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Then the patient's eyes were opened. He began to realize that the schizoid blockage of all emotional relationships, his waking wish and sleeping dream of strict voluntary confinement, his application for admission to our clinic recommended by his doctor, and finally the unavoidable certification by the authorities, could scarcely be an unrelated series of events. As time went on he came to see this

J 96 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

whole range of variations on the imprisonment theme as phenomena corresponding to the extreme restriction of his world-openness and therefore as the only phenomena which in fact could appear and

^vcome forth in his life. From then on it did not take long for him to realize that in the furious rebellion against his enforced detain­ment, which had come out in the analysis, he was actually avoiding

(the real work of salvation and self-liberation by concentrating his

«whole strength upon fighting only the most peripheral and ex­ternal restriction of his existence, and thus evading his true and full duty to his destiny as a human being. Once that bitter pill was swallowed, he gladly accepted our consolation that there could be no question about his eventual discharge from the asylum, and that it would come about of itself as a result of the liberation of his own, genuine self, just as his former emotional petrifaction had inevitably led to his confinement behind actual stone walls.

The realization of the total closure of his nature and his world gave rise to_ja~further question. What was he hiding behind his former facade of utter indifference, of rationalistic speculationFand empty phrases,, andjvhy did h&have"to hide it? We admitted that a considerable quantity of hatred and aggression had found vent in the analysis, but after all, who would not be seething with rage and resentment if he had lived the wretched Hfe of a lonely prisoner since early youth? For that matter, we added, his recent dream about his dead confessor seemed to offer some help here; it hinted

V that behind the hard, cold, psychopathic crust of his character and the hatred it engendered, utterly different ways of living stood waiting to be revealed which might even be the original, soft, warm, love-seeking, and child-like core of his being. In that dream he had gone to see his former confessor but had found him dead. In the dream he felt deep sorrow. Long after the patient's confidence in his parents had been totally destroyed by their ruthless inter­vention in his first love relationship, this confessor had been the only human being to whom he had dared bring his deepest feelings, the only one he had come to when most in distress. The fact that in the dream the confessor was removed from him by death reveals to what depth the breach in his communication with his fellow men had struck and the extreme isolation to which he had been brought. At the same time the confessor was a signpost to the patient's genuine love of a boy toward a fatherly man, which at one time he had been able to bring to the priest without reserve.

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The Case History of a Sadistic Pervert 197

Tus if those warm, child-like, love-seeking relationships had not: en part of the patient's existence in posse, even in the form of a Kixid of rigor mortis, he could not possibly have dreamed of the beloved dead confessor. For the very appearance of such a person ' wbo belongs to a world of fatherly love presupposes the correspond­ing openness of the dreamer's existence, i.e., presupposes his pos­sibility to love as a son, however deeply this potentiality of loving mav still be buried in his waking and dreaming life.

In fact, after weeks of relentless questioning as to what he was, ^ding behind the coldness of his fagade and the noise of his *mculence, thfi-|^^nt~sbwb/ y^nj^edjc^confess that he did notf c_ ^stjiis own waeaJeelingSj Indeed he had at aU time§~warcted off with all his might emotional relationships of any kind because he

;arded them as silly and senseless sentimentalities and irrational: -s. From childhood on he had striven "to replace all unpredictable;eelings by clear, rational ideas, which were always at hand and which guaranteed continuity of thought." Soon the shame he felt for his feelings turned out to be a very essential motive for warding them off, yet in its turn that very shame was based on the (to him)

Ameful infantilism of the impulses he had till then warded off. With their gradual appearance in the analysis, a completely new sta^e began in our therapeutic work, which was eventually to re­veal the root of his sadism. The beginning of a new phase in an analysis never, of course, appears as a sharp line of demarcation. Old patterns of behavior persist, now stronger, now weaker, but thev no longer govern the entire bearing of a patient as they did at the beginning of the analysis.

The_ next_thing in the analysis of F. F. was.his confession of his 7 - -rors as a child. He recalled how panic-stricken he had been/

ery time he had to go through the woods at night. Then he was.irterly ashamed when he remembered how softhearted he had. reallyjbeen as a child. This sadist and near murderer was incapable) of looking on while other boys killed small animals. Tears would always come into his eyes, just as they did when he so much as heard or read touching stories. His family often teased him about - He was also ashamed because he was sorry for a man who had just his life in the mountains and because he once took a little lost Sir! affectionately under his wing. It still happens today that intense feeling of pity of this kind are interpreted as repressions of still deeper aggressions. If we interpreted them this way, we should

198 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Nettrote*

have been guilty of a quite unjustifiable underestimation of them. We should have willfully blinded ourselves to their overt content replacing the actual phenomena by mere hypotheses not susceptible of proof. Therefore, each time he confessed to his shame of these gentler feelings, we confined ourselves to asking him whether there was any need actually to feel so ashamed of them. Through this relentless probing of his stereotyped shame reactions to everythi:: that had to do with feeling, the patient came gradually to seejhai this was not, as he had assumed without question, the. jQbvious, the only possible and right attitude to his own self. He then realized that he had unwittingly adopted this attitude from his stern, un~ fatherly, and cold father, who set no store by feelings but was prone to outbursts of brutal anger. On the other hand he had never been able to find an outlet for his affections for his mother, who was more warmhearted by nature but who had succumbed completefv to the father's mentality. At this point the patient complained once more of his mother's betrayal of his first love secret to his father. It took weeks for him to realize, under the cons istently kindly, and reassuring guidance of the analyst, that the dislike of and contempt for feeling which dominated his parents' world was n ot unive rsaJb" valid.

To allow him to turn this realization into experience, the analyst had to be very careful not to raise the slightest objection to his existing love relationship to the woman who was sixteen years older than he. On the contrary, he had to impress on the patient that he took the matter very seriously; otherwise he would have been promptly relegated to the forbidding and heartless parent-world, while the patient's own worjd would have completely closed again. For the patient was only too prone to regard all persons in authority, even the analyst, in the humanly atrophied form in which he had experienced his father. In order to undermine this narrowed-in perception we had to ask him again and againjwhy we should wish to separate him from his mistress as his parents did. Meanwhile, having heard of his being committed to the asylum. the mistress had approached him again and would not admit that there had been any breach between them. We assured him that we respected his judgment and could therefore leave the decision to I (him. Only then did he reveal the really paranoid ideas he had held «back until then. In all seriousness the patient dreaded that the.analyst was conniving with his father behind his back to have him

The Case History of a Sadistic Pervert 299

put away for years in order to stop his love affair for good and all. Ь He imagined that the analyst would also have him expelled fromj the country by the authorities.

The totally different attitude of the analyst—steady, calm, re­assuring, and adapted to the patient's essential nature—finally suc­ceeded in breaking the spell of the narrow and frozen father-world so that the patient's deep and positive emotional capacities ven-, tured to show themselves. At this time all the long-forgotten memories of his childhood came back to him spontaneously—rather, th^jLgyerwhelmed him. This phenomenon of "recalling" can throw^ a peculiar light on the so-called human memory. Psychologists and psychiatrists usually think of the memory as being a special function of the psyche, capable of picking up memory traces which had been left somewhere in the brain by earlier impressions and of bringing them back into consciousness again. However, nothing of the kind has ever been observable. When our patient suddenly re? called so many events which had happened in his childhood, they simply became present again in his Daseiris light in the form of memories because the patient had allowed himself to get attuned once more to the same soft mood which had opened him up to their occurrence at that earlier stage of his life. At any rate, our patient, remembered now, for instance, trying to protect his helplessly weeping mother from his father's harshness, but along with it came the memory of the punishment to be expected from the bullying rage of his father. Again we were careful not to take the father's part in all these accusations, although we realized that his picture of his father might be completely distorted. What was real for the patient in our work was the experience derived from the whole relationship between the actual father and this, particularly sensitive and affectionate child. As regards the mother, the patient remem­bered having said often, when he was six or seven, that he instead of his father should be married to her, always with the idea that he could make her much happier than his father could. He had often suffered agonies of fear that she would not come back when she had gone out.

As these events of his childhood presented themselves to him again he came straight and without transition to the realization of the continued child-mother quality of his relationship to his present mistress, a woman so much older and of a truly motherly nature. With this woman, he was often overwhelmed by the dread of her

200 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

returning to her husband and leaving him for good. He told us that she often complained of his lack of respect toward her; he would importune her and run after her. On the other hand, girls of his own age seemed to him immature and childish. He could not get on with them at all as his existence was not yet open to an adult partnership between man and woman, but only for a son-mother relation.

The dreams which now began brought out very clearly the child­like pattern of his actual relationship to his motherly friend. He dreamed once that he was falling into an abyss and that she saved him at the last moment by catching hold of his collar. In another dream he was having a dispute with an innkeeper because he could not pay his bill and she helped him out of her own purse. Again, he was nearly run over by a truck; she came and scolded him and taught him how to behave on the road. In yet another dream, after a boat trip on the lake, he could not find the boat's moorings. He stood helpless, fearing that the waves would carry the boat away, but his friend came and showed him how to bring the boat to land. In a last dream, he was lying in bed in one of the busiest squares in the town. She came, shielded him from the jeers of the people, and took him home. In the end the patient saw that in his waking life he was treating his friend's husband with disgraceful rudeness, like some hated father he wished in hell.

The last point for the patient to realize, and the one he was most unwilling to admit, was that his rivalry with the husband was an essential factor in this whole love relationship. Even here his dreams spoke with the utmost candor. Thus in one dream he met the husband, who threatened him, but the patient took not the slightest notice of him, to his own extreme satisfaction. Finally he confessed, both to himself and to us, that the very fact that his friend had never been able to make a final breach with her husband, but had always left open the possibility of a reconciliation, had been the permanent fascination of the whole affair. If his friend had run after him, he went on, to use his own words, "it would all have become uninteresting, banal, and commonplace."

In this way we were able to bring the patient to grasp his so-called Oedipus complex by actual experience, simply by never so much as mentioning the word. Indeed, we carefully avoided be­littling his relations with his mother-mistress by labeling them as infantile. Only too often this word "infantile"—so commonly used

The Case History of a Sadistic Pervert 201

by psychoanalysts—gives the patient the impression that the be­havior so designated is something rather shameful which one should long ago have outgrown. Actually though, in the case of such patients it is a hitherto unexperienced way of relating to the world, which they should be allowed to accept and to venture into for the first time in their lives in their relation with the analyst. They must go through this experience, because this child-like behavior constitutes a normal phase of every man's development, which can­not possibly be omitted without all subsequent growth being jeopardized. Therefore, if such a patient eventually dares in analysis to allow himself, for once, to be cared for like a child, we have good reason to encourage him and praise his courage, rather than to urge him to overcome this "infantile" attitude as soon as possible. Consequently, in the case of our patient, we led him to see that in the relevant dreams and ideas his obvious need of love and pro­tection by an older, mature woman was entirely justified and legitimate. It was only by proceeding in this way that we were able to avoid blocking the way to his own experience of his still child­like emotional condition, which he had to take upon himself if it was ever to become the source of a new and real maturity. We had, indeed, been put on the alert by learning from the patient that a doctor had once told him point blank that he was suffering from an Oedipus complex. He had been deeply hurt by this reduction of his love to a mere technical term, and had clung to his friend all the more defiantly. It was due to our caution in this respect that in the end he admitted, of his own free will, that he would never have been so much in love with the woman if his parents had not ob­jected so strongly and if he had not been stimulated by the rivalry with her husband.

But the tactless doctor's explanation of the patient's love for his much older mistress and of his hatred of her husband as "actually" meaning, respectively, his own concrete mother and father was a mistake not merely of timing but of content. For his former ex­periences with his parents had so hampered the unfolding of his existence that, emotionally, he had been open only to a distorted child-parent relationship. His mistress fitted admirably into this existential world-openness as the actual motherly woman she was, without any other "meaning" or "symbolizing." In the facts them­selves, at any rate, there is not the slightest hint to be found to justify such a derivative interpretation. Even a dream of an "un-

202 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

veiled" sexual intercourse with his own mother, which he might well have dreamed at this time of his life, would not in the least alter the truth of this statement. Such a dream would merely have been an event in his dreaming state which could be paralleled in waking life by his love for his mistress, both occurrences being nothing other than that which they showed themselves to be, both equally authentic and corresponding equally well with the patient's reduced world-openness.

The most important question still remains, however.—the appear-'*ance~oT sadistically perverted behavior 4n this life history. The ""clearest and promptest answer to that question is given by the re­markable change in the character of the patient's dreams in the course of his last twenty years. As far back as he could remember, from the age of six to that of pre-puberty, nearly all his dreams were extremely terrifying. He dreamed mostly of fires which burned down his parents' home, wreaked havoc through the whole village, or attacked great forests, without rain ever falling or the fire brigade ever appearing in time. These fire dreams appeared at a time when, in his waking life, he was still capable of intensely warm relations with his environment, when he suffered agonies of pity at the sight of another boy torturing an animal and still greater agonies when he met the little girl lost in the road. From his twelfth or thirteenth year on, these scenes were replaced by one in which the patient was buried under an avalanche or a landslide. In these dreams he felt little or nothing and coolly allowed everything to happen to him. Finally, in a dream he had only a few days before the criminal attack on the girl which had led him to apply for admission to the mental hospital, he was wandering, about on an arid steppe. There was not a human being, not a refuge in sight. Then he caught sight of a burning farmhouse far in the distance; suddenly he was in front of the burning house, where he met his mistress and told her that he was going to kill her.

\Jthe fires in the dreams of the early part of the patient's life had been called into his dreaming world by his hot, impetuous, and as yet uncontrolled temperament. The fire of his sensual attachment to most of the people of his world was terrifyingly wild and un­tamed, burning up all the social institutions and structures of his home and village. In his child-like instability and weakness he stood in need of adequate help from his parents, from the grownups, the "fire brigade," or the soothing rain from heaven to bring order to

The Case History of a Sadistic Pervert 203

his existence. But the father, himself deeply inhibited, failed him. That is why the patient, from his twelfth or thirteenth year on, dreamed only of avalanches and landslides, which buried him. There is no further trace of his emotional participation in what was going on around him. In and around him was merely an arid void, and it was an arid steppe which surrounded him in the dream that im­mediately preceded the most serious and dangerous of his sadistic acts. His existence and (because man's existence is nothing else but his luminating world-openness) his whole world had closed down and dried up. Now, through the arid, desert crust of this land, the old, unruly flame of his vitality shot up again. They burn down the peaceful farmhouse, and at that precise moment there erupts in ths dreamer the sadistic decision to kill his mistress. Thus the impulse to acts of sadism here, too, proved to be an outbreak of fire, the fire of his attachment to a motherly woman, which, al­though warded off, had been burning behind the rigid crust of his outwardly detached pose. The harder and thicker the crusts appear in the light of such a narrowed-in existence, the more violence is needed to break through them with sadistic practices. It was exactly the same blow-up of a character armor as happened in the case of Erich Klotz, described elsewhere.³ The spontaneous remarks made by these two sadists about their sexual relations agree almost word for word. Thus F. F., in his sadistic practices with his partner, also felt as if "a wall between us had blown up," and as if it was only by his brutal biting, beating, and strangling in the sexual act that "the two bodies could melt in a single fire of love and a feeling arise of union unknown till then." This patient also felt the impulse to commit a sexual murder "because only then would the' woman belong to him and him alone; then he would be one with her." Thus the sadists remind us more than any other patients of the profound sentence which Freud wrote about the "most horrible perversions": "The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these."⁴

We learned in the course of the analysis that, in addition to his sadistic sexual impulses, the patient had at times been overcome by an irresistible urge to travel far away.'He would get up in the middle of the night, take a train leaving for some distant destination,

³ M. Boss, op. cit., p. 96 ff.

⁴ S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in SE, Vol. VII, p. 161.

204 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

and not return home until the following day. During the journey he always felt relief and relaxation. The changing scenery in the moonlight and dawn gave him a feeling of inward freedom. He felt the pressure in his head and the tension in his chest yielding, and his insomnia left him. The stars drew him as a "magically fascinat­ing picture," a "distant realm of joy, of freely flowing life outside the rigid walls of narrow-mindedness and philistinism." Even when not under the influence of such moods, the patient would indulge in daydreams, planning to go to Africa, "to the tropical south, where [he] could start out on a great adventure and build up an entirely new life." Thus these imagined excursions in space and his porio­mania were merely another and less brutal form of bursting through the intolerably cramped state of his existence to discover all the wealth of living there was in him and in his world.

Recapitulation of the Psychotherapeutic Process

Just as the dreams occurring before the analysis showed clearly and logically the development of the patient's sadistic behavior, a small series of dreams during the analysis showed his way to re­covery. In a quite early stage of treatment he had dreamed as follows:

I am in a wood with my father and my elder and younger brothers. I am still a boy. My mother and sisters are not there. The path leads deep into the wood where dense bushes and trees have grown. Suddenly I realize that all the trees look as if they were made of cement or are actually encased in a hard, impene­trable crust of cement from root to top. It is, in fact, rigid, lifeless, and impenetrable—as if life itself were frozen behind a mask. We four walk on to a house which stands at the top of a high stairway. There my father and brothers have to stop; I am to go in alone. In the dream I have been told that a young and loving woman will receive and welcome me there and that a child will call me father. But before I can really enter the house, everything vanishes and I am suddenly quite alone on the edge of the town.

Only a few details of the extremely rich content of this dream need be dealt with here. Even as a boy the patient lacked the female members of the family, who might have let him share in their gentler, softer, more affective way of life. In his father and brothers he has only the male, reserved, and cold aspect of relating

The Case History of a Sadistic Pervert 205

to the world around him. Rich vegetable life, however, is met in the middle of the wood, yet this natural growth at once freezes behind a mask of cement. The possibility of meeting with the warm­hearted, feminine way of being in the later part of the dream can appear only in the form of a promise which is not fulfilled. Finally, this way of being human vanishes entirely and he is driven to the periphery of the human community, "on the edge of the town."

About halfway through the analysis, however, one of his dreams showed a somewhat different state of affairs. The patient is sailing Jbwn a river in a boat. At one point the river narrows a little and a bridge connects the two banks. He decides to land here and climbs onto the bridge which connects the two parts of the town on the right and left banks. There he meets a watchman, a kind of policeman, who asks him where he is going. The dreamer replies that he wants to have a look at the town, whereupon the policeman warns him that both sides are extremely dangerous. There is plague on the left bank, cholera on the right. After a little reflection, how­ever, the patient disregards the warning and ventures first into one part of the town, then into the other. He is surprised to find, in both parts, a calm picture of perfect health. The people are going about their business in perfectly normal fashion and they assure him that there is no sickness. Therefore, the dreamer thinks, the watchman must have been mad.

The dreamer already has the wish and the desire to put an end to his lonely voyage. He enters the living community of the town, but he meets a watchman who assures him that it would be a most dangerous venture, leading to sickness and death. This policeman tells us of a world of precaution, of barriers, dangers, and sickness against which one must be warned. Such a world is disclosed only in the light of a Dasein which is attuned to an attitude of mistrust against all human community. The early acquired attunement to a fundamental distrust, however, is no longer the only possible way of world-openness. The patient is already capable of an attitude of some venturing and some trusting. He dares to disregard the police­man's warning and to enter the human communities of the cities. He discovers that this friendly and trustful mixing with people is the normal and healthy way of existing, whereas the distrusting and all too precautious attitude toward people amounts to madness.

Not long before the end of the analysis the patient had a third dream. He is out in the country, in a pretty landscape with a lake

206 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Doctrine of Neuroses

in the middle. The scene makes him think of a novel by Hermann Hesse, in which the lake is the place of contemplation and an Indian fakir meditates on the sunny lake shore by the edge of the wood. The patient, with five friends, is sailing on the lake in a boat There is also an older man in the boat, a skipper. The skipper proposes a contest to the young men. At a sign from him all six are to dive from the boat and pick water lilies at the bottom of the lake; the one who brings up the most will get first prize. The dreamer is a little nervous, afraid of losing the race. In telling the drgamfEhe patient's childhood came back to him at once. At home there were six children, and the others had always teased him for being, the weakest. Later the dream takes an unexpectedly favorable turn. All six friends reach the surface at the same moment. Each has exactly the same number of water lilies, twelve, in his hand. None has outstripped the others. All are glad and feel united in mutual respect.

To stress only the most essential point: the beginning of the dream is still colored by a feeling of nervousness and insecurity and by the suspense of rivalry. The fact—at least in his dreaming state —that the patient had already appropriated quite different ways of existing by the psychoanalytic plunge into his own depths is shown by the concluding incident in the dream. The full dozen of delicate water lilies in the hand of each man bears impressive witness to the blossoming out into the fullness of his Hfe, as well as a reconciling balance of male and female. The man who has achieved this is beyond egocentric greed and fear and has found himself as a mem­ber of an ordered human community.

This dream might well have tempted many a psychoanalyst to interpretations of a symbolic manifestation of the patient's "trans­ference." The older man would have been thought of as "meaning" the analyst, especially if his appearance had shown some similarity to the analyst. The next step after this interpretation would have been to undo the "wrong connection" of the "transference" and to interpret the old boatman-analyst as ultimately signifying the patient's father.

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