My expectations were fulfilled; I was set free from hypnosis. But along
with the change in technique, the process of catharsis took on a new
complexion. Hypnosis had screened from view an interplay of forces which
now came in sight, and the understanding of which gave a solid
foundation to my theory.
How had it come about that the patients had forgotten so many of the
facts of their external and internal lives, but could nevertheless
recollect them if a particular technique was applied? Observation
supplied an exhaustive answer to these questions. Everything that had
been forgotten had in some way or other been painful; it had been either
alarming or disagreeable or shameful, by the standards of the subject’s
personality. The thought arose spontaneously: it was precisely on that
account that it had been forgotten, i. e. that it had not remained
conscious. In order to make it conscious again, in spite of this, it was
necessary to overcome something that fought against one in the patient;
it was necessary to make an expenditure of effort on one’s own part in
order to compel and subdue it. The amount of effort required of the
physician varied in different cases; it increased in direct proportion
to the difficulty of what had to be remembered. The expenditure of force
on the part of the physician was evidently the measure of a _resistance_
on the part of the patient. It was only necessary to translate into
words what I myself had observed, and I was in possession of the theory
of _repression_.
It was now easy to reconstruct the pathogenic process. Let us keep to a
simple example, in which a particular impulsion had arisen in the
subject’s mind, but was opposed by other powerful tendencies. We should
have expected the mental _conflict_ which now arose to take the
following course. The two dynamic quantities—for our present purposes
let us call them “the instinct” and “the resistance”—would struggle with
each other for some time in the fullest light of consciousness, until
the instinct was repudiated and the charge[9] of energy withdrawn from
it. This would have been the normal solution. In a neurosis, however,
(for reasons which were still unknown) the conflict found a different
outcome. The ego drew back, as it were, after the first shock of its
conflict with the objectionable impulse; it debarred the impulse from
access to consciousness and to direct motor discharge, but at the same
time the impulse retained its full charge of energy. I named this
process _repression_; it was a novelty, and nothing like it had ever
before been recognized in mental life. It was obviously a primary
mechanism of defence, comparable to an attempt at flight, and was only a
fore-runner of the later developed normal condemning judgment. The first
act of repression involved further consequences. In the first place, the
ego was obliged to protect itself against the constant threat of a
renewed advance on the part of the repressed impulse by making a
permanent expenditure of energy, a _counter-charge_, and it thus
impoverished itself. On the other hand, the repressed impulse, which was
now _unconscious_, was able to find means of discharge and of
substitutive gratification by circuitous routes and thus to bring the
whole purpose of the repression to nothing. In the case of
conversion-hysteria, the circuitous route led to the nerve supply of the
body; the repressed impulse broke through at some point or other and
produced _symptoms_. The symptoms were thus results of a compromise, for
although they were substitutive gratifications, they were nevertheless
distorted and deflected from their aim, owing to the resistance of the
ego.
The theory of repression became the foundation-stone of our
understanding of the neuroses. A different view had now to be taken of
the task of therapy. Its aim was no longer to “abreact” an effect which
had got onto the wrong lines, but to uncover repressions and replace
them by acts of judgment which might result either in the acceptance or
in the rejection of what had formerly been repudiated. I showed my
recognition of the new situation by no longer calling my method of
investigation and treatment _catharsis_ but _psychoanalysis_.
It is possible to take repression as a centre and to bring all the
elements of psychoanalytic theory into relation with it. But before
doing so, I have a further remark of a polemical nature to make.
According to Janet’s view, a hysteric was a wretched person who, on
account of a constitutional weakness, was unable to hold her mental acts
together, and it was for that reason that she fell a victim to mental
dissociation and to a restriction of the field of her consciousness. The
results of psychoanalytical investigations, on the other hand, showed
that these phenomena were the result of dynamic factors—of mental
conflict and of repression. This distinction seems to me to be
far-reaching enough to put an end to the glib repetition of the view
that whatever is of value in psychoanalysis is merely borrowed from the
ideas of Janet. The reader will have learned from my account that
historically psychoanalysis is completely independent of Janet’s
discoveries, just as, in its content, it diverges from them and goes far
beyond them. Janet’s works would never have had the implications which
have made psychoanalysis of such importance to the mental sciences and
have made it attract such universal interest. I always treated Janet
himself with respect, since his discoveries coincided, to a considerable
extent, with those of Breuer, which had been made earlier, but were
published later than his. But when, in the course of time,
psychoanalysis became a subject of discussion in France, Janet behaved
ill, showed ignorance of the facts and used ugly arguments. And finally
he revealed himself to my eyes and destroyed the value of his own work
by declaring that when he had spoken of ‘unconscious’ mental acts, he
had meant nothing by the phrase—it had been no more than a _façon de
parler_.
But the study of pathogenic repressions and of other phenomena which
have still to be mentioned compelled psychoanalysis to take the concept
of the “unconscious” seriously. Psychoanalysis regarded everything
mental as being in the first instance unconscious; the further quality
of “consciousness” might also be present, or again it might be absent.
This, of course, provoked a denial from the philosophers, for whom
“conscious” and “mental” were identical, and who protested that they
could not conceive of such a monstrosity as the “unconscious mental.”
There was no help for it, however, and this idiosyncrasy of the
philosophers could only be disregarded with a shrug. Experience (gained
from pathological material, of which the philosophers were ignorant) of
the frequency and power of impulses of which one knew nothing directly,
and whose existence had to be inferred like some fact in the external
world, left no alternative open. It could be pointed out, incidentally,
that this was only treating one’s own mental life as one had always
treated other people’s. One did not hesitate to ascribe mental processes
to other people, although one had no immediate consciousness of them and
could only infer them from their words and actions. But what held good
for other people must be applicable to oneself. Anyone who tried to push
the argument further and to conclude from it that one’s own hidden
processes belonged actually to a second consciousness would be faced
with the concept of a consciousness of which one knew nothing, of an
“unconscious consciousness”—and this would scarcely be preferable to the
assumption of an “unconscious mental.” If, on the other hand, one
declared, like some other philosophers, that one was prepared to take
pathological phenomena into account, but that the processes underlying
them ought not to be described as mental but as “psychoid,” the
difference of opinion would degenerate into an unfruitful dispute about
words, though, even so, expediency would decide in favour of keeping the
expression “unconscious mental.” The further question as to the ultimate
nature of this unconscious is no wiser or more profitable than the older
one as to the nature of the conscious.
It would be more difficult to explain concisely how it came about that
psychoanalysis made a further distinction in the unconscious, and
separated it into a _preconscious_ and an unconscious proper. It will be
sufficient to say that it appeared a legitimate course to supplement the
theories which were a direct expression of experience by hypotheses
which were designed to facilitate the handling of the material and
related to matters which could not be a subject of immediate
observation. The very same procedure is adopted by the older sciences.
The sub-division of the unconscious is part of an attempt to picture the
apparatus of the mind as being built up of a number of _instances_ or
systems, whose inter-relations may be expressed in spatial terms,
without reference, of course, to the actual anatomy of the brain. (I
have described this as the _topographical method of approach_.) Such
ideas as these are part of a speculative superstructure of
psychoanalysis, any portion of which can be abandoned or changed without
loss or regret the moment its inadequacy has been proved. But there is
still plenty to be described that lies closer to actual experience.
I have already mentioned that my investigation of the precipitating and
underlying causes of the neuroses led me more and more frequently to
conflicts between the subject’s sexual impulses and his resistances to
sexuality. In my search for the pathogenic situations in which the
repressions of sexuality had set in and in which the symptoms, as
substitutes for what was repressed, had their origin, I was carried
further and further back into the patient’s life and ended by reaching
the first years of his childhood. What poets and students of human
nature had always asserted turned out to be true: the impressions of
that remote period of life, though they were for the most part buried in
amnesia, left ineradicable traces upon the individual’s growth and in
particular laid the foundations of any nervous disorder that was to
follow. But since these experiences of childhood were always concerned
with sexual excitations and the reaction against them, I found myself
faced by the fact of infantile sexuality—once again a novelty and a
contradiction of one of the strongest of human prejudices. Childhood was
looked upon as “innocent” and free from the lusts of sex, and the fight
with the demon of “sensuality” was not thought to begin until the
troubled age of puberty. Such occasional sexual activities as it had
been impossible to overlook in children were put down as signs of
degeneracy and premature depravity or as a curious freak of nature. Few
of the findings of psychoanalysis have met with such universal
contradiction or have aroused such an outburst of indignation as the
assertion that the sexual function starts at the beginning of life and
reveals its presence by important signs even in childhood. And yet no
other finding of analysis can be demonstrated so easily and so
completely.
Before going further into the question of infantile sexuality, I must
mention an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have
had fatal consequences for the whole of my work. Under the pressure of
the technical procedure which I used at that time, the majority of my
patients reproduced from their childhood, scenes in which they were
sexually seduced by some grown-up person. With female patients the part
of seducer was almost always assigned to their father. I believed these
stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of
the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in
childhood. My confidence was strengthened by a few cases in which
relations of this kind with a father, uncle or elder brother had
continued up to an age at which memory was quite to be trusted. If the
reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot
altogether blame him; though I may plead that this was at a time when I
was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance so as to
preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many
novelties which were coming to my notice every day. When, however, I was
at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never
taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had
made up or which I myself had perhaps forced upon them, I was for some
time completely at a loss. My confidence alike in my technique and in
its results suffered a severe blow, it could not be disputed that I had
arrived at these scenes by a technical method which I considered
correct, and their subject-matter was unquestionably related to the
symptoms from which my investigation had started. When I had pulled
myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my
discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly
to actual events but to phantasies embodying wishes, and that, as far as
the neurosis was concerned, psychical reality was of more importance
than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the
seduction-phantasies upon my patients, that I “suggested” them. I had,
in fact, stumbled for the first time upon the _Œdipus complex_, which
was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not
recognize as yet in its disguise of phantasy. Moreover, seduction during
childhood retained a certain share, though a humbler one, in the
ætiology of neuroses. But the seducers turned out as a rule to have been
older children.
It will be seen, then, that my mistake was of the same kind as would be
made by someone who believed that the legendary story of the early kings
of Rome (as told by Livy) was historical truth instead of what it is in
fact—a reaction against the memory of times and circumstances that were
insignificant and occasionally, perhaps, inglorious. When the mistake
had been cleared up, the path to the study of the sexual life of
children lay open. It thus became possible to apply psychoanalysis to
another field of science and to use its data as a means of discovering a
new piece of biological knowledge.
The sexual function, as I found, is in existence from the very beginning
of the individual’s life, though at first it is assimilated to the other
vital functions and does not become independent of them until later; it
has to pass through a long and complicated process of development before
it becomes what we are familiar with as the normal sexual life of the
adult. It begins by manifesting itself in the activity of a whole number
of _component instincts_. These are dependent upon _erotogenic zones_ in
the body; some of them make their appearance in pairs of opposite
impulses (such as sadism and masochism or the impulses to look and to be
looked at); they operate independently of one another in their search
for pleasure, and they find their object for the most part in the
subject’s own body. Thus, to begin with, they are non-centralized and
predominantly _auto-erotic_. Later they begin to be co-ordinated; a
first stage of organization is reached under the dominance of the _oral_
components, an _anal-sadistic_ stage follows, and it is only after the
third stage has at last been reached that the primacy of the _genitals_
is established and that the sexual function begins to serve the ends of
reproduction. In the course of this process of development a number of
elements of the various component instincts turn out to be unserviceable
for this last end and are therefore left on one side or turned to other
uses, while others are diverted from their aims and carried over into
the genital organization. I gave the name of _libido_ to the energy of
the sexual instincts and to that form of energy alone. I was next driven
to suppose that the libido does not always pass through its prescribed
course of development smoothly. As a result either of the excessive
strength of certain of the components or of experiences involving
premature gratification, _fixations_ of the libido may occur at various
points in the course of its development. If subsequently a repression
takes place, the libido flows back to these points (a process described
as _regression_), and it is from them that the energy breaks through in
the form of a symptom. Later on it further became clear that the
localization of the point of fixation is what determines the _choice of
neurosis_, that is, the form in which the subsequent illness makes its
appearance.
The process of arriving at an object, which plays an important part in
mental life, takes place alongside of the organization of the libido.
After the stage of auto-erotism, the first love-object in the case of
both sexes is the mother; and it seems probable that, to begin with, the
child does not distinguish its mother’s organ of nutrition from its own
body. Later, but still in the first years of infancy, the relation known
as the Œdipus complex, becomes established: boys concentrate their
sexual wishes upon their mother and develop hostile impulses against
their father as being a rival, while girls develop an analogous
attitude. All of the different variations and consequences of the Œdipus
complex are important; and in particular the innately bisexual
constitution of human beings makes itself felt and increases the number
of simultaneously active tendencies. Children do not become clear for
quite a long time upon the differences between the sexes; and during
this period of _sexual enquiry_ they produce typical _sexual theories_
which, since they are limited by the incompleteness of their authors’
own physical development, are a mixture of truth and error and fail to
solve the problems of sexual life (the riddle of the Sphinx, the
question of where babies come from). We see, then, that a child’s first
object-choice is an _incestuous_ one. The whole course of development
that I have described is run through rapidly. For the most remarkable
feature of the sexual life of man is that it comes on in two waves, with
an interval between them. It reaches a first climax in the fourth or
fifth year of a child’s life. But this early growth of sexuality is
nipped in the bud; the sexual impulses, which have shown such
liveliness, are overcome by repression, and a _period of latency_
follows, which lasts until puberty and during which the
“reaction-formations” of morality, shame and disgust are built up. Of
all living creatures, man alone seems to show this double onset of
sexual growth, and it may perhaps be the biological determinant of his
predisposition to neuroses. At puberty the impulses and object-relations
of a child’s early years become re-animated, and amongst them the
emotional ties of his Œdipus complex. The sexual life of puberty is a
struggle between the impulses of early years and the inhibitions of the
latency period. Before this, and while the child is at the highest point
of its infantile sexual development, a genital organization of a sort is
established; but only the _male_ genitals play a part in it, and the
female ones remain undiscovered. (I have described this as the period of
_phallic_ primacy.) At this stage the contrast between the sexes is not
stated in terms of “male” or “female” but of “possessing a penis” or
“castrated.” The _castration complex_ which arises in this connexion is
of the profoundest importance in the formation alike of character and of
neuroses.
In order to make this condensed account of my discoveries as to the
sexual life of man more intelligible, I have brought together
conclusions which I reached at different dates and incorporated by way
of supplement or correction in the successive editions of my _Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality_.[10] I hope it will have been
easy to gather the nature of my extension (on which so much stress has
been laid and which has excited so much opposition) of the concept of
sexuality. That extension is of a twofold kind. In the first place
sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals
and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure
as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the ends of
reproduction. In the second place, the sexual impulses are regarded as
including all of those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to
which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love.’ I do not,
however, consider that these extensions are innovations, but rather
restorations: they signify the removal of inexpedient limitations of the
concept into which we had allowed ourselves to be led.
The detaching of sexuality from the genitals has the advantage of
allowing us to bring the sexual activities of children and of perverts
into the same scope as those of normal adults. The former have hitherto
been entirely neglected and, though the latter have been recognized, it
has been with moral indignation and without understanding. Looked at
from the psychoanalytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and
repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component
instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of
the genitals and are going in pursuit of pleasure on their own account
as they did in the very early days of the libido’s development. The most
important of these perversions, homosexuality, scarcely deserves the
name. It can be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all
human beings and to the after-effects of the phallic primacy.
Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other of a
homosexual object-choice in everyone. If I have described children as
“poly-morphously perverse,” I was only using a terminology that was
generally current; no moral judgment was implied by the phrase.
Psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with such judgments of value.
The second of my alleged extensions of the concept of sexuality finds
its justification in the fact revealed by psychoanalytic investigation,
that all of these affectionate impulses were originally of a completely
sexual nature but have become _inhibited in their aim or sublimated_.
The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and
diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every
kind, to which indeed they bring the most important contributions.
My surprising discoveries as to the sexuality of children were made in
the first instance through the analysis of adults. But later (from about
1908 onwards) it became possible to confirm them in the most
satisfactory way and in every detail by direct observations upon
children. Indeed, it is so easy to convince oneself of the regular
sexual activities of children, that one cannot help asking in
astonishment how the human race can have succeeded in over-looking the
facts and in maintaining for so long the agreeable legend of the
asexuality of childhood. This surprising circumstance must be connected
with the amnesia which, just as with the majority of adults, hides their
own infancy.