arising during the treatment are made use of by the patient to interfere
with it, anything which could distract him or deter him from it, every
hostile expression of opinion from anyone in his circle whom he can
regard as an authority, any chance organic illness or one complicating
the neurosis; indeed, he even converts every improvement in his
condition into a motive for slackening his efforts. Then you will have
obtained an approximate, though still incomplete, picture of the forms
and the measures taken by the resistances which must be met and overcome
in the course of every analysis. I have given such a detailed
consideration to this point because I am about to inform you that our
dynamic conception of the neuroses is founded upon this experience of
ours of the resistances that neurotic patients set up against the cure
of their symptoms. Breuer and I both originally practised psycho-therapy
by the hypnotic method. Breuer’s first patient was treated throughout in
a state of hypnotic suggestibility; at first I followed his example. I
admit that at that time my work went forward more easily and agreeably
and also took much less time: but the results were capricious and not
permanent; therefore I finally gave up hypnotism. And then I understood
that no comprehension of the dynamics of these affections was possible
as long as hypnosis was employed. In this condition the very existence
of resistances is concealed from the physician’s observation. Hypnosis
drives back the resistances and frees a certain field for the work of
the analysis, but dams them up at the boundaries of this field so that
they are insurmountable; it is similar in effect to the doubt of the
obsessional neurosis. Therefore I may say that true psycho-analysis only
began when the help of hypnosis was discarded.
If it is a matter of such importance to establish these resistances then
surely it would be wise to allow caution and doubt full play, in case we
have been too ready with our assumption that they exist. Perhaps cases
of neurosis may be found in which the associations really fail for other
reasons, perhaps the arguments against our theories really deserve
serious attention, and we may be wrong in so conveniently disposing of
the patient’s intellectual objections by stigmatizing them as
resistance. Well, I can only assure you that our judgement in this
matter has not been formed hastily; we have had opportunity to observe
these critical patients both before the resistance comes to the surface
and after it disappears. In the course of the treatment the resistance
varies in intensity continually; it always increases as a new topic is
approached, it is at its height during the work upon it, and dies down
again when this theme has been dealt with. Unless certain technical
errors have been committed we never have to meet the full measure of
resistance, of which any patient is capable, at once. Thus we could
definitely ascertain that the same man would take up and then abandon
his critical objections over and over again in the course of the
analysis. Whenever we are on the point of bringing to his consciousness
some piece of unconscious material which is particularly painful to him,
then he is critical in the extreme; even though he may have previously
understood and accepted a great deal, yet now all these gains seem to be
obliterated; in his struggles to oppose at all costs he can behave just
as though he were mentally deficient, a form of ‘emotional stupidity.’
If he can be successfully helped to overcome this new resistance he
regains his insight and comprehension. His critical faculty is not
functioning independently, and therefore is not to be respected as if it
were; it is merely a maid-of-all-work for his affective attitudes and is
directed by his resistance. When he dislikes anything he can defend
himself against it most ingeniously; but when anything suits his book he
can be credulous enough. We are perhaps all much the same; a person
being analysed shows this dependence of the intellect upon the affective
life so clearly because in the analysis he is so hard-pressed.
In what way can we now account for this fact observed, that the patient
struggles so energetically against the relief of his symptoms and the
restoration of his mental processes to normal functioning? We say that
we have come upon the traces of powerful forces at work here opposing
any change in the condition; they must be the same forces that
originally induced the condition. In the formation of symptoms some
process must have been gone through, which our experience in dispersing
them makes us able to reconstruct. As we already know from Breuer’s
observations, it follows from the existence of a symptom that some
mental process has not been carried through to an end in a normal manner
so that it could become conscious; the symptom is a substitute for that
which has not come through. Now we know where to place the forces which
we suspect to be at work. A vehement effort must have been exercised to
prevent the mental process in question from penetrating into
consciousness and as a result it has remained unconscious; being
unconscious it had the power to construct a symptom. The same vehement
effort is again at work during analytic treatment, opposing the attempt
to bring the unconscious into consciousness. This we perceive in the
form of resistances. The pathogenic process which is demonstrated by the
resistances we call REPRESSION.
It will now be necessary to make our conception of this process of
_repression_ more precise. It is the essential preliminary condition for
the development of symptoms, but it is also something else, a thing to
which we have no parallel. Let us take as a model an impulse, a mental
process seeking to convert itself into action: we know that it can
suffer rejection, by virtue of what we call “repudiation” or
“condemnation”; whereupon the energy at its disposal is withdrawn, it
becomes powerless, but it can continue to exist as a memory. The whole
process of decision on the point takes place with the full cognizance of
the Ego. It is very different when we imagine the same impulse subject
to _repression_: it would then retain its energy and no memory of it
would be left behind; the process of repression, too, would be
accomplished without the cognizance of the Ego. This comparison
therefore brings us no nearer to the nature of repression.
I will expound to you those theoretical conceptions which alone have
proved useful in giving greater definiteness to the term _repression_.
For this purpose it is first necessary that we should proceed from the
purely descriptive meaning of the word “unconscious” to its systematic
meaning; that is, we resolve to think of the consciousness or
unconsciousness of a mental process as merely one of its qualities and
not necessarily definitive. Suppose that a process of this kind has
remained unconscious, its being withheld from consciousness may be
merely a sign of the fate it has undergone, not necessarily the fate
itself. Let us suppose, in order to gain a more concrete notion of this
fate, that every mental process—there is one exception, which I will go
into later—first exists in an unconscious state or phase, and only
develops out of this into a conscious phase, much as a photograph is
first a negative and then becomes a picture through the printing of the
positive. But not every negative is made into a positive, and it is just
as little necessary that every unconscious mental process should convert
itself into a conscious one. It may be best expressed as follows: Each
single process belongs in the first place to the unconscious psychical
system; from this system it can under certain conditions proceed further
into the conscious system.
The crudest conception of these systems is the one we shall find most
convenient, a spatial one. The unconscious system may therefore be
compared to a large ante-room, in which the various mental excitations
are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is
a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception-room, in which, too,
consciousness resides. But on the threshold between the two there stands
a personage with the office of door-keeper, who examines the various
mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the
reception-room when he disapproves of them. You will see at once that it
does not make much difference whether the door-keeper turns any one
impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has
entered the reception-room; that is merely a matter of the degree of his
vigilance and promptness in recognition. Now this metaphor may be
employed to widen our terminology. The excitations in the unconscious,
in the antechamber, are not visible to consciousness, which is of course
in the other room, so to begin with they remain unconscious. When they
have pressed forward to the threshold and been turned back by the
door-keeper, they are ‘_incapable of becoming conscious_’; we call them
then _repressed_. But even those excitations which are allowed over the
threshold do not necessarily become conscious; they can only become so
if they succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness. This second
chamber therefore may be suitably called _the preconscious system_. In
this way the process of becoming conscious retains its purely
descriptive sense. Being repressed, when applied to any single impulse,
means being unable to pass out of the unconscious system because of the
door-keeper’s refusal of admittance into the preconscious. The
door-keeper is what we have learnt to know as resistance in our attempts
in analytic treatment to loosen the repressions.
Now I know very well that you will say that these conceptions are as
crude as they are fantastic and not at all permissible in a scientific
presentation. I know they are crude; further indeed, we even know that
they are incorrect, and unless I am mistaken, we have something better
ready as a substitute for them; whether you will then continue to think
them so fantastic, I do not know. At the moment they are useful aids to
understanding, like _Ampère’s_ manikin swimming in the electric current,
and, in so far as they do assist comprehension, are not to be despised.
Still, I should like to assure you that these crude hypotheses, the two
chambers, the door-keeper on the threshold between the two, and
consciousness as a spectator at the end of the second room, must
indicate an extensive approximation to the actual reality. I should also
like to hear you admit that our designations, unconscious, preconscious,
and conscious, are less prejudicial and more easily defensible than some
others which have been suggested or have come into use, e.g.
sub-conscious, inter-conscious, co-conscious, etc.
If so, I should think it more significant if you then went on to point
out that any such constitution of the mental apparatus as I have assumed
in order to account for neurotic symptoms can only be of universal
validity and must throw light on normal functioning. In this, of course,
you are perfectly right. We cannot follow up this conclusion at the
moment; but our interest in the psychology of symptom-development would
certainly be enormously increased if we could see any prospect of
obtaining, by the study of pathological conditions, an insight into
normal mental functioning, hitherto such a mystery.
Do you not recognize, moreover, what it is that supports these
conceptions of the two systems and the relationship between them and
consciousness? The door-keeper between the unconscious and the
preconscious is nothing else than the _censorship_ to which we found the
form of the manifest dream subjected. The residue of the day’s
experiences, which we found to be the stimuli exciting the dream, was
preconscious material which at night during sleep had been influenced by
unconscious and repressed wishes and excitations; and had thus by
association with them been able to form the latent dream, by means of
their energy. Under the dominion of the unconscious system this material
had been elaborated (worked over)—by condensation and displacement—in a
way which in normal mental life, i.e. in the preconscious system, is
unknown or admissible very rarely. This difference in their manner of
functioning is what distinguishes the two systems for us; the
relationship to consciousness, which is a permanent feature of the
preconscious, indicates to which of the two systems any given process
belongs. Neither is dreaming a pathological phenomenon; every healthy
person may dream while asleep. Every inference concerning the
constitution of the mental apparatus which comprises an understanding of
both dreams and neurotic symptoms has an irrefutable claim to be
regarded as applying also to normal mental life.
This is as much as we will say about repression for the present.
Moreover, it is but a necessary preliminary condition, a prerequisite,
of symptom-formation. We know that the symptom is a substitute for some
other process which was held back by repression; but even given
repression we have still a long way to go before we can obtain
comprehension of this substitute-formation. There are other sides to the
problem of repression itself which present questions to be answered:
What kind of mental excitations suffer repression? What forces effect
it? and from what motives? On one point only, so far, have we gained any
knowledge relevant to these questions. While investigating the problem
of resistance we learned that the forces behind it proceed from the Ego,
from character-traits, recognizable or latent: it is these forces
therefore which have also effected the repression, or at least they have
taken a part in it. We know nothing more than this at present.
The second observation for which I prepared you will help us now. By
means of analysis we can always discover the purpose behind the neurotic
symptom. This is of course nothing new to you: I have already pointed it
out in two cases of neurosis. But, to be sure, what do two cases
signify? You have a right to demand two hundred cases, innumerable
cases, in demonstration of it. But then, I cannot comply with that. So
you must fall back on personal experience, or upon belief, which in this
matter can rely upon the unanimous testimony of all psycho-analysts.
You will remember that in the two cases in which we submitted the
symptoms to detailed investigation analysis led to the innermost secrets
of the patient’s sexual life. In the first case, moreover, the purpose
or tendency of the symptom under examination was particularly evident;
in the second case, it was perhaps to some extent veiled by another
factor to be mentioned later. Well now, what we found in these two
examples we should find in every case we submitted to analysis. Every
time we should be led by analysis to the sexual experiences and desires
of the patient, and every time we should have to affirm that the symptom
served the same purpose. This purpose shows itself to be the
gratification of sexual wishes; the symptoms serve the purpose of sexual
gratification for the patient; they are a substitute for satisfactions
which he does not obtain in reality.
Think of the obsessive act of our first patient. This woman has to do
without the husband she loved so intensely; on account of his
deficiencies and short-comings she could not share his life. She had to
be faithful to him; she could not put anyone else in his place. Her
obsessional symptom gives her what she so much desires; it exalts her
husband, denies and corrects his deficiencies, above all, his impotence.
This symptom is fundamentally a wish-fulfilment, in that respect exactly
like a dream; it is, moreover, what a dream is not always, an erotic
wish-fulfilment. In the case of the second patient you could see that
her ritual aims at preventing intercourse between the parents or at
hindering the procreation of another child; you have probably also
divined that fundamentally it seeks to set her in her mother’s place. It
again therefore constitutes a removal of hindrances to sexual
satisfaction and the fulfilment of the subject’s own sexual wishes. Of
the complications referred to in the second case I shall speak shortly.
I wish to avoid making reservations later on about the universal
applicability of these statements, and therefore I will ask you to
notice that all I have just been saying about repression,
symptom-formation and symptom-interpretation has been obtained from the
study of three types of neurosis, and for the present is only applicable
to these three types—namely, _anxiety-hysteria_, _conversion-hysteria_,
and _the obsessional neurosis_. These three disorders, which we are
accustomed to combine together in a group as the TRANSFERENCE NEUROSES,
constitute the field open to psycho-analytic therapy. The other neuroses
have been far less closely studied psycho-analytically; in one group of
them the impossibility of therapeutic influence has no doubt been one
reason for this neglect. You must not forget that psycho-analysis is
still a very young science, that much time and trouble are required for
the study of it, and that not so very long ago there was only one man
practising it: yet we are approaching from all directions to a nearer
comprehension of these other conditions which are not transference
neuroses. I hope I shall still be able to tell you of the developments
that our hypotheses and conclusions have undergone in the course of
adaptation to this new material, and to show you that these further
studies have not yielded contradictions but have led to a higher degree
of unification in our knowledge. Everything that has been said, then,
applies only to the three transference neuroses and I will now add
another piece of information which throws further light upon the
significance of the symptoms. A comparative examination of the
situations out of which the disease arose yields the following result,
which may be reduced to a formula—namely, that these persons have fallen
ill owing to some kind of PRIVATION which they suffer when reality
withholds from them gratification of their sexual wishes. You will
perceive how beautifully these two conclusions supplement one another.
The symptoms are now explicable as substitute-gratifications for desires
which are unsatisfied in life.
It is certainly possible to make all kinds of objections to the
proposition that neurotic symptoms are substitutes for sexual
gratifications. I will discuss two of them to-day. If any one of you has
himself undertaken the analysis of a large number of neurotics, he will
perhaps shake his head and say: “In certain cases this is not at all
applicable, in them the symptoms seem rather to contain the opposite
purpose, of excluding or of discontinuing sexual gratification.” I shall
not dispute your interpretation. In psycho-analysis things are often a
good deal more complicated than we could wish: if they had been simpler
psycho-analysis would perhaps not have been required to bring them to
light. Certain features of the ritual of our second patient are
distinctly recognizable as being of this ascetic character, inimical to
sexual satisfaction; e.g., her removing the clocks for the magic purpose
of preventing erections at night, or her trying to prevent the falling
and breaking of vessels, which amounts to a protection of her virginity.
In other cases of ceremonials on going to bed which I have analysed this
negative character was far more marked; the whole ritual could consist
of defensive regulations against sexual recollections and temptations.
But we have long ago learnt from psycho-analysis that opposites do not
constitute a contradiction. We might extend our proposition and say that
the purpose of the symptom is either a sexual gratification or a defence
against it; in hysteria the positive, wish-fulfilling character
predominates on the whole, and in the obsessional neurosis the negative
ascetic character. The symptoms can serve the purpose both of sexual
gratification and of its opposite so well because this double-sidedness,
or _polarity_, has a most suitable foundation in one element of their
mechanism which we have not yet had an opportunity to mention. They are
in fact, as we shall see, the effects of _compromises_ between two
opposed tendencies, acting on one another; they represent both that
which is repressed, and also that which has effected the repression and
has co-operated in bringing them about. The representation of either one
or another of these two factors may predominate in the symptom, but it
happens very rarely that one of them is absent altogether. In hysteria a
collaboration of the two tendencies in one symptom is usually achieved.
In the obsessional neurosis the two parts are often distinct: the
symptom is then a double one and consists of two successive actions
which cancel each other.
It will not be so easy to dispose of a second difficulty. When you
consider a whole series of symptom-interpretations your first
opinion would probably be that the conception of a sexual
substitute-gratification has to be stretched to its widest limits in
order to include them. You will not neglect to point out that these
symptoms offer nothing real in the way of gratification, that often
enough they are confined to re-animating a sensation, or to enacting
a phantasy arising from some sexual complex. Further, that the
ostensible sexual gratification is very often of an infantile and
unworthy character, perhaps approximating to a masturbatory act, or
is reminiscent of dirty habits which long ago in childhood had been
forbidden and abandoned. And further still, you will express your
astonishment that anyone should reckon among sexual gratifications
those which can only be described as gratifications of cruel or
horrible appetites, or which may be termed unnatural. Indeed, we
shall come to no agreement on these latter points until we have
submitted human sexuality to a thorough investigation and have thus
established what we are justified in calling sexual.
TWENTIETH LECTURE
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF MAN
One would certainly think that there could be no doubt about what is to
be understood by the term “sexual.” First and foremost, of course, it
means the “improper,” that which must not be mentioned. I have been told
a story about some pupils of a famous psychiatrist, who once endeavoured
to convince their master that the symptoms of an hysteric are frequently
representations of sexual things. With this object, they took him to the
bedside of an hysterical woman whose attacks were unmistakable
imitations of childbirth. He objected, however: “Well, there is nothing
sexual about childbirth.” To be sure, childbirth is not necessarily
always improper.