse that his father should fall down and hurt himself as his playmate and the horse had done. Moreover, his attitude towards someone’s departure on a certain occasion makes it probable that his wish that his father should be out of the way also found less hesitating expression. But a wish of this sort is tantamount to an intention of putting one’s father out of the way oneself - is tantamount, that is, to the murderous impulse of the Oedipus complex.

So far there seem to be no connecting links between ‘Little Hans’s’ repressed instinctual impulse and the substitute for it which we suspect is to be seen in his phobia of horses. Let us simplify his psychical situation by setting on one side the infantile factor and the ambivalence. Let us imagine that he is a young servant who is in love with the mistress of the house and has received some tokens of her favour. He hates his master, who is more powerful than he is, and he would like to have him out of the way. It would then be eminently natural for him to dread his master’s vengeance and to develop a fear of him - just as ‘Little Hans’ developed a phobia of horses. We cannot, therefore, describe the fear belonging to this phobia as a symptom. If ‘Little Hans’, being in love with his mother, had shown fear of his father, we should have no right to say that he had a neurosis or a phobia. His emotional reaction would have been entirely comprehensible. What made it a neurosis was one thing alone: the replacement of his father by a horse. It is this displacement, then, which has a claim to be called a symptom, and which, incidentally, constitutes the alternative mechanism which enables a conflict due to ambivalence to be resolved without the aid of a reaction-formation. Such a displacement is made possible or facilitated at ‘Little Hans’s’ early age because the inborn traces of totemic thought can still be easily revived. Children do not as yet recognize or, at any rate, lay such exaggerated stress upon the gulf that separates human beings from the animal world. In their eyes the grown man, the object of their fear and admiration, still belongs to the same category as the big animal who has so many enviable attributes but against whom they have been warned because he may become dangerous. As we see, the conflict due to ambivalence is not dealt with in relation to one and the same person: it is circumvented, as it were, by one of the pair of conflicting impulses being directed to another person as a substitutive object.

So far everything is clear. But the analysis of ‘Hans’s’ phobia has been a complete disappointment in one respect. The distortion which constituted the symptom-formation was not applied to the representative (the ideational content) of the instinctual impulse that was to be repressed; it was applied to a quite different representative and one which only corresponded to a reaction to the disagreeable instinct. It would be more in accordance with our expectations if ‘Little Hans’ had developed, instead of a fear of horses, as inclination to ill-treat them and to beat them or if he had expressed in plain terms a wish to see them fall down or be hurt or even die in convulsions (‘make a row with their feet’). Something of the sort did in fact emerge in his analysis, but it was not by any means in the forefront of his neurosis. And, curiously enough, if he really had produced a hostility of this sort not against his father but against horses as his main symptom, we should not have said that he was suffering from a neurosis. There must be something wrong either with our view of repression or with our definition of a symptom. One thing, of course, strikes us at once: if ‘Little Hans’ had really behaved like that to horses, it would mean that repression had in no way altered the character of his objectionable and aggressive instinctual impulse itself but only the object towards which it was directed.

Undoubtedly there are cases in which this is all that repression does. But more than this happened in the development of ‘Little Hans’s’ phobia - how much more can be guessed from a part of another analysis.

As we know, ‘Little Hans’ alleged that what he was afraid of was that a horse would bite him. Now some time later I was able to learn something about the origin of another animal phobia. In this instance the dreaded animal was a wolf; it, too, had the significance of a father-substitute. As a boy the patient in question - a Russian whom I did not analyse till he was in his twenties - had had a dream (whose meaning was revealed in analysis) and, immediately after it, had developed a fear of bring devoured by a wolf, like the seven little goats in the fairy tale. 1 In the case of ‘Little Hans’ the ascertained fact that his father used to play at horses with him doubtless determined his choice of a horse as his anxiety-animal. In the same way it appeared at least highly probable that the father of my Russian patient used, when playing with him, to pretend to be a wolf and jokingly threaten to gobble him up. Since then I have come across a third instance. The patient was a young American who came to me for analysis. He did not, it is true, develop an animal phobia, but it is precisely because of this omission that his case helps to throw light upon the other two. As a child he had been sexually excited by a fantastic children’s story which had been read aloud to him about an Arab chief who pursued a ‘ginger-bread man’ so as to eat him up. He identified himself with this edible person, and the Arab chief was easily recognizable as a father-substitute. This phantasy formed the earliest substratum of his auto-erotic phantasies.

¹ ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918b).5

The idea of being devoured by the father is typical age-old childhood material. It has familiar parallels in mythology (e.g. the myth of Kronos) and in the animal kingdom. Yet in spite of this confirmation the idea is so strange to us that we can hardly credit its existence in a child. Nor do we know whether it really means what it seems to say, and we cannot understand how it can have become the subject of a phobia. Analytic observation supplies the requisite information. It shows that the idea of being devoured by the father gives expression, in a form that has undergone regressive degradation, to a passive, tender impulse to be loved by him in a genital-erotic sense. Further investigation of the case history leaves no doubt of the correctness of this explanation. The genital impulse, it is true, betrays no sign of its tender purpose when it is expressed in the language belonging to the superseded transitional phase between the oral and sadistic organizations of the libido. Is it, moreover, a question merely of the replacement of the representative by a regressive form of expression or is it a question of a genuine regressive degradation of the genitally-directed impulse in the id? It is not at all easy to make certain. The case history of the Russian ‘Wolf Man’ gives very definite support to the second, more serious, view; for, from the time of the decisive dream onward, the boy became naughty, tormenting and sadistic, and soon afterwards developed a regular obsessional neurosis. At any rate, we can see that repression is not the only means which the ego can employ for the purpose of defence against an unwelcome instinctual impulse. If it succeeds in making an instinct regress, it will actually have done it more injury than it could have by repressing it. Sometimes, indeed, after forcing an instinct to regress in this way, it goes on to repress it.

The case of the ‘Wolf Man’ and the somewhat less complicated one of ‘Little Hans’ raise a number of further considerations. But we have already made two unexpected discoveries. There can be no doubt that the instinctual impulse which was repressed in both phobias was a hostile one against the father. One might say that that impulse had been repressed by the process of being transformed into its opposite. Instead of aggressiveness on the part of the subject towards his father, there appeared aggressiveness (in the shape of revenge) on the part of his father towards the subject. Since this aggressiveness is in any case rooted in the sadistic phase of the libido, only a certain amount of degradation is needed to reduce it to the oral stage. This stage, while only hinted at in ‘Little Hans’s’ fear of being bitten, was blatantly exhibited in the ‘Wolf Man’s’ terror of being devoured. But, besides this, the analysis has demonstrated, beyond a shadow of doubt, the presence of another instinctual impulse of an opposite nature which had succumbed to repression. This was a tender, passive impulse directed towards the father, which had already reached the genital (phallic) level of libidinal organization. As regards the final outcome of the process of repression, this impulse seems, indeed, to have been the more important of the two; it underwent a more far-reaching regression and had a decisive influence upon the content of the phobia. In following up a single instinctual repression we have thus had to recognize a convergence of two such processes. The two instinctual impulses that have been overtaken by repression - sadistic aggressiveness towards the father and a tender passive attitude to him - form a pair of opposites. Furthermore, a full appreciation of ‘Little Hans’s’ case shows that the formation of his phobia had had the effect of abolishing his affectionate object-cathexis of his mother as well, though the actual content of his phobia betrayed no sign of this. The process of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus complex - both his hostile and his tender impulses towards his father and his tender impulses towards his mother. In my Russian patient this state of affairs was much less obvious.

These are unwelcome complications, considering that we only set out to study simple cases of symptom-formation due to repression, and with that intention selected the earliest and to all appearances, most transparent neuroses of childhood. Instead of a single repression we have found a collection of them and have become involved with regression into the bargain. Perhaps we have added to the confusion by treating the two cases of animal phobia at our disposal - ‘ Little Hans’ and the ‘Wolf Man’ - as though they were cast in the same mould. As a matter of fact, certain differences between them stand out. It is only with regard to ‘Little Hans’ that we can say with certainty that what his phobia disposed of were the two main impulses of the Oedipus complex - his aggressiveness towards his father and his over-fondness for his mother. A tender feeling for his father was undoubtedly there too and played a part in repressing the opposite feeling; but we can prove neither that it was strong enough to draw repression upon itself nor that it disappeared afterwards. ‘Hans’ seems, in fact, to have been a normal boy with what is called a ‘positive’ Oedipus complex. It is possible that the factors which we do not find were actually at work in him, but we cannot demonstrate their existence. Even the most exhaustive analysis has gaps in its data and is insufficiently documented. In the case of the Russian the deficiency lies elsewhere. His attitude to female objects had been disturbed by an early seduction and his passive, feminine side was strongly developed. The analysis of his wolf-dream revealed very little intentional aggressiveness towards his father, but it brought forward unmistakable proof that what repression overtook was his passive tender attitude to his father. In his case, too, the other factors may have been operative as well; but they were not in evidence. How is it that, in spite of these differences in the two cases, almost amounting to an antithesis, the final outcome - a phobia - was approximately the same? The answer must be sought in another quarter. I think it will be found in the second fact which emerges from our brief comparative examination. It seems to me that in both cases we can detect what the motive force of the repression was and can substantiate our view of its nature from the line of development which the two children subsequently pursued. This motive force was the same in both of them. It was the fear of impending castration. ‘Little Hans’ gave up his aggressiveness towards his father from fear of being castrated. His fear that a horse would bite him can, without any forcing, be given the full sense of a fear that a horse would bite off his genitals, would castrate him. But it was from fear of being castrated, too, that the little Russian relinquished his wish to be loved by his father, for he thought that a relation of that sort presupposed a sacrifice of his genitals - of the organ which distinguished him from a female. As we see, both forms of the Oedipus complex, the normal, active form and the inverted one, came to grief through the castration complex. The Russian boy’s anxiety-idea of being devoured by a wolf contained, it is true, no suggestion of castration, for the oral regression it had undergone had removed it too far from the phallic stage. But the analysis of his dream rendered further proof superfluous. It was a triumph of repression that the form in which his phobia was expressed should no longer have contained any allusion to castration.

Here, then, is our unexpected finding: in both patients the motive force of the repression was fear of castration. The ideas contained in their anxiety - being bitten by a horse and being devoured by a wolf - were substitutes by distortion for the idea of being castrated by their father. This was the idea which had undergone repression. In the Russian boy the idea was an expression of a wish which was not able to subsist in the face of his masculine revolt; in ‘Little Hans’ it was the expression of a reaction in him which had turned his aggressiveness into its opposite. But the affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration. It was therefore a realistic fear, a fear of a danger which was actually impending or was judged to be a real one. It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.

It is no use denying the fact, though it is not pleasant to recall it, that I have on many occasions asserted that in repression the instinctual representative is distorted, displaced and so on, while the libido belonging to the instinctual impulse is transformed into anxiety. But now an examination of phobias, which should be best able to provide confirmatory evidence, fails to bear out my assertion; it seems, rather, to contradict it directly. The anxiety felt in animal phobias is the ego’s fear of castration; while the anxiety felt in agoraphobia (a subject that has been less thoroughly studied) seems to be its fear of sexual temptation - a fear which, after all, must be connected in its origins with the fear of castration. As far as can be seen at present, the majority of phobias go back to an anxiety of this kind felt by the ego in regard to the demands of the libido. It is always the ego’s attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed libido. If I had contented myself earlier with saying that after the occurrence of repression a certain amount of anxiety appeared in place of the manifestation of libido that was to be expected, I should have nothing to retract to-day. The description would be correct; and there does undoubtedly exist a correspondence of the kind asserted between the strength of the impulse that has to be repressed and the intensity of the resultant anxiety. But I must admit that I thought I was giving more than a mere description. I believed I had put my finger on a metapsychological process of direct transformation of libido into anxiety. I can now no longer maintain this view. And, indeed, I found it impossible at the time to explain how a transformation of that kind was carried out.

It may be asked how I arrived at this idea of transformation in the first instance. It was while I was studying the ‘actual neuroses’, at a time when analysis was still a very long way from distinguishing between processes in the ego and processes in the id. I found that outbreaks of anxiety and a general state of preparedness for anxiety were produced by certain sexual practices such as coitus interruptus, undischarged sexual excitation or enforced abstinence - that is, whenever sexual excitation was inhibited, arrested or deflected in its progress towards satisfaction. Since sexual excitation was an expression of libidinal instinctual impulses it did not seem too rash to assume that the libido was turned into anxiety through the agency of these disturbances. The observations which I made at the time still hold good. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the libido belonging to the id-processes is subjected to disturbance at the instigation of repression. It might still be true, therefore, that in repression anxiety is produced from the libidinal cathexis of the instinctual impulses. But how can we reconcile this conclusion with our other conclusion that the anxiety felt in phobias is an ego anxiety and arises in the ego, and that it does not proceed out of repression but, on the contrary, sets repression in motion? There seems to be a contradiction here which it is not at all a simple matter to solve. It will not be easy to reduce the two sources of anxiety to a single one. We might attempt to do so by supposing that, when coitus is disturbed or sexual excitation interrupted or abstinence enforced, the ego scents certain dangers to which it reacts with anxiety. But this takes us nowhere. On the other hand, our analysis of the phobias seems to admit of no correction. Non liquet.

V

We set out to study the formation of symptoms and the secondary struggle waged by the ego against symptoms. But in picking on the phobias for this purpose we have clearly made an unlucky choice. The anxiety which predominates in the picture of these disorders is now seen as a complication which obscures the situation. There are plenty of neuroses which exhibit no anxiety whatever. True conversion hysteria is one of these. Even in its most severe symptoms no admixture of anxiety is found. This fact alone ought to warn us against making too close a connection between anxiety and symptom-formation. The phobias are so closely akin to conversion hysteria in every other respect that I have felt justified in classing them alongside of it under the name of ‘anxiety hysteria’. But no one has as yet been able to say what it is that determines whether any given case shall take the form of a conversion hysteria or a phobia - has been able, that is to say, to establish what determines the generating of anxiety in hysteria.

The commonest symptoms of conversion hysteria - motor paralyses, contractures, involuntary actions or discharges, pains and hallucinations - are cathectic processes which are either permanently maintained or intermittent. But this puts fresh difficulties in the way. Not much is actually known about these symptoms. Analysis can show what the disturbed excitatory process is which the symptoms replace. It usually turns out that they themselves have a share in that process. It is as though the whole energy of the process had been concentrated in this one part of it. For instance, it will be found that the pains from which a patient suffers were present in the situation in which the repression occurred; or that his hallucination was, at that time, a perception; or that his motor paralysis is a defence against an action which should have been performed in that situation but was inhibited; or that his contracture is usually a displacement of an intended innervation of the muscles in some other part of his body; or that his convulsions are the expression of an outburst of affect which has been withdrawn from the normal control of the ego. The sensation of unpleasure which accompanies the appearance of the symptoms varies in a striking degree. In chronic symptoms which have been displaced on to motility, like paralyses and contractures, it is almost always entirely absent; the ego behaves towards the symptoms as though it had nothing to do with them. In intermittent symptoms and in those concerned with the sensory sphere, sensations of unpleasure are as a rule distinctly felt; and in symptoms of pain these may reach an extreme degree. The picture presented is so manifold that it is difficult to discover the factor which permits of all these variations and yet allows a uniform explanation of them. There is, moreover, little to be seen in conversion hysteria of the ego’s struggle against the symptom after it has been formed. It is only when sensitivity to pain in some part of the body constitutes the symptom that that symptom is in a position to play a dual role. The symptom of pain will appear no less regularly whenever the part of the body concerned is touched from outside than when the pathogenic situation which it represents is associatively activated from within; and the ego will take precautions to prevent the symptom from being aroused through external perceptions. Why the formation of symptoms in conversion hysteria should be such a peculiarly obscure thing I cannot tell; but the fact affords us a good reason for quitting such an unproductive field of enquiry without delay.

1 Let us turn to the obsessional neuroses in the hope of learning more about the formation of symptoms. The symptoms belonging to this neurosis fall, in general, into two groups, each having an opposite trend. They are either prohibitions, precautions and expiations - that is, negative in character - or they are, on the contrary, substitutive satisfactions which often appear in symbolic disguise. The negative, defensive group of symptoms is the older of the two; but as illness is prolonged, the satisfactions, which scoff at all defensive measures, gain the upper hand. The symptom-formation scores a triumph if it succeeds in combining the prohibition with satisfaction so that what was originally a defensive command or prohibition acquires the significance of a satisfaction as well; and in order to achieve this end it will often make use of the most ingenious associative paths. Such an achievement demonstrates the tendency of the ego to synthesize, which we have already observed. In extreme cases the patient manages to make most of his symptoms acquire, in addition to their original meaning, a directly contrary one. This is a tribute to the power of ambivalence, which, for some unknown reason, plays such a large part in obsessional neuroses. In the crudest instance the symptom is diphasic: an action which carries out a certain injunction is immediately succeeded by another action which stops or undoes the first one even if it does not go quite so far as to carry out its opposite.

Two impressions at once emerge from this brief survey of obsessional symptoms. The first is that a ceaseless struggle is being waged against the repressed, in which the repressing forces steadily lose ground; the second is that the ego and the super-ego have a specially large share in the formation of the symptoms.

Obsessional neurosis is unquestionably the most interesting and repaying subject of analytic research. But as a problem it has not yet been mastered. It must be confessed that, if we endeavour to penetrate more deeply into its nature, we still have to rely upon doubtful assumptions and unconfirmed suppositions. Obsessional neurosis originates, no doubt, in the same situation as hysteria, namely, the necessity of fending off the libidinal demands of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, every obsessional neurosis seems to have a substratum of hysterical symptoms that have been formed at a very early stage. But it is subsequently shaped along quite different lines owing to a constitutional factor. The genital organization of the libido turns out to be feeble and insufficiently resistant, so that when the ego begins its defensive efforts the first thing it succeeds in doing is to throw back the genital organization (of the phallic phase), in whole or in part, to the earlier sadistic-anal level. This fact of regression is decisive for all that follows.

Another possibility has to be considered. Perhaps regression is the result no t of a constitutional factor but of a time-factor. It may be that regression is rendered possible not because the genital organization of the libido is too feeble but because the opposition of the ego begins too early, while the sadistic phase is at its height. I am not prepared to express a definite opinion on this point, but I may say that analytic observation does not speak in favour of such an assumption. It shows rather that, by the time an obsessional neurosis is entered upon, the phallic stage has already been reached. Moreover, the onset of this neurosis belongs to a later time of life than that of hysteria - to the second period of childhood, after the latency period has set in. In a woman patient whose case I was able to study and who was overtaken by this disorder at a very late date, it became clear that the determining cause of her regression and of the emergence of her obsessional neurosis was a real occurrence through which her genital life, which had up till then been intact, lost all its value.¹

¹ See my paper on ‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’ (1913I).3

As regards the metapsychological explanation of regression, I am inclined to find it in a ‘defusion of instinct’, in a detachment of the erotic components which, with the onset of the genital stage, had joined the destructive cathexes belonging to the sadistic phase.

In enforcing regression, the ego scores its first success in its defensive struggle against the demands of the libido. (In this connection it is of advantage to distinguish the more general notion of ‘defence’ from ‘repression’. Repression is only one of the mechanisms which defence makes use of.) It is perhaps in obsessional cases more than in normal or hysterical ones that we can most clearly recognize that the motive force of defence is the castration complex and that what is being fended off are the trends of the Oedipus complex. We are at present dealing with the beginning of the latency period, a period which is characterized by the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, the creation or consolidation of the super-ego and the erection of ethical and aesthetic barriers in the ego. In obsessional neuroses these processes are carried further than is normal. In addition to the destruction of the Oedipus complex a regressive degradation of the libido takes place, the super-ego becomes exceptionally severe and unkind, and the ego, in obedience to the super-ego, produces strong reaction-formations in the shape of conscientiousness, pity and cleanliness. Implacable, though not always on that account successful, severity is shown in condemning the temptation to continue early infantile masturbation, which now attaches itself to regressive (sadistic-anal) ideas but which nevertheless represents the unsubjugated part of the phallic organization. There is an inherent contradiction about this state of affairs, in which, precisely in the interests of masculinity (that is to say, from fear of castration), every activity belonging to masculinity is stopped. But here, too, obsessional neurosis is only overdoing the normal method of getting rid of the Oedipus complex. We once more find here an illustration of the truth that every exaggeration contains the seed of its own undoing. For, under the guise of obsessional acts, the masturbation that has been suppressed approaches ever more closely to satisfaction.

The reaction-formations in the ego of the obsessional neurotic, which we recognize as exaggerations of normal character-formation, should be regarded, I think, as yet another mechanism of defence and placed alongside of regression and repression. They seem to be absent or very much weaker in hysteria. Looking back, we can now get an idea of what is peculiar to the defensive process in hysteria. It seems that in it the process is limited to repression alone. The ego turns away from the disagreeable instinctual impulse, leaves it to pursue its course in the unconscious, and takes no further part in its fortunes. This view cannot be absolutely correct, for we are acquainted with the case in which a hysterical symptom is at the same time a fulfilment of a penalty imposed by the super-ego; but it may describe a general characteristic of the behaviour of the ego in hysteria.

We can either simply accept it as a fact that in obsessional neurosis a super-ego of this severe kind emerges, or we can take the regression of the libido as the fundamental characteristic of the affection and attempt to relate the severity of the super-ego to it. And indeed the super-ego, originating as it does from the id, cannot dissociate itself from the regression and defusion of instinct which have taken place there. We cannot be surprised if it becomes harsher, unkinder and more tormenting than where development has been normal.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23