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Title: Inhibition, symptom and anxiety
Author: Sigmund Freud
Commentator: Sándor Ferenczi
Translator: Leon Pierce Clark
Release date: October 21, 2026 [eBook #79835]
Language: English
Original publication: Stamford: The Psychoanalytic Institute, 1927
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79835
Credits: Stephen M. Kraus at https://readfreud.org/ (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND ANXIETY ***
Monograph Series No. 8
Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety
by
Prof. Sigmund Freud
Authorized translation from the German
Supervised by L. Pierce Clark
Published by
The Psychoanalytic Institute
Stamford, Conn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1927
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Preface
I. A Definition of Inhibition and Symptom
II. Symptom Formation
III. The Ego
IV. Infantile Zoöphobia
V. Symptom Formation and the Secondary Defense of the Ego
VI. The Undoing and Isolation Mechanisms in Compulsion Neurosis
VII. A Further Consideration of Infantile Zoöphobia
VIII. An Analysis of Fear
IX. The Relation between Symptom Formation and Fear Development
X. Theoretical Considerations of the Birth Trauma
XI. Addenda
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
Only long persuasion on the part of Dr. Clark has influenced me as to
the fitness of writing a preface to this fundamental work by Freud. I
am unfamiliar with American customs, and with us in Europe this sort
of formal introduction is not required for the scholar may represent
the master before the public; but other countries have other customs.
However, more mature deliberation has finally led me to find this task
both pleasant and sensible,---pleasant because it gives me the
opportunity to express publicly my gratitude for a new and valuable
performance, and sensible because this grateful pupil is not so badly
adapted to direct the attention of the circle of scientific readers to
a work, the study of which helps so much to enlarge and deepen proper
theoretic understanding to master so many practical aspects of
psychoanalytic activity.
This little work, seemingly so modest, is in reality an attempt by
Freud to bring his views on the mechanisms of the neurotic
symptom-formation in harmony with the peak of his now successfully
established metapsychology. On this occasion and with unsparing
rectitude he has revised all of his leading expressions as to the
sources of energy of the more recent symptoms and the wherefore of
their makeup; his critical spirit does not rest until it has disposed
of all possible counter-arguments and when it is unsuccessful he
candidly admits the temporary insolubility of the problems. This
justifies my opinion, elsewhere expressed, that Freud is actually not
a strict Freudian and refutes the views expressed by hostile critics
as to his "orthodoxy." It may be foreseen that the same opponents can
gain more important positions by assertions as to inconsequence and
omission, without withdrawing their complaints as to orthodoxy. In
reality the entire fabric of Freud's psychology of the neuroses, even
after the strictest revision, stands essentially in full stability for
only on occasion are the foundation pillars exchanged or shifted to
more favorable positions.
Moreover, the other assertion, that the finer makeup of the ego
psychology has destroyed the libido theory formerly erected by Freud,
is absolutely false. From the beginning Freud knew how to value the
importance of the ego impulses as suppressors of energy although it is
only in the present work that he has succeeded in elaborating this
view in detail.
I will forego any attempt to anticipate the contents of this thesis
and will be content to assure the reader that the time expended in
reading it will be richly repaid and will awaken the impression that
the master has again presented us with a work which may be placed side
by side in value with the publications of his earlier years.
S. Ferenczi (Budapest)
New York, January, 1927.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I.
A Definition of Inhibition and Symptom
Our usage of speech permits us, in the description of pathological
phenomena, to differentiate between symptoms and inhibitions, but not
much value is attributed to this distinction. If cases of illness did
not come to us of whom we must say that they show only inhibitions and
no symptoms, and if we did not know how they came about, we should
hardly be interested in discriminating between inhibition and symptom.
These two do not flourish on the same soil. Inhibition has a special
relationship to function and does not necessarily indicate something
pathological, for one may call the restrictions of a function inhibition
of the same. Symptoms, on the other hand, signify indications of disease
processes. So also may inhibition be a symptom of disease. The usage of
language, then, is such that it speaks of inhibition where there is an
unusual variation of the same or a new performance. In many cases it is
left to one's discretion to emphasize the positive or negative side of a
pathological process, and designate the result as a symptom or an
inhibition. This, in all truth, is not interesting and the question with
which we begin this thesis is shown to bear little fruit.
As inhibition is evidently so intimately connected with function, one
may arrive at the idea of studying the different ego functions, in
respect to which forms of disturbance of the same are expressed in the
individual neurotic functions. For this comparative study we choose: the
sexual function, eating, locomotion and occupation.
(a) The sexual function is subject to very manifold disturbances, the
majority of which show the character of simple inhibitions. These may be
comprehended under the head of psychic impotence. The status of normal
sexual function presupposes a very complicated course, and disturbance
may come about in every part. The principal stations for inhibition in
men are: the turning aside of the libido at the beginning of the process
(psychic frigidity); the absence of physical preparation (erection); the
shortening of the act (precocious ejaculation---which may equally be
described as a positive symptom); the holding back of the same (lack of
ejaculation); and the absence of the psychic effect (pleasure in the
orgasm). Other disturbances result from the association of the function
with special conditions of perverse or fetichistic nature.
One cannot long escape the recognition of a relationship between
inhibition and _angst_.[1] Many inhibitions are palpably a renunciation
of function because in the exercise of the latter fear is developed.
Direct fear of the sexual function is frequent in women. We associate it
with hysteria, and also with the defensive symptom of nausea, which set
in originally as a supplementary reaction to the passively experienced
sexual act and appear later at the mental image of the same. A great
number of compulsive behaviors are also shown as precautions and
assurance against sexual experience and are therefore of phobic nature.
One does not get far in the comprehension of these matters and at most
one remarks only that very different procedures are applied in the
disturbance of the functions: (1) The mere absence of libido, which
seems the soonest to manifest itself, which we call a pure inhibition.
(2) The impairment in the execution of the function. (3) The aggravation
of the same by special conditions and the modification by deviation to
other objectives. (4) The prevention by safety measures. (5) The
interruption through development of fear so far as its addition cannot
be hindered, and finally (6), a supplementary one which protests against
the disturbance and would make what has happened undone if the function
could be carried out.
(b) The most common disturbance of the nutritive function is anorexia
through withdrawal of the libido. Also aggravation of the appetite is
often seen---a compulsion to eat motivated by fear of starving has been
but little studied. As a hysterical refusal of food is the symptom of
vomiting, refusal of food through fear belongs to psychotic states
(delusion of poisoning).
(c) Locomotion is inhibited in many neurotic conditions through
disinclination to walk and weakness on walking, while hysterical
inhibition is manifested by motor palsy of the locomotor apparatus or
else by some special abolition of function like abasia. Especially
characteristic are difficulties of locomotion through the interposition
of definite conditions, through the non-fulfilment of which fear arises
(phobias).
(d) Inhibition of one's occupational activities, which comes so often
to treatment as an isolated symptom, shows diminished desire for work or
poor execution or reaction phenomena, as exhaustion (vertigo, vomiting)
when continuation of the occupation is forced. Hysteria forces the
cessation of labor through engendering organ and functional paralyses,
the existence of which cannot be conjoined with execution. The
compulsive neuroses disturb work through continuous diversion and
through loss of time in the interpolated delays and repetitions.
We could extend this survey over other functions but could not expect to
attain more thereby. We have not gone beyond the surface phenomena.
Hence we resolve to take a view which makes the conception of an
inhibition no longer very enigmatical. Inhibition is the expression of a
functional limitation of the ego, which can come about from very
different causes.
Many of the mechanisms of this renunciation of function and a general
tendency to the same are well known to us. It is easy to recognize this
tendency in the specialized inhibitions. If piano playing, writing and
even walking are subject to neurotic inhibitions, analysis shows us the
reason for the same in an over-strong erotisation of the organs
involved---the fingers and the feet. We have gained the view in general
that the ego function of an organ is injured if its erogeneity, its
sexual significance, increases. It then behaves---if one dare make a
scurrilous comparison---like a cook who will no longer work at the
fireside because the man of the house enters into love relations with
her. If writing which consists in letting ink flow from a tube on a
piece of white paper, has assumed the symbolic significance of coitus;
or when walking has become a symbolic substitute for stamping on Mother
Earth, then both writing and walking will be prohibitive because it is
as if one would carry out some forbidden sexual transaction. The ego
renounces this function proper to it in order not to be compelled to
undertake a new repression, in order to avoid a conflict with the It.
Other inhibitions follow obviously in the service of
self-punishment---frequently in connection with professional activities.
The ego dare not do certain things because it will use them in a manner
disapproved of by the more strict super-ego. In turn the ego renounces
these functions in order not to engage in a conflict with the super-ego.
The general inhibitions of the ego follow another and simple mechanism.
When the ego is claimed by a psychic task of particular
difficulty,---through an affliction, a grand affect-suppression, through
the necessity of holding down a constantly increasing sexual fancy,---it
is so deprived of disposable energy that it must retrench its supply in
many directions like a speculator who has tied up his money in his
enterprises. An instructive example of such an intensive general
inhibition of brief duration was observed by me in a compulsive patient
who fell into a paralyzing weariness of one or several days' duration on
occasions which should obviously have led to an outbreak of rage.
Beginning here there must be found a way to the comprehension of general
inhibition through which the depressive states and the most severe of
these, melancholy, characterize themselves.
In conclusion, one may say of the inhibitions that they are restrictions
of the ego functions either from prudence or impoverishment of energy.
It is easy to recognize now wherein _inhibition_ differs from _symptom_;
for _symptom_ can be nothing more than a process within or connected
with the ego.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II.
Symptom Formation
The main features of symptom formation have long been studied and have
been expressed, it is to be hoped, in an impregnable manner. The symptom
is a sign and substitute of a suppressed impulse-gratification, the
result of a repressive process. The repression proceeds from the ego,
which, perchance in the service of the super-ego, will not coöperate in
an instinct investment incited by the It. The ego through the repression
makes it possible for the idea, which was the carrier of the unamiable
striving, to become shut off from consciousness. Analysis often
demonstrates that it remains as an unconscious formation. Thus far it is
clear, but presently the unsolved difficulties begin.
Our previous descriptions of the process in repression have emphasized
the result of the shutting off from consciousness, but in other respects
we have left matters open to doubt. The question arises, what is the
fate of the impulse activated in the It which aims at gratification? The
answer is an indirect one and runs as follows: through the process of
repression the anticipated desire for gratification is changed to pain.
One would then confront the problem of how pain could be the result of
the instinct gratification. We hope to explain the situation by the
definite statement that the intentional course of the stimulus in the It
fails to take place because of repression, while the ego succeeds in
inhibiting or diverting the same. Then the riddle unfolds of
affect-transformation by repression. We have, however, confessed to the
ego that it can express so far reaching an influence on the processes in
the It and we should learn to understand in what way this astounding
unfolding of power becomes possible.
I believe that this influence belongs to the ego as a result of its
intimate associations with the perceptive system, which indeed
constitutes its very nature and is the basis of its differentiation from
the It. The function of this system, which we have called the
perceptive-conscious, is bound up with the phenomenon of consciousness;
it receives excitations not only from without but also from within and
by means of pleasure-pain sensations which it attains therefrom it
attempts to direct all of the courses of the psychic happenings in
accordance with the pleasure principle. We imagine the ego as good as
powerless against the It, but when it strives against an instinctive
process in the It, it needs only to give the signal of pain in order to
attain its objective through the almost omnipotent factor of the
pleasure principle. When we contemplate this situation by itself for the
moment we may illustrate it by an example from another sphere of
activity. A certain clique resists a measure which meets with the
inclinations of the mass of the people. This minority then usurps the
press, manipulates through it the sovereign "public opinion" and pushes
matters in such a way that the planned measure does not go through.
Other questions now arise. Where does the energy originate which brings
about the pain signal? Here an idea shows us the way the defence of an
unwished for process within may follow the pattern of a defence against
an external irritant, where the ego takes the same path against internal
as it does against external danger. If the danger is from without, the
organized being takes flight and then first of all withdraws from the
perception of danger; later it is recognized that a more efficacious
means is to effectuate such muscular actions that the perception of
danger becomes impossible, even when it is not denied; in other words,
to withdraw from the region of danger. One such effort at flight is
equivalent to repression. The ego withdraws the (preconscious)
investment from the instinct representation to be repressed and applies
it for the disengagement of displeasure (anxiety). The problem of how
anxiety arises from repression may be no simple one and in any case one
has the right to hold fast to the idea that the ego is the chief place
of anxiety and to reject the earlier notion that the investment energy
of fixation of the repressed incitation becomes automatically changed to
anxiety. If I formerly so expressed myself I was giving it a
phenomenological and not a metapsychological presentation.
From what has been said a new question comes up. How is it economically
possible that a mere withdrawal and conducting off---as in the retreat
of a preconscious ego-investment---could engender disinclination or
fear, which according to our presuppositions can result only from
enhanced investment? My reply is that this causation is not to be
explained economically. Anxiety is not newly engendered in repression
but is reproduced as an affective state after a present memory picture.
With a further inquiry as to the origin of this anxiety---as of affects
in general---we abandon the undisputed psychological territory and enter
the borderland of physiology. Affective states are incorporated into the
soul life as precipitates of archaic traumatic experiences and are
awakened in like situations as memory symbols. I mean that I am not in
error in making them equivalent to the late and isolated hysterical
attacks, and to be regarded as their normal prototypes. In mankind and
the creatures related to him the act of parturition appears to be the
first individual anxiety experienced to give the characteristic traits
of the expression of an anxiety affect. We are not, however, to
overestimate this connection and in its recognition are not to overlook
the fact that an affect symbol is a biological necessity for a situation
of peril and at all events must be obtained. I also hold that it is
unjustified to assume that in every outbreak of anxiety something occurs
in the soul life which reproduces the birth situation. It is not at all
certain whether the hysterical attacks which are originally such
traumatic reproductions maintain this character permanently.
Elsewhere I have deduced that most repressions with which we have to do
therapeutically are cases of after-repression, which presuppose the
existence of archaic repressions exerting their attractive influence on
a newer situation. Of this background and forestage of repression too
little is known. One comes easily into the danger of overestimating the
rôle of the super-ego in repression.
At present we are unable to judge whether the appearance of the
super-ego creates the border between primeval repression and late
repression. The first---very intensive---outbursts of anxiety do at any
rate follow upon the differentiation of the super-ego. It is plausible
throughout that quantitative factors, such as the excessive strength of
the excitation and the breach in the stimulus protection, are the first
occasions of the primary repression.
Mention of protection from excitation reminds us like a catchword that
repressions appear in two different situations---first, when an
unpleasant instinctive stimulus is awakened by an external perception,
and second, when the latter occurs from internal provocation. We will
return later to this difference. Stimulus protection is afforded only
against external irritation, not from internal instinctive demands.
As long as we study the attempt at flight of the ego we remain far from
symptom formation. The symptom arises from the instinct stimulus which
is encroached on by the repression. When the ego attains its objective,
through the pain signal, of keeping under the instinct stimulus, we
learn nothing as to how this is brought about. We only learn from cases
which are to be termed more or less unsuccessful repressions.
In general, then, it is so presented that despite the repression the
instinct stimulus has found a substitute, but this is strongly blighted,
displaced and inhibited. It is no longer recognizable as a satisfaction.
When it consummated, no feeling of pleasure accompanies it. For this
reason the consummation has assumed the character of a compulsion. But
in this lowering of the course of satisfaction to the symptom, the
repression shows its power in another respect. The substitution process
is withheld from removal by the motor actions and even when this is
unsuccessful it must exhaust itself in the alteration of its own body
and cannot encroach on the outer world; it is forbidden it to transform
itself into activity. We understand that in suppression the ego works
under the influence of external reality and on that account shuts off
the result of the process of substitution from this reality.
The ego dominates the access to consciousness as also the transition to
action against the external world; in repression its power is employed
in both directions. The instinct object is adapted to sense one side,
and the impulse prompting to the other side of its expression of force.
It is now permissible to ask how this recognition of the power of the
ego coincides with the description outlined of the position of the same
ego in my study "The Ego and the It." We have therein depicted the
dependence of the ego on the It and the super-ego and unmasked its
weakness and readiness to anxiety toward both and its superiority, which
has been built up laboriously. This judgment has since found a strong
echo in psychoanalytic literature. Numerous voices emphasize urgently
the weakness of the ego against the It, of the rational against the
demoniacal in us, and are ready to make this proposition into a
foundation for a psychoanalytic view of the universe. Should not the
insight into the mode of action of repression be the very thing to hold
the analyst back from so extreme a partisan designation?
I am not at all for the fabrication of world contemplations. One may
leave such to philosophers who by their own confession cannot make
life's journey practicable without such a Baedeker, which gives
information about all things. Let us humbly take upon ourselves the
contumely with which the philosophers look down upon us from the
standpoint of their indigence. Since we, too, cannot deny our narcistic
pride, we will seek our comfort in the venture that all of these life
pilots soon age, that it is just our shortsighted restricted work in
miniature which makes necessary their new editions, and that even the
most modern of these Baedekers are essays to replace old catechism, so
convenient and complete. We know exactly how little light science has
hitherto diffused over the riddle of this world; all the noise of the
philosophers can change nothing, only a patient continuation of the work
which subordinates everything to one demand for certainty, can effect
slowly the transformation. If the wanderer sings in the dark, he denies
his anxiety but this does not make him see more clearly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III.
The Ego
To return to the problem of the ego: the appearance of contradiction is
due to the fact that we take abstractions too rigidly and out of a
complicated state of affairs look at first one, then another side alone.
The separation of the ego from the It seems justified. It is forced on
us by definite conditions. But on the other hand, the ego and It are
identical, the ego is only a differentiated part of the same It. If in
thought we place this fragment against the whole, or if there is a true
dissension between the two, the weakness of this ego is manifest. But if
the ego remains bound to the It and cannot be divided from it, its
strength is manifest. The relation between the ego and super-ego is
similar; in many situations the two flow together; mostly we can only
distinguish between them when there is tension, a conflict, between
them. For the case of repression this fact will be decisive, that the
ego is an organization, the It is not. The ego is the organized part of
the It. It would be quite unjustified if one should imagine that the ego
and It are two unlike camps of warriors; in repression the ego seeks to
repress a fragment of the It. but the remainder of the It comes to the
rescue and measures its strength with that of the ego. This may often
happen although it is certainly not the initial situation of repression;
as a rule the instinct to be repressed is isolated. If the act of
repression has shown us the strength of the ego, it bears witness of its
weakness and for the fact that the individual instincts of the It cannot
be influenced. For the process which has become a symptom through
repression maintains its existence outside of the ego organization and
independently of it. And not only this alone but all of its offshoots
enjoy the same right, one may say the extraterritoriality. And where it
comes together associatively with the portions of the ego organization,
it may be asked whether these did not draw it to themselves and gain
ground with this addition at the expense of the ego. A comparison long a
favorite with us regards the symptom as a foreign body which ceaselessly
maintains phenomena of irritation and reaction in the tissues in which
it has embedded itself. It does indeed happen that the defensive battle
against the unpleasant instinct is shut off through the symptom
formation; as far as we can see this is possible in hysterical
conversion, but usually the course is different---after the first act of
repression there follows a tedious or never ending after-play; the fight
against the instinct finds its continuation in the fight against the
symptom.
This secondary defensive fight shows us two faces with contradictory
expressions. On one hand the ego is notified through its nature to
undertake something which we must estimate as an attempt at restoration
or expiation. The ego is an organization, it rests upon free intercourse
and the possibility of reciprocally influencing among all of its
components. Its desexualized energy announces its origin in the effort
towards union and unification and this urge to synthesis always
increases with the strength which the ego develops. It therefore becomes
intelligible that the ego also tries to abolish the strangeness and
isolation of the symptom, using for this purpose all possibilities to
bind it to itself and by such bands to incorporate it into its
organization. We know that such an effort already influences the act to
symptom formation. A classical example thereof is furnished by those
hysterical symptoms which become transparent to us as a compromise
between the requirement for gratification and the requirement for
punishment. As fulfillment of a demand of the super-ego such symptoms
have from the first a part in the ego while on the other hand they
indicate positions of the repressed and breaches in the ego
organization; they are, so to speak, border stations with mixed
investments. Whether all primary hysterical symptoms are so constructed
demands careful investigation. In further course the ego so behaves as
if conducted by deliberation. The symptom is once there and cannot be
removed. It must make friends with the situation and draw the greatest
amount of benefit from it. An adaptation takes place with the
ego-foreign fragment of the inner world which is represented through the
symptom, as otherwise normally the ego brings to pass in the real outer
world. There is never a lack of occasions. The existence of symptoms may
bring with itself a certain inhibition of function with which one may
soothe a demand of the super-ego or refuse a claim of the external
world. The symptom is gradually entrusted with the representation of
more important interests, it receives a value for self assertion,
adheres more intimately to the ego and becomes more indispensable to it.
Only in quite rare cases can the process be likened to the presence of a
foreign body after a wound has healed. One may also exaggerate the
importance of this secondary adaptation to the symptom in saying that
the ego has created the symptom in order to derive benefit from it. This
is just as true or false as when one presents the opinion that
war-injured soldiers have allowed their legs to be shot off in order to
live without work on their invalid pensions.
Other symptom formations, such as compulsion neurosis and paranoia, gain
a high value for the ego, not because they are of advantage to it but
because they bring a narcistic gratification which is indispensable. The
system formations of the compulsive neurotic flatter his self love
through the delusion that he is specially pure and conscientious and is
better than other human beings. The delusional formations of paranoia
open to the acumen and phantasy of these patients a field of activity
which is not readily replaced. From all of these mentioned relations
there results what is known as the (secondary) disease gain of the
neurosis. There ensues the effort of the ego to incorporate the symptom
into itself and strengthen the fixation of the latter. If we then make
the attempt to furnish aid of analysis to the ego in its fight against
the symptom, we find that these placable connections between the ego and
symptom efficacious on the part of the resistance. It is not made easy
for us to solve these. Both procedures which the ego applies against the
symptom stand actually in opposition to each other.
The other procedure has a less friendly aspect and continues the
direction of the repression. It seems, however, that we should not
burden the ego with the reproach of futility. The ego is ready to be
peaceable and would like to incorporate the symptom and take it into its
ensemble. The disturbance proceeds from the symptom, which is the proper
substitute and derivative of the repressed prompting. The latter rôle is
played further, in that the urge for gratification is constantly renewed
and so prompts the ego to again give the pain signal and come to its
defense. The secondary defensive fight against the symptom is many sided
and plays itself on different stages, serving itself with manifold
means. We will state little if we do not take the individual cases of
symptom formation as an object of investigation. By so doing we shall
find occasion to go into the problem of anxiety which we have long spied
lurking in the background. It would seem desirable to start out with the
symptoms created by the hysterical neuroses, for we are not yet prepared
for the presuppositions of symptom formation in the compulsive neuroses,
paranoia, and other neuroses.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV.
Infantile Zoöphobia
Our first consideration will be that of infantile hysterical animal
fear; for example, the typical case of horse fear of the five year old
"Little Hans" (in Volume VIII of my collected papers published in
German). Even the first glimpse allows us to recognize that the
relations of a genuine case of neurotic disease are much more
complicated than would be anticipated in our imagination as long as we
work with abstractions. Some work must be devoted to orientation---which
suppressed prompting, what symptom equivalent, what motive for
suppression becomes recognizable.
The boy refused to go out in the street because of his fear of horses.
This is the raw material. What is the symptom? Development of anxiety,
selection of a feared object, renunciation of free mobility, or several
such in combination? What gratification is given up? Why must he go
without it? The case is not enigmatical. The incomprehensible fear of
the horse is a symptom of incapacity for walking in the street, a
phenomenon of inhibition, a limitation which is enjoined on the ego in
order not to awaken the fear symptom. One sees straightway the
correctness of the explanation of the last point and will leave this
inhibition out of consideration in further discussion. But the first
fugacious acquaintance with the case does not teach us to recognize the
actual expression of the supposititious symptoms. As shown by further
inquiry it had to do not with an indefinite fear of a horse, but a
definite anxious expectation that the horse would bite him. It is true
that this content sought to withdraw itself from consciousness and to
replace it with an indefinite phobia in which only the fear and the
object remain. Is this content the nucleus of the symptom?
We get no further so long as we do not draw the entire psychic situation
of the child into consideration as is revealed with analytical work in
general. In the Oedipus situation to the father we find jealousy and
enmity although the boy loved him heartily aside from conditions in
which the mother came into consideration. In other words there was an
ambivalence conflict---well founded love with not less justified hate,
both directed against the same person. His phobia must result from an
effort to solve this conflict. Such ambivalence conflicts are very
common and we know another typical ending. In this one of the two
instincts which strive together, usually the tender one, greatly
strengthened, causes the other to disappear. Only the excess and the
compulsive character of the tenderness betray it, as this situation is
not the only one present, and it is constantly on its guard to hold its
opponent in subjugation and allows us to construe a procedure which we
describe as repression through reaction formation in the ego. Cases like
that of little Hans show nothing of such reaction formation; evidently
there are different ways which lead out of an ambivalence conflict.
In the meantime we have learned something with certainty. The instinct
stimulus which lies beneath the repression is a hostile impulse against
the father. The analysis gives us the proofs, because it traces the
origin of the idea of the biting horse. Hans had seen a horse fall, and
had also seen a playmate fall and hurt himself when they were playing
horse. This gave us the right to construe a wish impulse of Hans's which
meant that the father might fall and injure himself. References to an
observed departure allowed us to assume that the wish for the removal of
the father had found a less timid expression. Such a wish, however, is
equivalent to the intention to remove him himself, with the murderous
stimulus of the Oedipus complex.
From this repressed instinct stimulus there leads up to now no way to a
substitute for what we suppose to be hippophobia. Suppose we simplify
the situation of the boy by clearing away the infantile factor and
ambivalence. There is, perhaps, a young man servant who is enamored of
the mistress and who rejoices in certain kindnesses on that account on
her part. Suppose that he hates the stronger master of the house and
would like to have him removed. The most natural consequence of this
situation would be that he fears the revenge of the master, so that
there develops a sense of fear---quite analogous to the phobia of the
little boy for the horse. That is to say, we cannot designate the fear
in this phobia as symptom; if the boy who loves his mother would show
fear of his father we should have no right to impute to him a neurosis,
a phobia. We have here a quite comprehensible affective reaction. That
which would make a neurosis out of this is another trait and this only,
the substitution of the horse for the father. This displacement produces
something which has claim to the name of symptom. It is that other
mechanism which permits the solution of the ambivalence conflict without
the aid of a reaction formation. It is made possible or easier through
the circumstance that the inborn traces of totemistic modes of thinking
in this tender age are still readily animated. The cleft between human
and animal is not yet recognized, certainly less emphasized than later.
The adult, admired yet feared, still stands in a series with the larger
animal, which man envies in many ways and of which he must be warned
because the beast can be a source of danger. The ambivalence conflict is
not decided on the same person but is as if circumvented, as one palms
off one of his own promptings as that of a substitute man. Thus far we
see clearly, but in another point analysis of the phobia of the boy has
brought a complete disillusionment. The disguise in which the symptom
formation exists is not at all undertaken as the representative
(ideational content) of the instinct prompting to be repressed, but is
quite different therefrom, which corresponds only to a reaction on the
essentially unpleasant. Our anticipation would find a gratification
sooner if the small Hans had developed in place of a phobia an
inclination to mistreat the horse, to beat it, or had announced the wish
to see it fall and hurt itself, perhaps to die in convulsions (making a
riot with its legs). Something of the sort did develop during the
analysis but it did not stand long prominent in the neurosis. Something
there is not in order, either in our comprehension of the repression or
in our definition of a symptom. One thing strikes us naturally at once:
if little Hans had really shown this demeanor toward the horse, the
character of the shocking, aggressive instinct stimulus would not be at
all altered by the repression, only the object would be changed.
It is quite certain that there are cases of repression which do not
perform more than this; but in the genesis of the phobia in little Hans
more happened. As to how much more may be divined in another fragment of
the analysis.
We have already heard that little Hans gave as the content of his phobia
the idea of being bitten by the horse. Later we have had a glimpse into
the genesis of another case[2] of animal phobia in which a wolf was the
animal feared with likewise the significance of a father substitute. At
the conclusion of a dream which made the analysis transparent there
developed in this boy the fear of being devoured by a wolf like one of
the seven kids in the fable. That the father of little Hans demonstrably
had played horse with him had certainly been a determinant for the
choice of the animal to be feared. Likewise, it was at least made
probable that the father of my Russian (who was not analyzed until the
third decade of his life) had also in play imitated a wolf and jokingly
threatened to eat the boy. Since then I have found a third case in a
young American in whom indeed no zoöphobia had developed but this very
omission aids in clearing up the other cases. His sexual excitation had
been kindled by a child's fanciful history which was read to him, about
an Arabian chief who pursued a man consisting of an edible substance
(the gingerbread man) in order to devour him. He identified himself with
this edible man while the chieftain was readily recognizable as a
substitute for the father and this fancy was the first substratum of his
autoerotic activity. The idea of being devoured by his father is typical
archaic child property; the analogies from mythology (Chronos) and from
animal life are well known.
Despite these explanations the content of this idea is so strange to us
that we could impute it to the child only with incredulity. We do not
even know whether he really meant what he seemed to be saying and do no
understand how he can be the subject of a phobia. Analytic experience,
however, gives the requisite information and teaches us that the notion
of being eaten by the father is the regressive degraded expression of a
passive tender excitation which wishes to be loved by the father as an
object in the sense of genital eroticism. The follow-up history of the
case leaves no doubt as to the correctness of this interpretation. The
genital striving does indeed betray nothing more of its tender intention
if expressed in the speech of the vanquished transition phase of the
oral to the sadistic libido organization. Does it have to do further
with nothing more than a substitution of the representative through a
regressive expression, or is there a genuine regressive degradation of
the genitally directed striving in the It? It is not so easy to decide.
The clinical history of the Russian wolf man speaks quite decidedly for
the last named possibility for he himself behaved badly after the
deciding dream---vexatiously and sadistically---and soon after developed
a proper compulsion neurosis. In any case we gain the insight that the
suppression is not the sole means which stands at the command of the ego
for the rejection of an unpleasant impulse prompting. When he succeeds
in bringing the impulse to regression he has injured it fundamentally
with greater energy than was possible through its repression. Indeed, it
often happens that the regression originally forced follows the
repression.
The subject matter with the wolf man, and that somewhat simpler in the
case of little Hans incite various other considerations but already we
gain two unexpected glimpses. There is no doubt that in these phobias
the repressed instinct is hostile to the father. One may say this was
repressed through the process of transformation into the opposite; in
place of aggression toward the father, the aggression---revenge---of the
father is directed toward one's own person. As without this, such an
aggression is rooted in the sadistic libido phase, it needs only to be
degraded to the oral stage, indicated by Hans through the fear of being
bitten, in the Russian carried out crudely by the fear of being
devoured. Moreover the analysis established beyond all doubt that at the
same time another instinct yielded to repression, the opposite of a
tender passive excitation for the father, which had already reached the
level of the genital (phallic) libido organization. The latter indeed
seems more important for the end result of the process of repression; it
experiences a further reaching regression and maintains the determining
influence on the content of the phobia. Where we have investigated only
a repression of impulse, we must recognize the coincidence of two such
processes; both of the promptings---sadistic aggression against the
father and a tender passive situation to him---form a contrasting pair.
Still more: when we properly evaluate the history of little Hans we
recognize that through the formation of his phobia the tender
object-investment of the mother is also abolished, the content of phobia
betraying nothing of this. In the case of Hans---it is much less
distinct in the Russian---there is only a process of repression, which
concerns almost all of the components of the Oedipus complex, the
hostile as well as the tender incitation toward the father and the
tender incitation toward the mother.
These complications are not wished for by us who desire to study only
simple cases of symptom formation and with this intention we have
applied ourselves only to the earliest and apparently most transparent
neuroses of childhood. In place of a single repression we found a
cumulation of such and in addition had to do with a regression. Perhaps
we have increased the confusion when we treat our two disposable cases
of zoöphobia alike---that of little Hans and the wolf man. Now certain
differences occur to us. Only in the case of little Hans can we say with
precision that through his phobia he disposed of both chief excitations
of the Oedipus complex, the aggressive attitude against the father and
the over tender one toward the mother; the tender feeling for the father
is certainly obvious and plays its rôle in the repression of its
opposite, but it is neither demonstrable that it was strong enough to
provoke the repression nor that it was afterwards abolished. Hans seems
to have been a normal child with a so-called positive Oedipus complex.
It is possible that the elements which we missed were also coöperative
but we could not point them out, the material even of our most thorough
analyses is defective and our documentation imperfect. In the Russian
the defect is in another place; its relation to the female object is
disturbed by a precocious seduction; the passive, feminine side is
strongly cultivated in him and the analysis of the wolf dream reveals
little of intentional aggression against the father. Therefore the
proofs are undoubted that the repression concerns the passive, tender
situation to the father. Here also other factors may have actively
participated, but such do not appear. If despite this distinction in the
two cases, which almost approximates an antithesis, the end result of
the phobia is almost the same, the explanation must come to us from
another side; it comes from the second result of our little comparative
study. We believe the motif for repression in both cases is known and we
see its rôle corroborated through the course which was taken by the
development of the two children. In both cases it is the same, the fear
of threatened castration. Out of castration fear little Hans gave up his
aggression toward the father; his fear that the horse would bite him can
easily be completed---the horse would bite off his genitals, castrate
him. But out of castration fear the little Russian renounced the wish to
be loved by the father as a sexual object, for he had understood that
such a relation had the presupposition that his genitals would be
sacrificed---the organs which distinguished him from woman. Both forms
of the Oedipus complex, the normal and active like the inverted, are
shattered at the castration complex. The fear idea of the Russian, that
of being devoured by the wolf, does not contain any hint of castration;
it had through oral regression removed itself too far from the phallic
phase, but the analysis of the dream makes every other proof
superfluous. It is a complete triumph of suppression that in the text of
the phobia there is no further hint of castration.
Here we have unexpected results. In both cases the motif of repression
is the fear of castration; the content of the fear of being bitten by
the horse and of being devoured by the wolf are substitutions,
disguised, for the content of being castrated by the father. In the
Russian it was the expression of a wish which could not exist if manhood
were rebelled against; in Hans it was the expression of a reaction which
aggression transformed to the opposite. But the fear affect of the
phobia which makes up its nature, does not originate in the process of
repression, nor from the libidinous fixations of the suppressed impulses
but from that which is repressed. The fear in the zoöphobia is the
untransformed castration fear, hence a true fear, fear of an actually
threatened or actually judged danger. Here the fear makes the
repression, not, as I once thought, the reverse.
It is not pleasant to think thus but it does not help to deny it. I have
often represented the proposition that through repression the
representative of the impulse is disguised, displaced, etc., the libido
of the prompting being transformed into fear. Investigation of the
phobias which before all should be called on to prove this proposition,
not only did not confirm but seemed rather to contradict directly. The
fear of the zoöphobias is the castration fear of the ego, that of the
less fundamentally studied agoraphobia seems to be fear of temptation,
which must cohere genetically with castration fear. Most phobias as far
as we can see to-day go back to fear of the ego of the claims of the It.
Here the fear situation of the ego is the primary one and the incentive
to repression. The fear never comes forth from the libido. If I formerly
pleased to say, after the repression appears a mass of fear in place of
the expected expression of the libido, I have nothing to take back
to-day. The description is correct and between the force of the
prompting to be repressed and the intensity of the resulting fear the
correspondence which I asserted doubtless exists. But I confess that I
believe I gave more than a mere description, in assuming that I had
recognized the metapsychological process of a direct transformation of
the libido into fear. This I cannot to-day maintain. Nor was I formerly
able to explain how this came to pass.
Whence did I draw the idea of this transformation? At a time when it was
still not possible for us to distinguish between processes of the ego
and processes of the It---from the study of actual neuroses---I found
that definite sexual practices such as coitus interruptus, frustrated
excitation, enforced abstinence, generated outbreaks of fear and a
general predisposition to fears---always therefore when the course of
sexual gratification was inhibited, delayed or diverted. As sexual
excitement is the expression of libidinous promptings it does not seem
venturesome to assume that libido is changed to fear through the
influence of such disturbances. Now this observation holds good to-day.
On the other hand it cannot be denied that the libido of the It
processes experiences a disturbance through the incitement of the
repression; it may be still better to say that fear arises in the
repression from the libido investment of the instinct stimulus. But how
may we harmonize this result with the other, that the fear of the
phobias is an ego fear---originating in the ego, not produced by
repression but producing the repression? This seems a contradiction and
is not readily solved. The reduction of both origins of fear to one
single fear is not readily carried through. One may try it with the
assumption that the ego in the situation of the disturbed coitus, the
interrupted excitement, the abstinence, scents danger, to which it
reacts with fear. But nothing can be done with this. On the other hand
the analysis of the phobias which we have undertaken seems not to admit
of a justification. It is not clear.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V.
Symptom Formation and the Secondary Defense of the Ego
We will study the symptom formation and the secondary combat of the ego
against the symptom but we have frankly made no fortunate selection
among the phobias. The fear which dominates in the picture of this
affection appears to us now as a complication which veils the subject
matter. There are neuroses in abundance in which no fear is shown. The
genuine conversion hysteria is of this sort, and its severest symptoms
are found with no admixture of fear. This fact must warn us that we must
not adhere too closely to the relations between fear and symptom
formation. Otherwise conversion hysteria stands so close to the phobias
that I have held myself justified in grouping the latter with "fear
hysterias." But no one has as yet been able to give the condition which
differentiates between them or whether a case assumes the form of a
conversion hysteria or a phobia. Nor has any one explored the reasons
for development of fear in hysteria.
The commonest symptoms of conversion hysteria---a motor paralysis,
contracture, involuntary action or discharge, a pain, a
hallucination---are either permanently established or intermittent
investment processes, the explanation of which prepares new
difficulties. One really knows but little of such symptoms. Through
analysis one may learn what disturbed course of excitement they replace.
Mostly it results that they themselves have a part in these, as if the
total energy had been concentrated on a fragment. Pain was present in
the situation in which the repression fell; hallucination was at the
time a perception; motor palsy was a defense against action which should
have been carried out in that situation but was inhibited; contracture
is usually a displacement for a muscular innervation intended at the
time at another place; the convulsive attack an expression of an
affective outbreak which has withdrawn itself from the normal control of
the ego. Changeable in a striking manner is the feeling of
disinclination which accompanies the appearance of the symptoms. In the
permanent symptoms displaced as to motility, as palsies and
contractures, this is mostly absent; the ego behaves against these as if
non-participating. In the intermittent cases and in symptoms of the
sensory sphere, these sensations of pain are as a rule distinct and in
the case of pain the symptoms may increase to an excessive degree. It is
very difficult in this manifoldness to find the factor which makes such
differences possible and which can explain them in unit fashion. Even
the battle of the ego against the once formed symptom is but little in
evidence in conversion hysteria. Only when the sensitiveness to pain in
some region of the body has become a symptom will this be placed in
position to play a double rôle. The pain symptom appears just as
certainly when this locality is touched from without, as when the
pathogenic situation which represents it is associatively activated from
within, and the ego grasps precautionary rules in order to hold back the
awakening of symptoms through external perception. Whence originates the
special opaqueness of symptom formation in conversion hysteria we cannot
guess, but it gives us a motive to leave promptly a field so unfertile.
We turn now to compulsion neurosis in the expectation that here we can
learn more about symptom formation. The symptoms of compulsion neurosis
are in general of two kinds and of opposite tendencies. They are either
prohibitions, precautions, expiations---hence negative in nature---or,
contrariwise, they are substitute gratifications, very often in symbolic
clothing. Of these two groups the negative, defensive, punitive, is the
older and with the duration of the disease the gratifications which mock
at all defense take the upper hand. It is a triumph of symptom formation
when it succeeds in fusing the prohibition with gratification; so that
the originally defensive command or prohibition obtains the significance
of a gratification; whereby often very artificial methods of combination
are claimed. In this performance an inclination to synthesis shows
itself which we have already conceded to the ego. In extreme cases the
patient effects that most of his symptoms have acquired the exact
opposite of their original significance, a testimony of the power of
ambivalence, which, we know not why, plays so great a rôle in compulsive
neuroses. In the crudest cases the symptom is two stage---that is, upon
the action which executes a certain instruction there follows
immediately a second, which abolishes the first or makes it regressive
if it does not dare to carry out the opposite.
Two impressions are at once derived from this fugacious survey of
compulsive symptoms. The first, which is maintained in constant warfare
against the repressed which applies itself more and more to the disfavor
of the repressing forces, and the second, that the ego and super-ego
play a specially large part in the symptom formation.
The compulsive neurosis is probably the most interesting and most
gratifying object of analytical investigation although as yet it is an
unconquered problem. If we will penetrate deeply into its nature we must
confess that uncertain assumptions and unproved surmises cannot yet be
dispensed with. The exit situation of the compulsive neurosis is
probably no other than that of hysteria, the necessary defense against
the libidinous claims of the Oedipus complex. In every compulsive
neurosis we seem to find a lower stratum of precociously formed
hysterical symptoms. Then, however, the further formation is decidedly
altered by a constitutional factor. The genital organization of the
libido shows itself as weakly and too little resistant. When the ego
begins its defensive striving its first result is that the genital
organization (phallic phase) regresses wholly or in part to an earlier
sadistic-anal stage. This fact of regression remains a determinant of
all that follows. One may draw yet another possibility into
consideration. Perhaps the regression is not the consequence of a
constitutional but a time factor. Hence it is not endowed with power
because the genital organization of the libido is weak, but because the
effort of the ego is premature, set in during the bloom of the sadistic
phase. I do not trust myself to make a final decision upon this point,
but analytical observation is not favorable to this supposition. Rather
does it show that in the turn to compulsive neurosis the phallic stage
has already been reached. The time of life for the outbreak of this
neurosis is also later than for hysteria (the second childhood period
after the termination of the latent period) and in a case of very late
development of this affection which I could cite, it was clearly shown
that a real depreciation of the hitherto intact genital life created the
condition for the regression and the origin of the compulsive
neurosis.[3]
The metapsychologic explanation of the regression is to be sought in a
mixture of impulses, in the separation of an erotic component which
appeared at the onset of the genital phase in the destructive
investments of the sadistic phase.
The conquest of the regression signifies the first result of the ego in
the defensive fight against the libido claims. We distinguish here the
general tendency of the defense from the repression, which is only one
of the defensive mechanisms. Perhaps still more clearly than in normal
and hysterical cases one recognizes in the compulsive neurosis the
castration complex as the motive of defense. We now find ourselves at
the beginning of the latency period, which is characterized by the fall
of the Oedipus complex, the creation or consolidation of the super-ego,
and the erection of an ethical and esthetic shrine in the ego. These
processes in compulsive neuroses go over the normal measure. For the
destruction of the Oedipus complex the regressive degradation of the
libido is added, the super-ego is especially rigid and unamiable, and
the ego develops in obedience to the super-ego reaction pictures of
conscience, sympathy and purity. With inexorable and not always
successful rigidity, the temptation to the continuation of early
infantile onanism is tabooed; it now leans upon regressive sadistic-anal
ideas but represents the unconquered portion of the phallic
organization. There is here an internal contradiction, so that in the
very interest of preservation of manhood (castration fear) every
activity of manhood is hindered but even this contradiction is only
exaggerated in the compulsive neurosis and adheres already to the normal
mode of removing the Oedipus complex. As every excess carries in itself
the germ to a self-uplift, this holds good also in compulsion neuroses
since the very repressed onanism forces itself in the form of compulsive
actions to an ever-increasing approximation to gratification.
The reaction formations in the ego of the compulsive neurotic, which we
recognize as exaggerations of the normal character, we may class as a
new mechanism of defense along with repression and regression. In
hysteria it seems to be absent or far weaker. Retrospectively, we gain
the presumption that it is distinguished as a defense process of
hysteria. It seems that it limits itself to suppression as the ego turns
away from the unpleasant prompting, leaving it to its course in the
unconscious and takes no further part in its fate. This cannot be
entirely or exclusively correct, for we know the case where the
hysterical symptom simultaneously signified the fulfilment of a demand
for punishment from the super-ego; but it may describe a general
character of the behavior of the ego in hysteria.
One may simply receive it as a fact that in the compulsive neuroses so
strict a super-ego is formed that the fundamental trait of this
affection is libido regression; and one may seek to associate it with
the character of the super-ego. In fact the super-ego which springs from
the It cannot withdraw itself from the regression and mixture of
impulses which proceeds from the latter. It would not be surprising if
it were not on its own part harder, more punitive and less amiable than
when the development is normal.
During the period of latency the defense of the attempt at onanism seems
to be treated as the chief task. This combat generates a series of
symptoms which recur in typical fashion in the most dissimilar kinds of
people and bear in general the character of a ceremonial. It is to be
much lamented that these have not yet been collected and systematically
analyzed; as the earliest performances of the neurosis they would shed
light over the mechanism here involved in symptom formation. They
already show the traits which will appear so fatally in the later severe
affection; the disposal of the behaviors which later will be carried out
as if automatically---going to sleep, washing, dressing, walking, the
tendency to repetition and waste of time. Why this happens so is still
not at all intelligible but the sublimation of anal erotic components
plays a distinct rôle thereby.
Puberty makes a decisive section in the development of a compulsion
neurosis. The genital organization broken up in childhood now sets in
with great energy. We know, moreover, that the sexual development of
childhood also prescribes the direction in the beginning of the puberty
years. Hence on the one hand the aggressive promptings of the early
period are again awakened, on the other hand there is a more or less
large share of new libidinous stirrings---in bad cases the whole of
them---which strike out paths prescribed by regression, and appear as
aggressive and destructive purposes. As a result of this disguise of the
erotic strivings and the strong reaction-formations in the ego, the
warfare against sexuality is carried further under the ethical flag. The
ego, amazed, strives against cruel and violent demands sent up by the It
into the consciousness and has no inkling that it is fighting erotic
wishes, among them such that otherwise would escape its own criticism.
The over strict super-ego persists the more energetically in the
repression of sexuality which has assumed---to it---such repulsive
forms. Thus the conflict in compulsive neurosis becomes intensified in
two directions---the defender is intolerant and the defended has become
unendurable; both through the influence of one factor, libido
regression.
One could find a contradiction against many of our presuppositions in
the fact that the unpleasant compulsive idea is conscious. But there is
no doubt that previously it has gone through the process of repression.
In the majority the actual text of the aggressive instinct is not known
to the ego. A large block of analytic labor is required to make it
conscious. What gets through to consciousness is in most cases only a
disguised substitute, either of a blurred, dreamy vagueness or is made
unrecognizable through an absurd disguise. If the repression has not
gnawed at the content of the aggressive prompting it has certainly
removed the concomitant affect character. So the aggression does not
appear to the ego as an impulse but, as the patient says, as a bare
thought content that should leave one cold. The noteworthy fact is,
however, that this is not the case.
The affect spared by the perception of the compulsive thought comes
especially to view at another place. The super-ego behaves as if no
suppression had taken place, as if the aggressive prompting were known
to it in its proper text and with full affect character; and it treats
the ego on a basis of this presupposition. The ego, which knows itself
to be blameless, must feel a sense of guilt and bear a responsibility
which it knows not how to explain. The riddle herewith given to us is,
however, not so great as it at first seems. The behavior of the
super-ego is intelligible throughout, the contradiction in the ego shows
us only that it has, by means of repression, closed itself against the
It while it remains accessible to the influence of the super-ego.[4]
The further question, why the ego does not seek to withdraw from the
tormenting criticism of the super-ego, disposes of the fact that this
really does happen in a large series of cases. There are compulsive
neuroses entirely without sense of guilt; as far as we understand, the
ego has spared itself the perception of the same through a new series of
symptoms, expiations and restrictions to self-punishment. These symptoms
signify, however, simultaneous gratifications of masochistic promptings
which have likewise drawn strength through regression.
The manifold phenomena of compulsive neurosis are so great that even by
much effort we have failed to give a coherent synthesis of all their
variations. We have striven to make prominent the typical relations,
always with the concern to survey irregularities of no less importance.
I have already described the general tendency of symptom formation in
compulsive neuroses. It is to procure more room for
substitute-gratifications at the expense of renunciation. The same
symptoms which indicate the original limitations of the ego assume
later---thanks to the indication of the ego to synthesis---those of
gratification, and it is obvious that the last significance gradually
becomes the more practicable. An extremely restricted ego which has
shown that its gratifications are sought in the symptoms becomes the
result of these processes, which approaches more and more the complete
failure of the initial defensive striving. The displacement of the
relations of the energy in favor of gratification can lead to the
dreaded end of paralysis of will on the part of the ego, which for each
decision finds almost as strong an impulse on one side as on the other.
The hyper-acute conflict between the it and the super-ego which
dominates the affection at the beginning and after may so spread itself
that none of the arrangements of the ego, incapable of communication,
can avoid being drawn into this conflict.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI.
The Undoing and Isolation Mechanisms in Compulsion Neurosis
During this conflict one may observe two symptom-forming activities of
the ego which deserve particular interest because they are evidently
substitutes for repression and therefore their technic and tendency can
already be elucidated. Perhaps we should also understand this auxiliary
and substitute technic as a proof that the carrying through of correct
suppression will meet with difficulties. If we consider that in
compulsive neuroses the ego is so much more the scene of symptom
formation than in hysteria; that this ego holds fast tenaciously to its
relationship to reality and consciousness and thereby summons all of its
intellectual resources; and that the thought activity seems overfixed
and erotised, such variations of suppression are perhaps brought nearer.
The two suggested technics are the undoing and the isolation. The former
has a large field of application and extends far back. It is negative
magic, so to speak; it does not will the consequences of an event
(impression, experience) through motor symbolism but itself "blows this
away." With the choice of this last expression it is indicated what rôle
this technic plays not only in the neurosis, but also in magic actions,
folk customs and religious ceremonials. In the compulsion neurosis one
encounters the undoing first in the two-stage symptoms where the second
action abolishes the first as if it had not happened, where in reality
both stages occurred. The compulsive-neurotic ceremonial has its second
root in the intention of the undoing. The first is the prevention, the
foresight that something definite shall not happen, not repeat itself.
This distinction is easy to grasp; the precautionary measures are
rational, the abolitions through undoing are irrational, magical in
nature. Naturally one must suppose that this second root is the older,
originating in the animistic situation to the external world. Its
shading into the normal finds the attempt at undoing in the resolution
to treat an event as if it had not yet happened, but then one undertakes
nothing against it or bothers either with the event or its consequences;
while in the neurosis one even abolishes the past and seeks to repress
motivistically. The same tendency may also give the explanation of the
so frequent compulsion to repetition in the neurosis, in the execution
of which many intentions are found together which reciprocally
antagonize one another. What does not happen in this fashion, as it
should have happened in accord with the wish, is made undone in another
way through repetition, where all the motives appear to tarry in these
repetitions. In the further course of the neurosis the tendency is often
unveiled to make a traumatic experience undone, as a symptom-forming
motive of the first rank. We receive so unexpected a glimpse into a new
motor technic of defense, or as we might say with a little inexactness,
of repression.
The other sort of new technic to be described is that of isolation which
is peculiar to compulsive neuroses. It is likewise in relation to the
motor sphere and consists as follows: after an unpleasant event and also
after any personal activity significant in the sense of a neurosis, a
pause is interpolated in which nothing is to happen, no perception made
nor action carried out. This at first strange behavior soon betrays to
us its relation to repression. We know that it is possible in hysteria
to allow a traumatic impression to fall into amnesia. In compulsive
neurosis this does not often succeed; the experience is not forgotten
but is laid bare by its affect and its associative relations are
repressed or interrupted; so that it stands as if isolated and is not
reproduced in the course of thought activity. The effect of this
isolation is the same as in repression with amnesia. This technic is
therefore reproduced in the isolation of compulsive neurosis but is also
strengthened motor wise in the magic intention. What is thus held apart
is exactly that which associatively belongs to it, the motor isolation
is to give a guarantee for the interruption of the connection in
thought. A pretext for this procedure of the neurosis is given by the
normal process of concentration. What seems significant to us as an
impression, as a task, is not to be disturbed through the simultaneous
claims of other thought achievements or activities. But even in the
normal the concentration is applied not only to the indifferent and not
pertinent but before all to hold aloof the unsuitable opposite. As the
most disturbing is felt what had originally belonged to it but had been
torn asunder in the development of progress---for example, the
expressions of ambivalence of the father complex in the relationship to
God or the promptings of the excretory organs in the excitement of love.
Hence normally the ego has a great task of isolation to perform in the
direction of the course of thought and we know that in the exercise of
the analytic technic, we must educate the ego to renounce at times this
otherwise justifiable function.
We have all had the experience that it is especially difficult for the
compulsive neurotic to follow the psychoanalytic principle. Probably as
a result of the high tension of the conflict between the super-ego and
the It the ego is more watchful, more seriously aware of its isolations.
During the labor of thinking it has too much to defend, the mixture of
unconscious fancies, the expression of ambivalent strivings. It dare not
let itself go, and it finds itself constantly in readiness to fight. It
supports this compulsion to concentration and isolation through magical
acts of isolation, which as symptoms become so striking and practically
so significant, but are naturally worthless per se and have the
character of ceremonials.
As, however, it seeks to hinder associations, combination in thought, it
follows one of the oldest and most fundamental commands of compulsion
neurosis, the tabu of contact. If one puts to himself the question why
the avoidance of contact and infection plays so great a rôle in the
neurosis and brings such complicated systems into content, one finds the
answer that contact, bodily contact, is the nearest goal both as to
aggressive and tender object fixation. The Eros wishes the contact, for
it strives for union and abolition of the distance between the ego and
the love object. But also destruction---which before the invention of
weapons used at a distance could only come from near by---must
presuppose bodily contact, the application of the hand. To touch a woman
is in speech usage a euphemism for her utilization as a sex object. Not
to touch the penis is the text of the prohibition against autoerotic
satisfaction. As the compulsive neurosis at the beginning follows the
erotic contact and then after regression the contact is masked as
aggression, there is nothing else to be forbidden in so high a degree,
nothing so suited to become the central point of a system of
prohibition. Isolation is abolition of the possibility of contact, a
thing to withdraw from every contact and if the neurotic isolates even
an impression or an activity through a pause, he gives us to understand
symbolically that he will not allow the thoughts of it to come into
associative contact with other thoughts.
So far our investigations extend into the subject of symptom formation.
It hardly repays us to resume them. They are poor in result and remain
unfinished; they have in fact brought us little that we did not know
before. Symptom formation in other affections besides phobias,
conversion hysteria and compulsion neurosis for the sake of comparison,
promises nothing---too little is known of them. Even from the comparison
of these three neuroses there arises a difficult task which cannot be
put off. In all three the destruction of the Oedipus complex is the
exit; in all, we assume, castration fear is the motif of the ego
striving. But only in the phobias does such fear come to the surface, is
admitted. What becomes of the fear in the two other affections, how has
the ego spared itself this fear? The problem becomes more difficult when
we think of the above mentioned possibility that the fear emerges in the
course of disturbed libido investment by a sort of agitation. Further,
does it stand fast that castration fear is the sole motif of repression
(or defense)? If one thinks of the neuroses of women, one must doubt it,
for as surely the castration complex may be found in them, one can
hardly speak of castration fear in the proper sense if castration is
already completed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII.
A Further Consideration of Infantile Zoöphobia
Let us return to the infantile zoöphobias, for we understand them better
than all of the others. Here the ego must intercede against a libidinous
object investment of the It (that of the positive or negative Oedipus
complex) because it has understood that to yield brings with it the
danger of castration. This we have already discussed and still find
occasion to clear up a doubt which remains from the first discussion.
Are we to assume with little Hans (hence in the case of a positive
Oedipus complex), that it is the tender emotion toward the mother, or
the aggressive one against the father which produces the defense of the
ego? Practically this seems indifferent, especially as the two
promptings condition each other, but a theoretic interest associates
itself in the question because only a tender current toward the mother
can count as purely erotic. The aggressive is essentially dependent on
the destructive impulse and we have always believed that in the neurosis
the ego defends itself against the claims of the libido, not of the
other impulses. We see in fact that in the formation of the phobia the
tender mother association has vanished and is radically removed through
repression, while the symptom (substitute) formation has completed
itself with the aggressive prompting. In the case of the wolf man the
matter is more simple, the repressed prompting is actually an erotic
one, the feminine situation to the father, and with this completes
itself in the symptom formation.
It is to be deplored that after so much work we find still further
difficulties in the comprehension of the fundamental relations, but we
have undertaken to simplify nothing and to conceal nothing. If we could
not see clearly we would at least see keenly the obscurities. That which
stands in our way here is evidently a lack of symmetry in the
development of our knowledge of the impulses. First, we had the
organization of the libido from the oral past, the sadistic-anal to the
genital, and hereby ranked these components of the sex impulse equally.
Later it appears to us that sadism is the representative of another, the
impulse opposite to Eros. The new comprehension of the two groups of
impulses seems to rupture the former construction of the successive
phases of libido organization. But we do not need to discover anew the
helpful information from these difficulties, for these have long been
tendered us and mean that we hardly ever have to do with pure impulses
but always with the alloys of both impulses in varying proportions. The
sadistic object investment also has a claim to be treated as libidinous;
the organization of the libido does not need to be revised, the
aggressive prompting against the father can with the same claim be the
object of repression as the tender one for the mother. In any case we
place the material for later discussion of this possibility to one side,
for repression is a process which has a particular relation to the
genital organization of the libido. The ego grasps after other modes of
defense when it must defend itself against the libido at other stages of
organization, and we proceed. A case like that of little Hans permits us
no decision; here an aggressive prompting is removed by repression but
only after the genital organization has already been reached.
This time we will not allow the relation to fear to escape our
attention. We said that as the ego recognizes the danger of castration
it gives the fear signal and by means of the pleasure-pain principle
inhibits in a manner not understood the threatening investment process
in the It. Simultaneously the phobia formation is completed. The
castration fear receives another object and a disguised expression
(bitten by a horse, devoured by a wolf in place of being castrated by
the father). The substitute formation has two manifest advantages,
first, that it evades an ambivalent conflict, for the father is at the
same time an object of love; and second, that it permits the ego to stop
the development of fear. The fear in the phobia is especially a
facultative one and appears only when its object is the subject of
perception. This is entirely feasible, for only then is the fear
situation at hand. From an absent father one need not fear even
castration. Now when one cannot get the father out of the way the fear
always shows itself and when it will. If the father is replaced by an
animal, he needs only a glimpse, can keep out of the animal's way and
thus be free from danger and fear. Little Hans contracted his ego and
produced an inhibition; he would not go out in order not to see horses.
The little Russian had it still more convenient. It was hardly any self
denial for him to avoid taking up a certain picture-book. If his bad
sister did not hold up before him this image of the wolf he could feel
secure from this fear.
I have formerly ascribed to fear the character of a projection, as I
replaced an internal prompting of danger by an external perceptive
danger. This brings the advantage that man can protect himself against
external danger by flight and by avoidance of the perception, while
flight cannot protect from an internal danger. My observation was not
faulty but it remains superficial. The impulse is not a danger in itself
but only because it brings with it a true external danger, that of
castration. So at the basis of a phobia one external danger is replaced
by another. That the ego in a phobia can withdraw the fear by flight or
inhibition agrees very well with the notion that fear is an affect
signal only and that the economic situation is not really changed.
The fear in a zoöphobia is also an affective reaction of the ego to
danger; the danger which is signalled being that of castration. There is
no other difference from ordinary fear which the ego expresses in danger
situations save that the content remains unknown and is made conscious
only by disguising it.
The same comprehension will, I believe, hold good for the fears of
adults even if the material which the neurosis elaborates is much more
abundant and there are additional factors in symptom formation. At
bottom it is the same thing. The agoraphobe lays a limitation on his ego
in order to escape a danger from impulse. The danger lies in the
temptation to yield to his erotic desires, as a result of which he again
as in childhood, conjures up the fear of castration or something
analogous. As an example I cite the case of a young man who became an
agoraphobe because he feared he would yield to the attractions of
prostitutes and catch syphilis as a punishment.
I well know that many cases show a complicated structure and that many
others can empty repressed promptings into a phobia, but these are only
auxiliary and have for the most part set themselves at a later period in
association with the nucleus of the neurosis. The symptoms of
agoraphobia become complicated thereby, so that the ego does not content
itself with renouncing something; instead it adds something to deprive
the situation of danger. This addendum is usually a regression into
child years (in extreme cases into the uterus, into the time in which it
was protected from the dangers which now menace it) and appears as a
condition under which renunciation can be omitted. Hence the agoraphobe
can walk the streets when, like a little child, he is accompanied by
some one in whom he confides. The same regard may also permit him to go
out alone when he does not exceed a certain distance from his home and
does not go into neighborhoods which are unfamiliar to him and where he
is unknown to people. In the choice of these determinants he shows the
influence of infantile factors which dominate him through his neurosis.
Quite unequivocal but without the element of infantile regression is the
fear of being alone, which is founded on the fear that one will yield to
the temptation of solitary onanism. The condition of infantile
regression is naturally the chronological removal from childhood.
The phobia as a rule originates when under certain circumstances---on
the street, on the railway, when alone---a first attack of fear is
experienced. Fear is then banished but invariably asserts itself when
conditions of protection cannot be controlled. The mechanism of the
phobia does good service as a means of defense and shows a great
inclination to stability. A continuation of the defensive fight, which
is now directed against the symptom, often but not necessarily enters.
What we have learned about fears in connection with phobias remains of
utility in the compulsive neuroses. It is not difficult to reduce the
situation of the compulsive neurosis to that of a phobia. The motif of
all later symptom formation is evidently the fear of the ego of its
super-ego. The hostility of the super-ego is the danger situation from
which the ego must withdraw itself. Here there is no sign of a
projection, the danger is throughout interiorized. But if we ask
ourselves what the ego fears from its super-ego, the notion is forced
upon us that the punishment of the latter is a continuation of the
castration punishment. As the super-ego is really the father who has
been depersonalized, so the fear of the threatened castration by the
father becomes transformed into indefinite social fears, of fear of
conscience. But this fear is hidden, the ego withdraws itself from it
while at the same time it carries out the commands, precautions and
expiations laid upon it. When it is prevented there develops an
extremely penible discomfort which to the patient is the equivalent of
fear. Hence our result runs as follows: Fear is a reaction to the danger
situation and is spared if the ego does something to avoid the situation
or withdraw from it. One might say that the symptoms are created in
order to avoid dangerous situations which are signalized by fear
development. This danger in the cases hitherto discussed was the danger
of castration or of something derived from it.
If fear is the reaction of the ego to danger, we come nearer to
comprehending the traumatic neurosis which so often follows an
experience with danger to life as a direct consequence of life-fear or
death-fear with setting aside of the dependencies of the ego and of
castration. This has happened in connection with most of the observers
of traumatic neuroses during the last war, and it was triumphantly
announced that now we have proofs that imperilling the impulse to
self-preservation can cause a neurosis without any participation of
sexuality and without regard to the complicated assumptions of
psycho-analysis. It is, in fact, extremely unfortunate that there is not
a single utilizable example of an analysis of a traumatic neurosis. Not
because of the contradiction of the etiological significance of
sexuality---for this has long ago been abolished by the introduction of
narcism which brings the libidinous fixation of the ego in a series with
the object investments and emphasizes the libidinous nature of
self-preservation---but because through the absence of these analyses we
have neglected a most valuable opportunity to draw decisive conclusions
over the relation between fear and symptom formation. From all that we
know of the structure of the simpler neuroses of daily life it is highly
improbable that a neurosis can occur only through the objective fact of
peril without participation of the deeper unconscious strata of the
psychic apparatus. In the unconscious, moreover, there is nothing at
hand which can give content to our conception of the destruction of
life. Castration can be visualized through the daily experience of
parting with the intestinal contents and through the loss of the
maternal breast through weaning; but anything like death has never been
experienced, or if so, like a swoon, has left no trace behind which
could be demonstrated. Therefore I hold fast to the supposition that
death-fear is to be comprehended as an analogue of castration fear and
that the situation upon which the ego reacts is the abandonment by the
protecting super-ego---the power of fate---whereby the assurance against
all danger has an end. Besides, there comes into consideration that in
the experiences which lead to traumatic neurosis external protection
from irritation is broken through and over-large quantities of
excitation appear in the psychic apparatus; so that the second
possibility is present that not only does fear fail to signalize the
affect but the situation is newly generated from the economic
conditions.
Through the last remark that the ego through its regularly repeated loss
of objects is prepared for castration, we have obtained a new conception
of fear. Having regarded it hitherto as the affect signal of danger, it
now appears to us often in connection with castration danger as the
reaction to a loss, a separation. While many things may speak against
this conclusion, as is at once apparent, a very noteworthy agreement
must strike us. The first fear experience of mankind is birth, and this
signifies objectively separation from the mother, which may be likened
to castration of the mother (according to the equation child equals
penis). Now it would be very gratifying if fear should be repeated at
every subsequent separation as a symbol of separation; but unfortunately
another valuation of this agreement stands in the way, for subjectively
birth is not experienced as a separation from the mother, for to the
narcistic fetus the mother is quite unknown as a separate object.
Another consideration will be that the affect reaction to a separation
is known and that we feel pain and grief but not anxiety or fear.
Indeed, we recall that we have not understood why grief should be so
painful.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII.
An Analysis of Fear
It is time to reflect. We seek obviously for insight into the nature of
fear, for an "either---or" which will separate truth from error. This,
however, is difficult, for fear itself is not easily comprehended.
Hitherto we have attained nothing but contradictions between which no
choice is possible. I now propose something different. Without bias we
will assemble everything which may be said of fear and at the same time
give up the expectation of a close synthesis.
Fear or anxiety in the first place is something felt and we call it an
affective state, although we do not know what an affect is. As a feeling
it obviously is of the painful type but this does not exhaust its
quality. Not every painful sensation is fear, for there are others
(tensions, pain, grief), so that as a painful quality fear must have
something special. We may ask: Is it possible to comprehend differences
between these various painful affects? From the sensation of fear we can
always deduce something. Its pain has a special note and while we cannot
prove this it is probable and would not be striking. From this peculiar
quality so difficult to isolate we note the fear of certain somatic
sensations which we refer to different organs. We are not interested
here in the physiology of fear and will be satisfied to isolate
individual representatives of this sensation and the most frequent and
evident have to do with the respiratory organs and the heart. They are
to us proofs that the motor innervation (discharge processes) take part
in the totality of fear. Hence the analysis of the fear stage gives us
(1) a specific pain character; (2) a discharge reaction; and (3)
perception of the same. Points 2 and 3 at once give us a distinction
between fear on the one hand and grief and pain.
In the two latter there is no motor expression; where they are at hand
they separate themselves distinctly not as constituents of the whole but
as consequents or reactions. Fear is then a special state of pain with
discharge reactions along definite paths. According to our general views
we shall believe that fear is based on increased excitation which on the
one hand gives it its character of pain and on the other relieves itself
through discharge. But this purely physiological comprehension will
hardly suffice. We are tempted to assume the existence of a historical
factor which unites the sensations with the innervations. In other
words, the state of fear is the reproduction of an experience which
contains the conditions of an increase of irritation and leads off along
certain paths whereby the pain of fear receives its specific character.
As such a visualized experience birth in mankind presents itself, and
therefore we are inclined to see in a fear state a reproduction of the
birth trauma.
At the same time we have not maintained that fear is an exception in
this respect as compared with other affective states. We believe that
other affects are also reproductions of old experiences which are
important to life and perhaps preindividual, and we adduce them as
general, typical, congenital hysterical attacks in comparison with late
and individually acquired attacks of hysterical neurosis, the genesis
and importance of which have through analysis become distinct. Naturally
it would be very desirable to be able to carry this notion out for a
series of other affects in a demonstrable fashion but at present we are
far removed from this prospect.
Reference of fear back to the birth trauma must defend itself against
objections which are close at hand. Fear is probably a reaction
experienced by all animals although only the mammals experience labor
and it is questionable whether the latter is a trauma with them. There
is therefore fear without the prototype of birth. But this objection is
outside the limits between biology and psychology. Just because fear has
a biologically indispensable function to fulfil, as a reaction to the
condition of danger it may be arranged in different fashions for
different creatures. We do not therefore know whether in the creatures
far removed from man there is the same content in sensations and
innervations as in mankind. This does not, however, prevent fear from
being a prototype of the birth process in man. If this be the structure
and origin of fear, a further question is, What is its function? Under
what circumstances is it reproduced? The answer seems near at hand and
convincing. Fear is a reaction to a state of danger and is reproduced
regularly when such a state reappears.
There is something else to note. The innervation of the original fear
state was probably characterized by feeling and was purposeful, quite as
with the muscle actions of the first hysterical attack. If one would
explain the hysterical attack one need only to seek the situation in
which the movements concerned were part of an authorized action. So
probably during labor the direction of the innervation upon the
respiratory organs prepares the activity of the lungs, the acceleration
of the heart-beat works against the poisoning of the blood. This
efficiency naturally fails in the later reproduction of the fear state
as an affect, as it is also missed in the repeated hysterical seizure.
If, then, the individual engages in a new situation of danger it can
readily become unsuitable to answer by a fear state, the reaction to a
former danger, in place of that of the now adequate reaction. The
utility again appears when the danger situation is recognized as
approaching and as signalized by the outbreak of fear. The fear can then
be disposed of through suitable measures. Hence two possibilities
separate themselves in the appearance of fear: one, unsuitable, in a new
situation of danger, and the other suitable for signalling and
preventing danger.
But what is a danger? In the act of birth there exists an objective
danger to the preservation of life; we know what it imports in reality,
but psychologically it tells us nothing. The danger from birth has as
yet no psychic content. We certainly may not presuppose that the fetus
has any kind of knowledge that it is in danger of annihilation. The
fetus can do no more than perceive a wholesale disturbance in the
economy of its narcistic libido. Large quantities of excitations
penetrate to it and generate a new series of unpleasant situations; many
organs are forced to heightened fixations constituting a prelude to the
soon to begin object-investments. What among these find evaluation as a
characteristic of a danger situation?
Unfortunately we know far too little of the psychic comprehension of the
new-born to answer this question directly. I cannot even concede the
utility of the above depiction. It is easy to say that the new-born will
repeat the fear affect in all situations which recall to it the event of
birth. However, the decisive point remains, what is recalled, and how.
Hardly anything remains but to study the occasions in which the nursling
or older child shows itself to be prepared for fear. In his book on the
birth trauma, Rank[5] makes an energetic effort to demonstrate the
relations of the earliest phobias of the child to the impression of the
event of birth, but I do not regard this as fortunate.
One may make two objections to this view: First, that it rests on a
presupposition that the infant has definite sense impressions,
especially those of a visual nature, received during birth and renewed
in memory of the birth trauma, thus producing the fear reaction. This
assumption is fully unproved and devoid of probability, and it is not
credible that the child at birth has anything beyond tactile and general
sensibility. If it later shows fear of small animals as they vanish into
holes or emerge from the same, Rank explains this reaction through the
perception of an analogy which, however, could not become striking to a
child. Second, Rank, in the evaluation of this later fear situation
according to the requirement of the recollection of the happy
intrauterine life or of its traumatic interruption, leaves the door open
to any kind of arbitrary interpretation. Individual cases of child fear
are directly opposed to the application of Rank's principle. If the
infant is brought into darkness and solitude we should expect that it
would accept this restoration of the intrauterine situation as
gratification. If the fact that it reacts to this very situation with
fear is referred back to the recollection of the disturbance of its
happiness by birth one can no longer ignore the forced character of the
interpretation.
I must draw the conclusion that the earliest child phobias do not permit
of a direct transference to the impression made by the act of birth, and
thus far they have withdrawn themselves from explanation. A certain
predisposition to fear is unmistakable in the nursling. It is not at its
worst directly after birth, to decrease slowly, but appears during
psychic evolution and persists through a certain period of childhood.
When such early phobias extend beyond this period they awake the
suspicion of a neurotic disturbance, although their relationship to the
later distinct neuroses of childhood is obscure.
Only a few cases of the expression of child fear are intelligible to us
and we must limit ourselves to them. When the child is alone, in the
dark, and when it finds a stranger in place of its mother, all three
states reduce themselves to one condition, absence of the loved and
longed for person. But from here on the way to understanding fear and to
reconciling the contradictions which seem associated, is free.
The memory picture of the person longed for is certainly intense,
probably at first hallucinatorily fixed. But this has no consequence and
now it appears as if this longing changes to fear. There is exactly the
impression as if this fear is the expression of perplexity, as if the
undeveloped creature knew nothing better than to start with this
yearning fixation. The fear appears as a reaction to missing the object
and there is forced on us the analogy that castration fear has also the
content of separation from a highly prized object and that the original
fear (the primary fear of birth) arises from separation from the mother.
The next consideration leads to the emphasis of the loss of the object.
If the nursling longs to behold the mother it is only because it knows
from experience that she satisfies all its requirements without delay.
The situation which it evaluates as fear and against which it would be
assured is one of unsatisfaction, the increase in the requirement
tension, against which it is powerless. I mean that from this point of
view on, everything is arranged; the situation of unsatisfaction attains
a painful height from the mass of stimulus and does not find itself
overmastered by psychic employment or discharge. For the nursling this
must be analogous to the experience of birth, the repetition of the
danger situation. Common to both is the economic disturbance through the
increase of the mass of stimulation demanding discharge.
This factor is the essential nucleus of the danger. In both cases the
fear reaction appears, having shown itself already in the nursling as
useful, since the direction of the discharge upon the respiratory and
vocal musculature summons the mother, just as formerly the lung activity
did away with internal irritation. From its birth the child does not
need to maintain more than this characterization of danger.
With the experience that an external object comprehended through
perception can make an end to the dangerous warning situation, the
content of danger now displaces itself from the economic situation to
its condition, the loss of the object. To miss the mother is now the
danger at the appearance of which the child gives the fear signal, even
before the economic situation has appeared. This transformation
signifies the first great advance in the impulse toward
self-preservation and at the same time it includes the transition from
the automatically unwilled new origin of fear to its intentional
reproduction as the signal of danger.
In both respects, as an automatic phenomenon and as a rescuing signal,
fear shows itself as the product of the psychic helplessness of the
nursling which is the self-evident counterpart of its biological
helplessness. The striking coincidence that birth fear as well as
nursling fear recognize the condition of separation from the mother
needs no psychological explanation. It is explained biologically simply
enough from the fact that the mother has soothed all the demands of the
child before birth and partly continues to do so after delivery.
Intrauterine life and earliest childhood represent far more of a
continuum than the striking censure of the act of birth allows us to
believe. The psychic mother-object replaces to the child the biological
fetal situation. We must therefore not forget that in intrauterine life
the mother was no object and that at that time there was no object.
It is easily seen that in this connection there is no room for reacting
off the birth trauma and that another function of fear as a signal for
avoiding danger is not to be found. The fear condition of the loss of
the object carries us still further. The next transformation of fear,
the castration fear which develops in the phallic phase, is a fear of
separation bound to the same condition. The danger here is separation
from the genitals. A thought train from Ferenczi which seems fully
justified allows us to recognize distinctly the line of the connection
with the former content of the danger situation. The high narcistic
valuation of the penis can rest on this, that the possession of this
organ contains the danger of a reunion with the mother (mother
substitute) in the act of coitus. Deprivation of this member is as good
as a fresh separation from the mother, thus again indicating an
unpleasurable requirement tension (as in birth) to be delivered
helpless. This requirement, the increase of which is feared, is,
however, only a specialized one, that of the genital libido, and is no
longer an optional one as in the nursing period. I add here that the
fancy of return within the mother's womb is the substitute coitus of the
impotent (inhibited by the castration threat). In Ferenczi's sense one
may say that the individual who will allow himself to represent the
return into the womb with his genital organ, replaces this organ
regressively by his entire person.
The progress in the development of the child, the increase of its
independence, the acute separation of his psychic apparatus in several
instances, the appearance of new needs cannot remain without influence
on the content of the danger situation. We have followed this
transformation from the loss of the mother object to castration and see
the next step caused by the might of the super-ego. With the
depersonalization of the parental instance, from which one fears the
castration, the danger becomes more definite. Castration fear develops
into conscience fear and social fear. It is now no longer easy to say
what is feared. The formula of separation, exclusion from the herd,
applies only to that later portion of the super-ego which has developed
from leaning upon social prototypes, and not to the nucleus of the
super-ego, which corresponds to an introjected parental instance. More
generally expressed, it is the anger, the punishment of the super-ego,
the loss of love from that side which the ego values as danger and
answers with the fear signal. As the last transformation of this fear of
the super-ego is the fear of death (life), fear of the projection of the
super-ego into the power of destiny as it appears.
Formerly I placed a certain value on the presentation that it is the
fixation withdrawn in repression which the application experiences as
conducting off the fear. This view now seems to me hardly worth while.
The difference lies here, that formerly I believed that fear always
arose automatically through an economic process, while the present
conception of fear as a signal intended to influence the pleasure-pain
factor makes us independent of this economic compulsion. There is, of
course, nothing to be said against the assumption that the ego utilizes
this very energy which is set free in the diversion of repression to
arouse the affect, but it becomes unimportant with what portion of the
energy this takes place.
Another proposition which I have expressed now demands retesting in the
light of our new comprehension. This is the assertion that the ego is
the actual seat of fear.
In my opinion this will be shown to be correct. We have no occasion to
impute to the super-ego any kind of an expression of fear. If, however,
one speaks of a fear of the It there is no contradiction implied but one
must correct a clumsy expression. Fear is an affective state which
naturally can be felt only by the ego. The It cannot have fear like the
ego; it has no organization and is unable to judge a danger situation.
On the other hand, it is a frequent occurrence for processes to be
prepared or completed in the It which give occasion to the ego for the
development of fear. In fact, the probably earliest repressions with the
majority of the later ones are motivated through fear of the ego towards
individual processes in the It. We differentiate here, again with good
reason, the two processes which occur in the It. One activates the
danger situation for the ego and moves it to give the fear signal for
inhibition; and the other prepares in the It a situation analogous to
the birth trauma, in which it comes automatically to a fear reaction.
The two are brought nearer to each other when one emphasizes that the
second corresponds to the first and original danger situation; the
first, however, is one of the later ones derived from its fear
conditions. Or, referred to affections which actually occur, that the
second process is realized in the etiology of the actual neuroses while
the first remains characteristic for the psychoneuroses.
We now see that we do not need to depreciate former communications but
merely to bring them into association with the more recent. It is not to
be denied that in abstinence, or abusive disturbance in the course of
sexual excitement, resulting in a diversion of the same from its psychic
elaboration, fear may originate directly from the libido; that is, that
condition of helplessness of the ego against an over great requirement
tension is produced, which as in birth proceeds from fear development.
We see that upon the foundation of these actual neuroses psychoneuroses
may easily develop; that is to say, the ego makes an effort to spare the
fear, which it has learned to keep for a time in suspense and bind it by
symptom formation. Probably analysis of the traumatic war neuroses,
which term indeed comprises very different affections, would show that a
number of these share the characteristics of actual neuroses.
As we presented the development of the different danger situations from
the original birth prototype, it is far from our intention to maintain
that every later fear condition merely sets the predecessor out of
power. The progress of ego development contributes indeed to the
depreciation of the former fear situation and shoves it aside, so that
one may say that a certain fear condition must be assigned as adequate
to a definite age of development. The danger of psychic helplessness
fits in with the time of life of the immaturity of the ego, just as the
danger of loss of the object belongs to the early years of childhood,
the castration danger to the phallic stage, and fear of the super-ego to
the period of latency. But it can also happen that all these danger
situations and fear conditions coexist side by side and can cause the
ego to react with fear at periods later than those adequate or that
several of them may step into activity simultaneously. Possibly closer
relations may exist between the actual danger situation and the form of
the subsequent neurosis.[6]
In an earlier portion of these investigations we came upon the
importance of the castration danger in more than one neurotic affection,
and we imparted the warning not to overemphasize this factor, for it
might not work out in the neuroses to which women are known to be more
predisposed. We now see that we are not in danger if we explain
castration fear as the sole motif for the defensive processes which lead
to the neurosis. In another place I have explained how the development
of the little girl is directed by the castration complex to a tender
object fixation. It is exactly in women that the danger situation of the
loss of the object appears to be the most efficacious. We may adduce the
small modification in their fear condition, that it is no longer a
matter of missing or of the real loss of the object but of the loss of
love by reason of the object. As it is certain that hysteria has a great
affinity for femaleness as the compulsive neurosis has for maleness, the
presumption would be that the fear condition of the loss of love plays a
rôle in hysteria which is analogous to that of castration threat in the
phobias, and the fear of the super-ego in the compulsive neuroses.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IX.
The Relation Between Symptom Formation and Fear Development
What now remains is the treatment of the relations between symptom
formation and fear development. Two opinions on this point seem widely
diffused. The first calls the fear itself a symptom of the neurosis, the
other believes in a much more intimate relation between the two.
According to this, all symptom formation is undertaken in order to
escape fear; the symptoms bind the psychic energy that otherwise would
be led off as fear, so that fear is the basic phenomenon and chief
problem of the neurosis.
The at least partial justification of this second view is shown by
striking examples. When one has accompanied an agoraphobe into the
street and then leaves him to himself he produces in him an attack of
fear. If one hinder a compulsive neurotic from washing his hands after a
contact, he becomes the prey of an almost unbearable fear. It is
therefore clear that the conditions of being accompanied and of washing
had the intention and also the result of preventing fear.
In this sense every inhibition which the ego lays on itself may be
called a symptom. As we have referred the fear development to the danger
situation we would prefer to say that the symptoms have been formed to
withdraw the ego from the danger situation. If symptom formation is
prevented the danger actually appears, that is, a situation results
which is analogous to birth, in which the ego finds itself helpless
against the constantly growing claim of the impulse---the earliest and
most primitive of the fear conditions. For our view the relationship
between fear and symptom is less close than has been assumed because we
have interpolated between the two elements the danger situation. We
might add supplementarily that fear development introduces symptom
formation, yes, that it is a necessary presupposition of the same; for
if the ego would not arouse the pleasure-pain factor by fear
development, then it would not obtain the power of holding back the
danger threatening process prepared in the It. Here the tendency is
unmistakable of limiting itself to the smallest mass of fear
development, to use fear only to give the signal; otherwise one would
obtain the pain which is threatened by the impulse process but would
feel it only where there would be no result according to the intention
of the pleasure principle, which, however, happens often enough in the
neuroses.
The symptom formation, then, has the actual result of abolishing the
danger situation. It has two sides, one which is hidden from us and
prepares in the It that alteration by means of which the ego is
withdrawn from danger, while the other, turned toward us, shows what is
created at the place of the influenced impulse process---the formation
of the substitute.
We should, however, express ourselves more correctly if we ascribed to
the defensive process what we have just said of the symptom formation
and apply the term symptom formation as a synonym of substitute
formation. It now seems clear that the defensive process is analogous to
flight, through which the ego withdraws itself from danger which
threatens from without, that it represents an attempt at flight from an
impulse danger. The criticisms against this comparison will aid us in a
further explanation. First let it be objected that loss of the object
(loss of love in connection with the object) and the threat of
castration are likewise dangers which threaten from without, like a
beast of prey, hence not danger from impulses. But the case is not the
same. The wolf will probably attack us wherever we may happen to
encounter him; but the beloved person will not withdraw love and
castration will not menace us if we do not nourish within us definite
feelings and intentions. So if these instinct stimuli become conditions
of external danger and thereby themselves dangerous we can combat the
external danger by measures against internal dangers. In the zoöphobias
the danger seems to be felt as a purely external danger and also in the
symptom there is experienced a displacement externally. In the
compulsive neurosis the danger is far more interiorized, the share of
the fear of the super-ego, the social fear, is represented by an
internal substitution for an external danger, while the other share, the
fear of conscience, is throughout endopsychic.
A second objection is that in attempt at flight from a threatened
external danger we do nothing more than increase the space between us
and the danger. We do not place ourselves in defense against the danger,
do not seek to change anything in the same, as in the other cases, when
we charge on the wolf with a cudgel or shoot at him with a gun. The
defense process, however, seems to do more than what corresponds to
flight. It attacks the threatening course of the process, somehow
represses it, diverts its aim and thereby renders it powerless. This
objection seems absolute, we must take it into account. We think it
would be as if there were defense processes which one could with justice
compare to an effort at flight, because the ego defends itself much more
actively in others and undertakes energetic counter-efforts. If the
comparison of the defense with flight is not disturbed through the
circumstance that the ego and the It impulse are parts of the same
organization, not detached instances like the wolf and the child, every
kind of behavior of the ego must influence the impulse process to change
it.
Through the study of fear conditions we must look at the behavior of the
ego in defense in a so-to-speak rational clarification. Every danger
situation corresponds to a certain period of life or phase of
development of the psychic apparatus and seems justified for it. The
early child nature is actually not equipped to master psychically the
large quantities of excitation which reach it from without. At a certain
period of life it is actually of the most importance that the persons on
which it depends do not withdraw their tender care. When the boy feels
the powerful father as his rival for the mother, becomes aware of his
aggressive inclinations against him and his sexual intentions toward the
mother, he has the right to fear him and the fear of punishment can
through phylogenetic strengthening be expressed as castration fear. With
his entry into social relations fear of the super-ego, conscience,
necessity, the omission of these factors, become the source of severe
conflicts and dangers. But just here a new problem is added. Suppose we
attempt to replace for a time the fear affect through another, the pain
affect. We hold it as normal throughout that the girl of four years
cries painfully when she breaks her doll, at six years when her teacher
rebukes her, at sixteen when her sweetheart loses interest in her, at
twenty-five when she buries her child. All of these pain conditions have
their time relationship and afterwards become void, except the last
which persist through life. It would startle us if the girl as wife and
mother would weep over damage to some trifle, although the neurotic
behaves in just this way. In their psychic apparatus all instances for
the mastery of irritation have long been completed within wide limits;
they are sufficiently grown up to be able to satisfy most of their
needs; they have long known that castration is no longer utilized as a
punishment, nevertheless they behave as if the old danger situations
still persist, and hold fast to all former fear conditions.
The answer to this will turn out to be somewhat prolix. It will above
all have to sift the facts. In a large number of cases the old fear
conditions will actually fall out after they have caused neurotic
reactions. The phobias of little children---of being alone, darkness and
strangers, which may be termed almost normal---mostly pass off in later
years and are outgrown, as we say of many other disturbances of
childhood. The so numerous animal phobias have the same fate, and many
of the conversion hysterias of childhood years find no later continuity.
Ceremonial in the latent period is an uncommonly frequent occurrence;
only a very slight percentage of these cases develop later into a full
compulsion neurosis. The child neuroses---as far as our experience
extends among the city children of the white race which is subjected to
the high requirements of culture---are regular episodes of development
although there is still too little attention granted them. One misses
the signs of childhood neurosis not at all in an adult neurotic, while
by no means do all of the children who show them become neurotics later.
Hence in the course of ripening, fear conditions must be given up and
danger situations have lost their significance. Moreover, it happens
that some of these danger situations preserve themselves in later times
so that their fear condition is modified with time. In this way
castration fear is preserved under the mask of syphiliphobia after one
has experienced that castration is no longer the punishment for allowing
full play to sexual lusts although freedom of impulse threatens severe
affections. Other fear conditions are not especially doomed to perish
but accompany man through life, as fear of the super-ego. The neurotic
is differentiated from the normal by the fact that he immoderately
heightens the reaction to these dangers. Again, no sufficient protection
is offered even to adulthood that the original traumatic situations may
not return; there should be a limit for every man beyond which his
psychic apparatus fails to master the disposal of the importunate
amounts of excitation.
These small corrections cannot possibly have the determination to shake
the fact that is here discussed, the fact that so many individuals
remain infantile in their behavior to danger and do not overcome ancient
fear conditions. To dispute this would be to deny the fact of neurosis,
for such persons are called neurotics. But how is this possible? Why are
not all neuroses episodes of development which are concluded with the
attainment of the next phase? Whence the element of permanence in these
reactions to danger? Whence the advantage which the fear affect seems to
enjoy over all other affects that it alone calls forth reactions which
separate themselves as abnormal from the others and oppose themselves as
unsuitable to the stream of life? In other words we unexpectedly find
ourselves once more in the presence of the so often put vexed question,
whence comes the neurosis, what it its final, its special motif? After
decades of analytical investigation this problem looms before us, as
unsolved as in the beginning.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
X.
Theoretical Considerations of the Birth Trauma
Fear is the reaction to danger. However, one can not reject the idea
that it is connected with the nature of danger if the fear affect can
force an exceptional situation in the psychic economy. But dangers are
in general human and the same for all individuals; what we need and do
not have at our disposal is a factor which makes intelligible to us the
selection of the individual who can subject the fear affect despite its
strangeness to the normal psychic management, or determines who must
fail at this task. I see before me two efforts to uncover such a factor;
it is comprehensible that all such efforts may expect a sympathetic
reception for they promise redress for a tormenting need. Both of these
attempts supplement each other because they attack the problem from
opposite sides. The first was undertaken more than ten years ago by
Alfred Adler, who maintained---reduced to its inmost nucleus---that in
those individuals who are unable to master the task imposed by danger,
their organ inferiority makes the difficulties too great. If the maxim
_simplex sigillum veri_ is true one must greet such a solution as a
redemption. But on the contrary the criticism of the past decade has
proven conclusively the complete insufficiency of this explanation,
which moreover puts itself outside of the entire superstructure of facts
uncovered by psychoanalysis.
The second essay was undertaken in 1923 by Otto Rank in his book "The
Birth Trauma." It would be unjust to place it on a par with Adler's
effort save in the connection made above, for it rests on the foundation
of psychoanalysis and continues its course of thought and should be
recognized as a legitimate effort toward the solution of the analytic
problem. In the relation given between the individual and danger, Rank
diverts from the organ weakness of the individual and towards the
variable intensity of the danger. Birth is the first danger situation
and the economic disturbance produced by it is the prototype of the fear
reaction. We have already followed the line of development which unites
this first danger situation and fear condition with all later ones and
have seen that all preserve something in common, for all in a certain
sense indicate separation from the mother---at first only in a
biological respect, later in the sense of the direct loss of the object,
and finally in the indirect loss of the same. The discovery of this
great association is the undisputed service of the Rank construction.
Now the birth situation concerns the individual with a difference in
intensity; with the severity of the trauma there is a variation in the
violence of the fear reaction and, according to Rank, the initial volume
of the fear development should determine whether the individual will or
will not acquire mastery---whether he is to become normal or neurotic.
The criticism of the whole Rank conception is not our task here---only
the test of its utility for the solution of our problem. The formula of
Rank's that neurotics are those who cannot react off the over-strong
birth trauma is in theory vulnerable in a high degree. We do not know
just what is meant by the reacting off of a trauma. If understood
literally one comes to the untenable conclusion that the neurotic is the
nearer well the more frequently and intensely he can reproduce the fear
affect. Because of this contradiction with reality I have in due course
given up the theory of reacting off which plays so great a rôle in
catharsis. Emphasis of the variable strength of the birth trauma leaves
no room for justifiable etiological claim of the hereditary
constitution. This is, of course, an organic factor which behaves toward
the constitution as a contingency, and is itself dependent on many
influences which may be called contingent, as from timely assistance in
labor.
The Rank doctrine has left constitutional as well as phylogenetic
factors out of consideration altogether. If one will prepare space for
the significance of the constitution, perhaps through a modification of
the same, it would be much more to the point to know how prolifically
the individual reacts to the variable intensity of the birth trauma.
Thus one deprives the theory of its significance and restricts the newly
introduced factor to an accessory rôle. The decision as to the fate of
the neurosis lies, then, in another and again an unknown territory.
The fact that mankind has the birth process in common with other mammals
and at the same time has the preference of a particular disposition to
neuroses over the other mammals will hardly attune favorably with the
Rank theory. The chief objection, however, remains that it is in the air
and does not rest on an assured foundation. There have been no good
studies as to whether severe and protracted labor coincides unmistakably
with the development of neurosis and if children thus born show the
phenomena of early infantile fears longer or more strongly than others.
If one could show that precipitate labors which were easy for the mother
might possibly possess the significance of severe traumas for the child,
the demand would still remain that labors which lead to asphyxia must
allow the alleged consequences to be recognized with certainty. It
appears an advantage to the Rank etiology that it supplies a factor
which is accessible to testing with the material of experiment, but as
long as such a trial has never yet been actually undertaken it is
impossible to judge of the value.
On the other hand I cannot join in the opinion that the Rank theory
opposes the etiological significance of the sexual impulse hitherto
recognized in psychoanalysis; for this refers only to the relation of
the individual to the danger situation and fortunately leaves open the
supposition that whoever cannot master the original dangers must also
fail in the later developing sexual situations and thereby be forced
into a neurosis.
I therefore do not believe that the Rank essay has brought to us the
answer to the question of the foundation of the neurosis and I think it
cannot yet be decided, no matter how great the contribution to the
subject it may comprise. If the investigations over the influence of
severe labor on the disposition to neurosis fall out negative, this
contribution must be valued but slightly. It is to be lamented that the
need for a tangible and uniform final cause of nervousness still remains
unsatisfied. The ideal case after which the physician probably longs
to-day should be the bacillus which can be isolated and cultured pure
and of which inoculation into a given individual will cause the disease
in question. Or, to be less fanciful, the presentation of a chemical
substance the exhibition of which may both produce and abolish definite
neuroses. But probability speaks against such solutions of the problem.
Psychoanalysis leads to less simple and less satisfactory information. I
have here to repeat only what has long been known and have nothing new
to add. If the ego succeeds in protecting itself against a dangerous
impulse, for example, by the process of repression, it has indeed
inhibited and injured this portion of the It but has at the same time
given up a portion of its own independence and renounced some of its own
sovereignty. This follows from the nature of repression which is an
attempt at flight. The repressed content is now "free as a bird,"
excluded from the great organization of the ego, subjected only to the
laws that reign in the realm of the unconscious. If the danger situation
alters, so that the ego has no motif to repel a new impulse analogous to
the repressed content, the consequences of the ego limitation are
obvious. The course of the more recent prompting completes itself under
the influence of automatism---I prefer to say of the compulsion to
repetition---it wanders the same way as the former repressed content as
if the conquered danger situation still persisted. The fixing factor of
the repression is therefore the repetition compulsion of the unconscious
It which normally is abolished only by the freely mobile function of the
ego. Now it may at times succeed to the ego to recapture the repression
which it itself had arranged and to regain its influence over the
prompting and to direct the course of the new prompting in the direction
of the altered danger situation. The fact is that this so often fails of
success, that it cannot make its repressions regressive. Quantitative
relations may be authoritative for the outcome of this combat and in
many cases we gain the impression that the decision is compulsive; the
regressive attraction of the repressed instinct and the strength of
repression are so great that the more recent prompting can only follow
the repetition compulsion. In other cases we perceive the contribution
of another play of force; the attraction of the repressed prototype is
fortified through repulsion from the side of the actual difficulties
which are opposed by the different course of the more recent promptings.
That this is the origin of the investment of the repression and the
maintenance of the no longer actual danger situation, finds its proof in
the modest although theoretically hardly overestimable fact of analytic
therapy. If we furnish aid to the ego in the analysis which will enable
it to abolish its repressions it regains power over the repressed It and
can allow the impulses to run their course as if the old danger
situations no longer existed. What we thus attain is in harmony with
other powers of our medical performance. As a rule our therapy must be
satisfied with bringing about the good result more rapidly, more
trustworthily and with little outlay, which under favorable conditions
might have come about spontaneously.
The previous considerations teach us that there are quantitative
relations which are not directly visible, comprehended only through
inference, which decide whether the old danger situation is held fast,
whether the repressions of the ego are maintained, and whether or not
there is a continuation of the child neuroses. Of the factors which take
part in the causation of the neuroses, which have created the conditions
under which the psychic forces measure themselves with another, there
are three which become conspicuous for our comprehension---one biologic,
one phylogenetic and one purely psychologic. The first mentioned is the
long drawn out helplessness of the small human child. The intrauterine
existence of man seems relatively shorter than that of most of the
animals and he is sent into the world less apt. As a result the
influence of the external world is strengthened, the differentiation of
the ego from the It is precociously promoted, the dangers of the outer
world are increased in importance and the value of the object, which can
alone protect from these dangers and replace the lost intrauterine life,
is greatly enhanced. This biologic factor prepares the first danger
situation and creates the need to be loved which will never more leave
the human subject.
The second, phylogenetic, factor is only inferred by us; a very notable
fact of libido development has forced us to assume it. We find that the
sexual life of mankind is not developed steadily from beginning to
maturity, as in most of the nearest related animals, but that after an
early bloom up to the fifth year it experiences an energetic
interruption, after which it again becomes prominent with puberty and
annexes itself to the infantile fractions. We think that something
important to the destiny of mankind must have happened which this
interruption of sexual development has left behind as a historical
precipitate. The pathogenic significance of this factor is apparent from
the fact that most of the impulse claims of this infantile sexuality are
treated by the ego as dangers and repulsed, so that the later sexual
stirrings of puberty, which should be normal to the ego, are in danger
of subjugation to the attraction of infantile prototypes and follow
these in repression. Here we abut against the most direct etiology of
the neuroses. It is noteworthy that the early contact with the claims of
sexuality works upon the ego in the same manner as precocious contact
with the external world.
The third or psychologic factor is to be found in the incompleteness of
our psychic apparatus which is connected with its differentiation into
the ego and It, hence in the last analysis it goes back to the influence
of the external world. Through regard for the dangers of reality the ego
is forced to oppose itself against certain promptings of the It and to
treat them as dangers. The ego, however, cannot defend itself against
inner promptings so efficaciously as against a fragment of alien
reality. Itself intimately connected with the It, it can only defend
itself against the danger of the impulse while contracting its own
organization and allows itself to fall into symptom formation as a
substitute for its injury of the impulse. If the crowding of the
repulsed impulse is then renewed there result for the ego all of the
difficulties which we know as the neurotic affection.
I must believe that our insight into the nature and causation of the
neuroses cannot go further at present.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XI.
Addenda
In the course of these discussions various themes have been touched upon
which it was necessary to pass over for the time being and which should
now be assembled in order to maintain attention to the part of the book
to which they have claim.
Modifications of Views Previously Expressed
_Resistance and Counter-investment_
It is an important bit of the theory of repression that it does not
present a solitary process but requires a persistent outlay. When the
latter fails the repressed impulse, which receives the continuous influx
from its sources, will the next time strike out in the same path from
which it had been forced; the repression would be carried to its
termination or must be repeated indefinitely. Hence there follows from
the continuous nature of the prompting the demand upon the ego in order
to assure its defense reaction through a permanent outlay. This action
for the protection of the repression is that which we feel in the
therapeutic activity as resistance, and resistance presupposes what I
have designated as counter-fixation. Such counter-fixation is tangible
in compulsion neurosis and appears here as ego alteration, as reaction
formation in the ego, through strengthening of that situation which is
the antithesis of the repressing impulse direction (sympathy,
conscientiousness, purity). These reaction formations of the compulsive
neurosis are always exaggerations of normal character traits developed
in the period of latency. It is far more difficult to demonstrate
counter-investment in hysteria although according to theoretic
expectation it ought to be equally indispensable. Here likewise there is
a certain amount of ego alteration unmistakable, through reaction
formation, in many relations so striking that they force themselves on
the attention as the chief symptom of the condition. In such a fashion,
for example, is the ambivalence conflict of hysteria solved; the hate
toward a loved person is held down through an excess of tenderness for
him and anxiety about him. One must, however, make prominent a
distinction against the compulsive neurosis where such reaction
formations do not show the general nature of character traits but
restrict themselves to quite special relations. The hysterical woman,
for example, who treats with excessive tenderness the children which
fundamentally she hates does not on the whole become more ready for love
than other women nor more tender toward other children. The reaction
formation in hysteria holds tenaciously to a definite object and does
not elevate itself to a general disposition of the ego. For the
compulsive neurosis this generalization is characteristic---the
loosening of object relations and the displacement of the choice of
object.
Another kind of counter-investment seems more suitable to the
peculiarity of hysteria. The repressed prompting can become activated
from two sides (newly invested), first, through a strengthening of the
impulse from its inner sources of excitation; second, from without
through perception of the object which the prompting desires. Hysterical
counter-investment is now by preference directed outward and toward the
dangerous perception and assumes the form of a special vigilance which
avoids situations through contraction of the ego, in which the
perception must appear and which makes it able to draw the attention
from this perception should the latter come up. French authors
(Laforgue) have recently designated this performance of hysteria through
the special term "scotomisation." Still more striking than in hysteria
is this technic of counter-investment in the phobias, where the interest
concentrates itself in removing itself further and further from the
possibility of the dreaded perception. The contrast in the direction of
the counter-fixation between hysteria and the phobias on the one hand
and compulsion neurosis on the other seems significant even if it is not
absolute. The assumption lies near at hand that between the repression
and the external counter-investment, as between the regression and the
internal counter-investment (ego alteration through reaction formation),
there exists an intimate connection. The repulse of the dangerous
perception is, moreover, a general task of the neuroses. Different
commands and prohibitions are to serve the same intent. We have already
on one occasion made ourselves clear that the resistance, which we have
to overcome in the analysis, is furnished by the ego which holds fast to
its counter-investment. The ego finds it difficult to apply its
attention to perceptions and ideas, the avoidance of which it has
previously made a precept, or to recognize as its own, strivings which
form a complete antithesis to those believed to be his own. Our struggle
against the resistance in the analysis is based on such a conception of
the same. We make the resistance conscious where---so often because of
association with the repressed content---it is unconscious; we oppose to
it logical arguments, when or after it has become conscious, and promise
to the ego advantages and bonuses if it renounces the resistance. Hence
there is nothing either to doubt or to justify in respect to the
resistance of the ego. On the other hand it must be asked whether this
alone covers the subject matter which is opposed to us in the analysis.
We have the experience that the ego always finds new difficulties in
making the repressions regressive, even after it has conceived the
purpose of giving up the resistance and has designated the phase of
arduous effort---which follows such a praise-worthy intention---as that
of "working through." It now lies at hand to recognize the dynamic
factor which makes such "working through" necessary and intelligible. It
can hardly be otherwise than that after abolition of the ego resistance
the power of the repetition compulsion, the attraction of the
unconscious prototypes of the repressed impulse process, is to be
overcome and there is nothing to say against it if one will designate
this factor as the resistance of the unconscious. We should not allow
such corrections to vex us; they are desired if they further our
understanding a bit and there is nothing to be deplored if in place of
refuting they enrich what has been said before, restricting perhaps a
general consideration and broadening a comprehension which is too
narrow.
It is not to be assumed that through this correction we have gained a
complete summary of the kinds of resistance encountered in analysis. We
note rather that we have five kinds of resistance to antagonize which
proceed from all three sides, to wit, from the ego, the super-ego and
the It, the ego being the source of three of the forms shown to differ
in their dynamics. The first of these three ego resistances is the
repression resistance already treated, concerning which there is but
little to say that is new. From this is distinguished the resistance of
transference which is of like nature but in an analysis causes other and
far more important phenomena, for it succeeds in originating a relation
to the analytical situation or person of the analyst and with this a
repression which is recalled with difficulty becomes again freshly
animated. Another ego resistance although of quite different nature is
that which proceeds from the gain of the disease and is founded on the
interrelation of the symptoms in the ego. It corresponds to the striving
against the renunciation of a gratification or a relief. The fourth kind
of resistance---that of the It---we have made responsible just now for
the necessity of "working through." The fifth resistance, that of the
super-ego, is the latest to be recognized; it is the most obscure but is
not always the weakest and seems to spring from the sense of guilt or
need of punishment; it opposes itself to every analytic effort and later
also to cure through analysis.
_Fear from Transformation of the Libido_
The notion of fear represented in this essay is removed a bit from that
which hitherto seemed justified. Formerly I regarded fear as a general
reaction of the ego under the conditions of unpleasure and sought on
each occasion to justify its appearance economically. I assumed,
sustained by the investigation of the actual neuroses, that the libido
(sexual excitation) which was refused or not employed by the ego, found
a direct discharge in the form of fear. One cannot overlook the fact
that these different determinations do not go well together, at least do
not necessarily follow from one another. Moreover, there resulted the
apparently intimate relation between fear and libido, which again does
not harmonize with the general character of fear as an unpleasure
reaction.
The objection to this comprehension proceeds from the tendency to make
the ego the sole abiding place of fear and was also one of the
consequences of the arrangement of the psychic apparatus sought in "The
Ego and It." To the former comprehension it lay near at hand to regard
the libido of the repressed impulse as the source of the fear; according
to the later one the ego should be responsible for this fear---either
ego fear or impulse (It) fear. As the ego works with desexualized
energy, in the innovation the intimate connection between fear and the
libido is loosened. I hope to succeed at least to make this
contradiction clear, to draw the outlines of uncertainty sharply.
Rank's admonition that the fear affect, as I myself once maintained, is
a consequence of the birth process and a repetition of the situation
then lived through, necessitates a new examination of the fear problem.
With his own comprehension of birth as a trauma, of the fear condition
as a discharge reaction, every renewed fear affect as an attempt to
react off the trauma completely, I cannot go further. There results the
compulsion to go back to it, from the fear reaction to the danger
situation. With the introduction of this factor new viewpoints come up
for consideration. Labor becomes a prototype for all later danger
situations which result under the new conditions of the altered form of
existence and the progressive psychic development. Its own significance,
however, becomes contracted upon this prototype relation. The fear felt
at birth now becomes the prototype of an affect condition which must
share the fate of other affects. It is reproduced, either automatically
in situations which were analogous to its original situations, as
inappropriate forms of reaction, after it had been appropriate in the
first danger situation. Or the ego obtains power over this affect and
reproduces it itself, serves itself with it as a warning of danger and
as a means of rousing the pleasure-pain mechanism. The biologic
significance of the fear affect came into its own, since fear is
recognized as the general reaction to the situation of danger. The rôle
of the ego as the seat of fear was confirmed, since the function was
conceded to the ego of reproducing the fear affect according to its
requirements. To fear were directed in later life two kinds of modes of
origin; one involuntary, automatic, always economically justified
whenever a danger analogous to birth had been produced; the other,
produced by the ego when such a situation only threatened, in order to
further its avoidance. In this second case the ego submitted to the fear
like an inoculation, in which through a weakened outbreak of disease one
escapes an unweakened one. The danger situation, as it were, has an
unmistakable tendency to restrict the painful experience to a
suggestion, a signal. How the different situations of danger develop one
after another and yet remain genetically combined has already been set
forth in detail. Perhaps we may succeed in penetrating a little further
into the comprehension of fear if we attack the problem of the relations
between neurotic fear and actual fear.
The formerly asserted direct transposition of the libido to fear has now
become less significant to our interest, if we take into consideration
that we have several kinds to distinguish between. The fear which the
ego provokes as a signal does not come into account, and further, not in
all of the danger situations which move the ego to the introduction of a
repression. The libidinous investment of the repressed prompting
experiences (as one sees most distinctly in conversion hysteria) another
application than transposition into and discharge as fear. Nevertheless
we shall in the further discussion of the danger situation come upon
that kind of fear development which ought probably to be judged
otherwise.
_Repression and Defense_
In connection with the discussions of the fear problem I have an
idea---or more modestly expressed a terminus---to take up which served
me exclusively at the beginning of my studies thirty years ago and which
afterwards I was compelled to abandon. I refer to the process of
defense.[7] I replaced it later with that of repression, the
relationship between the two remaining undetermined. I now think that we
gain something by harking back to the old idea of defense if at the same
time one settles the issue that the general designation for all the
technics shall be _defense_, of which the ego serves itself in conflicts
which may lead to neurosis; while _repression_ remains the name of a
definite method of defense which must first be better known to us as a
result of the course of our investigations.
A simple terminological innovation will also become justified, and
should be the expression of a new mode of consideration or an
amplification of our views. The resumption of the idea of defense, and
the contraction of the notion of repression bears reckoning of only one
fact long known to us but with a gain in importance through certain new
findings. Our first experiences with repression and symptom formation
were gained from hysteria; we saw that the perception content of
exciting experiences, the ideation content of pathogenic thought
formations were forgotten and their reproduction excluded from memory,
and have therefore recognized in this shutting out from consciousness
the chief character of hysterical repression. Later we studied the
compulsion neurosis and found that in this affection the pathogenic
event had not been forgotten. It remained conscious but was, however,
isolated in a manner which as yet could not be visualized; so that about
the same result was produced as in hysteria. The difference, however, is
large enough to justify our opinion that the process, by means of which
the compulsive neurosis removed an impulse claim, could not be the same
as hysteria. Further investigations have taught us that in the
compulsion neurosis under the influence of ego striving a regression of
the impulses to an earlier phase of libido was obtained, which did not
make repression superfluous but evidently acted in the same direction as
a repression. We have seen further that the counter-investment which
also is presumptive in hysteria, plays a particularly large rôle in ego
protection in compulsion neurosis as a reactive ego alteration.
Our attention is called to a procedure of "isolation" the technic of
which we cannot yet give, which procures a directly sympathetic
expression, and to another procedure which may be termed magical, that
of "undoing," which without doubt is of a rebuffing tendency, but has no
longer any resemblance to the process of repression. These experiences
are reason enough to reinstate the old conception of defense, which can
comprehend all of these processes having a common tendency---protection
of the ego against impulse claims---and to comprise repression as a
special case of the same. The importance of this nomenclature is
heightened if one contemplates the possibility that a deepening of our
studies might yield an intimate connection between special forms of
defense and definite affections---for example between repression and
hysteria. Our anticipation is directed further to the possibility of
another significant dependence. It can easily be that before the sharp
sundering of the ego from the It, before the completion of the super-ego
the psychic apparatus used another method of defense than after
attaining these stages of organization.
Supplement to Fear
The fear affect shows certain traits the investigation of which promises
further enlightenment. Fear has an unmistakable relation to expectation;
one is afraid of something. There adheres to it a character of
indetermination and absence of an object. The correct use of language
itself changes the name to fright when an object is present. Fear has
further in addition to its relation to danger another to neurosis, with
the explanation of which we have expended much effort. The question
arises, why are not all fear reactions neurotic, and why are so many
recognized as normal? Finally the difference between real and neurotic
fear demands a basic critique. Let us start with the last mentioned
task. Our progress consisted in the falling back of the fear reaction
upon the danger situation. If we suppose the same alteration to be
present in the problem of real fear the solution would be easy. Real
danger is a danger which we know, real fear is fear of such a known
danger. Neurotic fear is fear of danger of which we know nothing. Hence
neurotic danger must first be sought and analysis shows us it is an
impulse danger. As we bring into consciousness this danger which is
unknown to the ego the difference between real and neurotic fear is
effaced and we may treat the last like the first.
In real danger we develop two reactions: the affective, or fear
outburst, and the protective behavior. Presumably the same happens in
impulse danger. We see the suitable coöperation of both reactions when
one gives the signal for the institution of the other; but we also see
the unsuitable type of response, that of fear paralysis, in which one
gains ground at the expense of the other.
There are instances in which the characters of real and neurotic fear
are commingled. The danger is known and real but the fear reaction is
unnaturally great, greater than it should be in our judgment and in this
excess the neurotic element is betrayed. But these instances for the
most part contribute nothing new, and analysis shows that the known real
danger is connected with an unknown impulsive danger.
We progress further when we refuse to be satisfied with referring the
fear to the danger. What is the nucleus, the significance of the danger
situation? Evidently the estimation of our strength in comparison with
its size, the confession of our helplessness against it---material
helplessness against real danger, psychic helplessness in the case of
impulse danger. Our judgment here is guided by actual experience and
whether this errs in the estimate is immaterial for the result. Suppose
we term such an experienced situation of helplessness a traumatic one;
we then have good reason for separating the traumatic situation from the
danger situation.
It is now important to prove for ourselves if such a traumatic situation
is not merely waited for but is foreseen, expected. The situation in
which the condition for such expectation is contained is called the
danger situation in which the fear signal is given. For example, I
expect that a situation of helplessness will result, or the present
situation reminds me of a formerly experienced traumatic experience.
Hence I anticipate that this trauma will behave as if it were already
there as long as there is time to divert it. Fear is therefore on the
one hand the expectation of a trauma, and on the other a mitigated
repetition of the same. Both characters which have struck us in
connection with fear have therefore a different origin. Their relation
to expectation belongs to the danger situation, their indefinite
character and absence of object to the traumatic situation of
helplessness, which is anticipated in the danger situation.
According to the development of the series, fear---danger---helplessness
(trauma), we can sum up. The danger situation is a known, recollected,
expected situation of helplessness. Fear is the original reaction to the
helplessness in the trauma which is then later reproduced in the danger
situation as a signal for help. The ego, which has passively lived
through the trauma, now repeats actively a weakened reproduction of the
same in order to be able to direct its course actively. We know the
child behaves thus in all painful impressions since they are reproduced
in play. In going over in this manner from passive to active it seeks to
master psychically its life impressions. If this is to be the sense of a
reacting off of the trauma, no one could further object to it. The
decisive point, however, is the first displacement of the fear reaction
from its origin in the situation of helplessness upon its expectation,
the danger situation. Then follow the further displacements from the
danger itself to the condition of the danger, the loss of object and the
modifications already mentioned.
The "spoiling" of the little child has the unwished for consequence that
the danger of the loss of the object---the object as protection against
all the situations of helplessness---is increased toward all other
dangers. It favors the reserve in childhood, which is proper to the
physical and psychical helplessness.
Hitherto we have had no occasion to consider real fear otherwise than
neurotic fear. We know the difference---real fear threatens from an
external object, and neurotic fear from an impulse claim. In as far as
this last is something real, neurotic fear may be recognized as founded
on real fear. We have understood that the appearance of a particularly
intimate relationship between fear and neurosis goes back to the fact
that the ego, with the aid of the fear reaction of the impulse danger,
defends itself as in actual external danger; that this direction of the
defense activity runs into the neurosis because of the imperfection of
the psychic apparatus. We have also gained the conviction that the
impulse claim often becomes dangerous (inwardly) only because its
gratification would bring about an external danger, because the internal
danger represents an external one.
On the other hand the external danger (real) must have found an
interiorization if it is to be significant for the ego; it must have
recognized its relation to an experienced situation of helplessness.[8]
An instinctive perception of externally threatening danger seems not to
be given to mankind or at least only in a very modest degree. Little
children incessantly do things which bring their lives in peril and
exactly for this reason cannot dispense with the protecting object. In
relation to the traumatic situation against which man is helpless,
external and internal danger, real danger and impulse claim, come
together. In one case the ego may experience a pain which will not let
up; in another case a stagnation of desire which can find no
satisfaction; the economic situation is the same in both cases and the
motor helplessness finds its expression in the psychic helplessness.
The enigmatic phobias of early childhood again deserve mention. Some of
these, as fear of being alone, of the dark and of strangers we can
understand as reactions to the danger of the loss of object. For others,
as fear of small animals, thunder, etc., the information offers itself
that they may be atrophied residues of a congenital preparation for real
dangers which is so distinctly developed in other animals. Purposeful
for mankind is only that portion of this archaic inheritance as is
related to loss of the object. If such child phobias fix themselves,
become strengthened and persist into late years of life, analysis shows
that the content has set itself in association with impulse claims and
is representative also of internal dangers.
Anxiety, Pain and Grief
There is so little pertaining to the psychology of the feelings that the
ensuing halting observations should raise a claim for indulgence in
judgment. We must say that anxiety becomes a reaction to the danger of
loss of object. Now we already know one such reaction on object loss
which we call sorrow. But when does it come to one, when to the other?
For sorrow, with which we have already been occupied (Grief and
Melancholy in my Collected Papers), one trait remains quite obscure, and
that is its peculiarly painful quality. It seems to us self evident that
separation from an object is painful, but the problem is complicated
further. When does separation from the object mean anxiety, when grief
and when pain? We say at once that there is no prospect at hand of
replying to these questions. We shall be content to find certain
demarcations and certain hints.
Our starting point may again be the one situation which we believe we
understand, that of the nursling who in place of its mother sees a
stranger. It then shows anxiety which we have interpreted as due to the
danger of object loss. But it is doubtless more complicated and merits a
more thorough discussion. There is no doubt as to the anxiety of the
nursling, but the facial expression and the reaction of crying allow us
to assume that it also feels pain. It seems as if certain things
coalesce which later become separate again. It cannot distinguish
between the momentary absence and permanent loss. If the mother once
goes out of its sight its behavior is as if it would never more behold
her and not until after several consolatory experiences does it learn
that such a vanishing of the mother will be followed by her
reappearance. The mother ripens this experience, so important for the
child, when she plays the game of "peek-aboo," hiding her face for a
moment and then showing it again to the great joy of the child. The
child can then feel longing which is not accompanied by despair.
The situation in which it misses the mother is the consequence of its
misconception, it is no danger situation but a traumatic one, or rather
it is traumatic if at this moment it feels a need that the mother should
satisfy; it turns itself to danger situations when the need is not
actual. The first anxiety condition which the ego itself introduces is
therefore that of the loss of perception which is placed on a par with
that of the loss of the object. A loss of love does not yet come into
consideration. Later experience teaches that the object may remain at
hand yet become bad for the child, and now the loss of love on the part
of the object becomes a new and much more constant danger and fear
condition.
The traumatic situation of missing the mother yields in one decisive
point from the traumatic situation of birth. At that time there was no
object present that could be missed. Anxiety remained the sole reaction
which could occur. Since then repeated situations of gratification have
formed the object of the mother, so that now in case of need it
experiences an intense fixation which may be termed as yearning. The
reaction of pain is related to this innovation and hence pain is the
peculiar reaction to loss of the object as fear is to danger which the
loss brings with it, in further displacement of the danger of loss of
object itself. Nor do we know much of pain. The only sure content is the
fact that pain---at first and as a rule---originates when a stimulus
which attacks the periphery breaks through the apparatus for protecting
against stimuli and acts like a continuous prompting against the
otherwise efficacious muscle actions which remain powerless to withdraw
the irritant from the irritated place. If the pain does not go forth
from the surface but from an internal organ the situation is not at all
changed; it is only that a bit of internal periphery replaces the
external. The child has obviously an opportunity to go through such
experiences of pain which are independent of its need experiences. This
condition of origin of pain seems, however, to possess but little
similarity with loss of the object and moreover the essential factor of
peripheral irritation in the yearning situation of the child is fully
lost. Nevertheless it cannot be irrational that language has shaped the
notion of internal, psychic pain and placed the sensations of object
loss quite on a par with physical pain.
In physical suffering there arises a high fixation---which may be termed
narcistic---on the painful area which continues to increase and acts, so
to speak, as evacuating upon the ego. It is known that in pain in the
internal organs we acquire spatial and other ideas of such portions of
the body which are not otherwise represented in conscious ideation.
Further, the noteworthy fact that the most intense physical pains cannot
develop if the mind is diverted by some other interest (we should not
say that one remains unconscious of the pain), finds its explanation in
the concentration of the fixation on the psychic representative of the
painful area of the body. Now the analogy in this point seems to lie in
the fact that it permits the transference of the painful sensation to
the psychic province. The intensive yearning fixation, steadily
augmenting because uncontrollable, of the missed (lost) object, forms
the same economic conditions as the pain-fixation of injured portions of
the body and makes it possible to look off from the peripheral
conditionhood of bodily pain. The transition from physical to psychical
pain correspond to the transformation of narcistic to object fixation:
The object idea, highly fixed from need, plays the rôle of the body
region fixed by growth stimulation. The continuity and uninhibitable
character of the fixation process brings about the same condition of
psychic helplessness. If the then arising sensation of unpleasure bears
the character of pain which cannot be more approximately described than
as specific, instead of expressing itself in the reaction form of
anxiety, it lies at hand to make a factor responsible for it which
otherwise would play but a small rôle in explanation; this is the high
level of the fixation and combination relations upon which these
processes which lead to the sensation of unpleasure perfect themselves.
We know still another emotional reaction to the loss of the
object---sorrow. Its explanation, however, is not difficult. Sorrow
originates under the influence of testing reality, which demands
categorically that man must separate himself from the object because it
no longer exists. This affect must now perform the labor of carrying out
the retreat from the object in all situations in which the object was
the subject of high fixation. The painful character of this separation
unites itself to the explanation just given through the unfulfillable
yearning fixation of the object during the reproduction of the
situations in which the binding to the object is to be loosed.
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NOTES
[1]: Contrary to ordinary usage the German word _angst_ in this book
is in many instances rendered _fear_ in place of _anxiety_, the
last being the equivalent given in psychoanalytic glossaries. The
reader can himself substitute the word _anxiety_ for _fear_
whenever the latter occurs in the text. The reason for preferring
_fear_ to _anxiety_ is that the latter is too mild a term,
suggesting little more than worry or solicitude to the casual
reader. The German word _angst_ has no exact equivalent in
English, for it can denote any affective state between anxiety
and the most extreme terror, as in the term _todeasangst_ for
_mortal fear_. That the affective state implied is fear is shown
in several ways, as the Greek phobia, which connotes fear, is
equivalent in sense and is rendered by _angstzustand_ or fear
state. The word _anxiety_ would not serve as an equivalent for
_phobia_, which may indicate a condition of extreme fear. It has
been suggested that the German word _angst_ be left untranslated
in the English text, much as the word _anlage_ is left
untranslated as having no exact English equivalent. This idea
meets with our approval but until this is done we prefer to make
use of _fear_ as well as _anxiety_. The idea of rendering _angst_
as fear _or_ anxiety at the option of the translator, according
to the context, has been tested but is not entirely
satisfactory. [L. P. C.]
[2]: See History of an Infantile Neurosis (Vol. VIII of Collected
Papers in German).
[3]: See Disposition to Compulsive Neurosis, Collected Papers in
German, Vol. V.
[4]: Compare Reik, Impulse to Confess and Punishment Need, 1925.
[5]: Otto Rank. Birth Trauma and Its Importance for Psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic Bibliothek, XV, 1921.
[6]: Since the distinction between the ego and It our interest in the
problems of suppression must experience a new animation. Hitherto
we had been satisfied to take into account the aspects of the
process applied to the ego, the shutting off from consciousness
and from motility and the substitute (symptom) formation. For the
suppressed prompting itself we assumed it to remain indefinitely
long and unchanged in the unconscious. Now our interest became
directed to the fate of the repressed and we had the foreboding
that such an unchanged and inalterable continuity is not
self-evident and perhaps not even customary. The original
prompting is in any case inhibited through the repression and
diverted from its aim. But does the portion in the unconscious
remain intact and does it show itself resistant towards the
changing and depreciating influences of life? Do the old wishes,
which analysis showed formerly to exist, persist? The answer
seems near at hand and to be trustworthy. The repressed old
wishes must persist in the unconscious, for we find their
derivatives, the symptoms, still active. But such an answer is
not sufficient; it allows no decision to be made between the two
possibilities, whether the old wish merely acts through its
derivatives to which all its energy of fixation has been
transferred or whether in addition the wish itself persists as
such. If it had been its fate to be exhausted in the fixation of
its derivatives, there remains a third possibility that in the
course of the neurosis it is reanimated by regression, however
unseasonable this may seem at present. One does not need to
regard these speculations as idle; much of the phenomena of the
morbid as well as the normal in the psychic life seems to demand
such questioning. In my studies of the decline of the Oedipus
complex I have called attention to the difference between the
bare repression and the actual elevation of an old wish.
[7]: See The Defense Neuroses, collected papers in German, Vol. I.
[8]: It may occur often enough that in a danger situation which is
rightly recognized as such, a small amount of impulse fear is
added to real fear. The impulse claim, from the gratification of
which the ego shrinks, would then be of a masochistic nature, a
destructive prompting directed against oneself. Possibly this
addition explains the reason why the fear reaction is excessive,
unsuitable and paralyzing. The height phobias (window, steeple,
precipice) may have this origin; their secret feminine
significance is related to masochism.
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