other. Incidentally, these are the two great offences condemned by
totemism, the first social-religious institution of mankind. Now let us
turn from the direct observation of children to the analytic
investigation of adults who have become neurotic; what does analysis
yield in further knowledge of the Oedipus complex? Well, this is soon
told. The complex is revealed just as the myth relates it; it will be
seen that every one of these neurotics was himself an Oedipus or, what
amounts to the same thing, has become a Hamlet in his reaction to the
complex. To be sure, the analytic picture of the Oedipus complex is an
enlarged and accentuated edition of the infantile sketch; the hatred of
the father and the death-wishes against him are no longer vague hints,
the affection for the mother declares itself with the aim of possessing
her as a woman. Are we really to accredit such grossness and intensity
of the feelings to the tender age of childhood; or does the analysis
deceive us by introducing another factor? It is not difficult to find
one. Every time anyone describes anything past, even if he be a
historian, we have to take into account all that he unintentionally
imports into that past period from present and intermediate times,
thereby falsifying it. With the neurotic it is even doubtful whether
this retroversion is altogether unintentional; we shall hear later on
that there are motives for it and we must explore the whole subject of
the ‘retrogressive phantasy-making’ which goes back to the remote past.
We soon discover, too, that the hatred against the father has been
strengthened by a number of motives arising in later periods and other
relationships in life, and that the sexual desires towards the mother
have been moulded into forms which would have been as yet foreign to the
child. But it would be a vain attempt if we endeavoured to explain the
whole of the Oedipus complex by ‘retrogressive phantasy-making,’ and by
motives originating in later periods of life. The infantile nucleus,
with more or less of the accretions to it, remains intact, as is
confirmed by direct observation of children.
The clinical fact which confronts us behind the form of the Oedipus
complex as established by analysis now becomes of the greatest practical
importance. We learn that at the time of puberty, when the sexual
instinct first asserts its demands in full strength, the old familiar
incestuous objects are taken up again and again invested by the Libido.
The infantile object-choice was but a feeble venture in play, as it
were, but it laid down the direction for the object-choice of puberty.
At this time a very intense flow of feeling towards the Oedipus complex
or in reaction to it comes into force; since their mental antecedents
have become intolerable, however, these feelings must remain for the
most part outside consciousness. From the time of puberty onward the
human individual must devote himself to the great task of _freeing
himself from the parents_; and only after this detachment is
accomplished can he cease to be a child and so become a member of the
social community. For a son, the task consists in releasing his
libidinal desires from his mother, in order to employ them in the quest
of an external love-object in reality; and in reconciling himself with
his father if he has remained antagonistic to him, or in freeing himself
from his domination if, in the reaction to the infantile revolt, he has
lapsed into subservience to him. These tasks are laid down for every
man; it is noteworthy how seldom they are carried through ideally, that
is, how seldom they are solved in a manner psychologically as well as
socially satisfactory. In neurotics, however, this detachment from the
parents is not accomplished at all; the son remains all his life in
subjection to his father, and incapable of transferring his Libido to a
new sexual object. In the reversed relationship the daughter’s fate may
be the same. In this sense the Oedipus complex is justifiably regarded
as the kernel of the neuroses.
You will imagine how incompletely I am sketching a large number of the
connections bound up with the Oedipus complex which practically and
theoretically are of great importance. I shall not go into the
variations and possible inversions of it at all. Of its less immediate
effects I should like to allude to one only, which proves it to have
influenced literary production in a far-reaching manner. Otto Rank has
shown in a very valuable work that dramatists throughout the ages have
drawn their material principally from the Oedipus and incest complex and
its variations and masked forms. It should also be remarked that long
before the time of psycho-analysis the two criminal offences of Oedipus
were recognized as the true expressions of unbridled instinct. Among the
works of the Encyclopædist Diderot you will find the famous dialogue,
_Le neveu de Rameau_, which was translated into German by no less a
person than Goethe. There you may read these remarkable words: _Si le
petit sauvage était abandonné à lui-même, qu’il conserva toute son
imbecillité et qu’il réunit au peu de raison de l’enfant au berceau la
violence des passions de l’homme de trente ans, il tordrait le cou à son
père et coucherait avec sa mère_.
There is yet one thing more which I cannot pass over. The mother-wife of
Oedipus must not remind us of dreams in vain. Do you still remember the
results of our dream-analyses, how so often the dream-forming wishes
proved perverse and incestuous in their nature, or betrayed an
unsuspected enmity to near and beloved relatives? We then left the
source of these evil strivings of feeling unexplained. Now you can
answer this question yourselves. They are dispositions of the Libido,
and investments of objects by Libido, belonging to early infancy and
long since given up in conscious life, but which at night prove to be
still present and in a certain sense capable of activity. But, since all
men and not only neurotic persons have perverse, incestuous, and
murderous dreams of this kind, we may infer that those who are normal
to-day have also made the passage through the perversions and the
object-investments of the Oedipus complex; and that this is the path of
normal development; only that neurotics show in a magnified and
exaggerated form what we also find revealed in the dream-analyses of
normal people. And this is one of the reasons why we chose the study of
dreams to lead up to that of neurotic symptoms.
TWENTY-SECOND LECTURE
ASPECTS OF DEVELOPMENT AND REGRESSION. ÆTIOLOGY
As we have heard, the Libido-function goes through an extensive
development before it can enter the service of reproduction in the way
that is called normal. Now I wish to show you the significance of this
fact for the causation of the neuroses.
I think that it will be in agreement with the doctrines of general
pathology to assume that such a development involves two dangers; first,
that of _inhibition_, and secondly, that of _regression_. That is to
say, owing to the general tendency to variation in biological processes
it must necessarily happen that not all these preparatory phases will be
passed through and completely outgrown with the same degree of success;
some parts of the function will be permanently arrested at these early
stages, with the result that with the general development there goes a
certain amount of inhibited development.
Let us seek analogies to these processes in other fields. When a whole
people leaves its dwellings in order to seek a new country, as often
happened in earlier periods of human history, their entire number
certainly did not reach the new destination. Apart from losses due to
other causes, it must invariably have happened that small groups or
bands of the migrating people halted on the way, and settled down in
these stopping-places, while the main body went further. Or, to take a
nearer comparison, you know that in the higher mammals the seminal
glands, which are originally located deep in the abdominal cavity, begin
a movement at a certain period of intra-uterine development which brings
them almost under the skin of the pelvic extremity. In a number of males
it is found that one of this pair of organs has remained in the pelvic
cavity, or else that it has taken up a permanent position in the
inguinal canal which both of them had to pass through on the journey, or
at least that this canal has not closed as it normally should after the
passage of the seminal glands through it. When as a young student I was
doing my first piece of scientific research under v. Brücke, I was
working on the origin of the dorsal nerve-roots in the spinal cord of a
small fish, still very archaic in form. I found that the nerve-fibres of
these roots grew out of large cells in the posterior horn of the grey
matter, a condition which is no longer found in other vertebrates. But
soon after I discovered that similar nerve-cells were to be found
outside the grey matter along the whole length to the so-called spinal
ganglion of the posterior roots, from which I concluded that the cells
of this ganglion had moved out of the spinal cord along the nerve-roots.
Evolutionary development shows this too; in this little fish, however,
the whole route of this passage was marked by cells arrested on the way.
Closer consideration will soon show you the weak points of these
comparisons. Therefore let me simply say that we consider it possible
that single portions of every separate sexual impulse may remain in an
early stage of development, although at the same time other portions of
it may have reached their final goal. You will see from this that we
conceive each such impulse as a current continuously flowing from the
beginning of life, and that we have divided its flow to some extent
artificially into separate successive forward movements. Your impression
that these conceptions require further elucidation is correct, but the
attempt would lead us too far afield. We will, however, decide at this
point to call this _arrest_ in a component-impulse at an early stage a
FIXATION (of the impulse).
The second danger in a development by stages such as this we call
REGRESSION; it also happens that those portions which have proceeded
further may easily revert in a backward direction to these earlier
stages. The impulse will find occasion to _regress_ in this way when the
exercise of its function in a later and more developed form meets with
powerful external obstacles, which thus prevent it from attaining the
goal of satisfaction. It is a short step to assume that fixation and
regression are not independent of each other; the stronger the fixations
in the path of development the more easily will the function yield
before the external obstacles, by regressing on to those fixations; that
is, the less capable of resistance against the external difficulties in
its path will the developed function be. If you think of a migrating
people who have left large numbers at the stopping-places on their way,
you will see that the foremost will naturally fall back upon these
positions when they are defeated or when they meet with an enemy too
strong for them. And again, the more of their number they leave behind
in their progress, the sooner will they be in danger of defeat.
It is important for comprehension of the neuroses that you should keep
in mind this relation between fixation and regression. You will thus
acquire a secure foothold from which to investigate the causation of the
neuroses—their ætiology—which we shall soon consider.
For the present we will keep to the question of regression. After what
you have heard about the development of the Libido you may anticipate
two kinds of regression; a return to the first objects invested with
Libido, which we know to be incestuous in character, and a return of the
whole sexual organization to earlier stages. Both kinds occur in the
transference neuroses, and play a great part in their mechanism. In
particular, the return to the first incestuous objects of the Libido is
a feature found with quite fatiguing regularity in neurotics. There is
much more to be said about the regressions of Libido if another group of
neuroses, called the narcissistic, is taken into account; but this is
not our intention at the moment. These affections yield conclusions
about other developmental processes of the Libido-function, not yet
mentioned, and also show us new types of regression corresponding with
them. I think, however, that I had better warn you now above all not to
confound _Regression_ with _Repression_ and that I must assist you to
clear your minds about the relation between the two processes.
_Repression_, as you will remember, is the process by which a mental act
capable of becoming conscious (that is, one which belongs to the
preconscious system) is made unconscious and forced back into the
unconscious system. And we also call it _repression_ when the
unconscious mental act is not permitted to enter the adjacent
preconscious system at all, but is turned back upon the threshold by the
censorship. There is therefore no connection with sexuality in the
concept ‘_repression_’; please mark this very carefully. It denotes a
purely psychological process; and would be even better described as
_topographical_, by which we mean that it has to do with the spatial
relationships we assume within the mind, or, if we again abandon these
crude aids to the formulation of theory, with the structure of the
mental apparatus out of separate psychical systems.
The comparisons just now instituted showed us that hitherto we have not
been using the word ‘_regression_’ in its general sense but in a quite
specific one. If you give it its general sense, that of a reversion from
a higher to a lower stage of development in general, then repression
also ranges itself under regression; for repression can also be
described as reversion to an earlier and lower stage in the development
of a mental act. Only, in repression this retrogressive direction is not
a point of any moment to us; for we also call it repression in a dynamic
sense when a mental process is arrested before it leaves the lower stage
of the Unconscious. Repression is thus a topographic-dynamic conception,
while regression is a purely descriptive one. But what we have hitherto
called ‘_regression_’ and considered in its relation to fixation
signified exclusively the return of _the Libido_ to its former
halting-places in development, that is, something which is essentially
quite different from repression and quite independent of it. Nor can we
call regression of the Libido a purely psychical process; neither do we
know where to localize it in the mental apparatus; for though it may
exert the most powerful influence upon mental life, the organic factor
in it is nevertheless the most prominent.
Discussions of this sort tend to be rather dry; therefore let us turn to
clinical illustrations of them in order to get a more vivid impression
of them. You know that the group of the transference neuroses consists
principally of hysteria and the obsessional neurosis. Now in hysteria, a
regression of the Libido to the primary incestuous sexual objects is
without doubt quite regular, but there is little or no regression to an
earlier stage of sexual organization. Consequently the principal part in
the mechanism of hysteria is played by repression. If I may be allowed
to supplement by a construction the certain knowledge of this neurosis
acquired up to the present I might describe the situation as follows:
The fusion of the component-impulses under the primacy of the genital
zone has been accomplished; but the results of this union meet with
resistance from the direction of the preconscious system with which
consciousness is connected. The genital organization therefore holds
good for the Unconscious, but not also for the preconscious, and this
rejection on the part of the preconscious results in a picture which has
a certain likeness to the state prior to the primacy of the genital
zone. It is nevertheless actually quite different. Of the two kinds of
regression of the Libido, that on to an earlier phase of sexual
organization is much the more striking. Since it is absent in hysteria
and our whole conception of the neuroses is still far too much dominated
by the study of hysteria which came first in point of time, the
significance of Libido-regression was recognized much later than that of
repression. We may be sure that our points of view will undergo still
further extensions and alterations when we include consideration of
still other neuroses (the narcissistic) in addition to hysteria and the
obsessional neurosis.
In the obsessional neurosis, on the other hand, regression of the Libido
to the antecedent stage of the sadistic-anal organization is the most
conspicuous factor and determines the form taken by the symptoms. The
impulse to love must then mask itself under the sadistic impulse. The
obsessive thought, “I should like to murder you,” means (when it has
been detached from certain superimposed elements that are not, however,
accidental but indispensable to it) nothing else but “I should like to
enjoy love of you.” When you consider in addition that regression to the
primary objects has also set in at the same time, so that this impulse
concerns only the nearest and most beloved persons, you can gain some
idea of the horror roused in the patient by these obsessive ideas and at
the same time how unaccountable they appear to his conscious perception.
But repression also has its share, a great one, in the mechanism of this
neurosis, and one which is not easy to expound in a rapid survey such as
this. Regression of Libido without repression would never give rise to a
neurosis, but would result in a perversion. You will see from this that
repression is the process which distinguishes the neuroses particularly
and by which they are best characterized. Perhaps, however, I may have
an opportunity at some time of expounding to you what we know of the
mechanism of the perversions, and you will then see that there again
nothing proceeds so simply as we should like to imagine in our
constructions.
I think that you will be soonest reconciled to this exposition of
fixation and regression of the Libido if you will regard it as
preparatory to a study of the _ætiology_ of the neuroses. So far I have
only given you one piece of information on this subject, namely, that
people fall ill of a neurosis when the possibility of satisfaction for
the Libido is removed from them—they fall ill in consequence of a
‘privation,’ as I called it, therefore—and that their symptoms are
actually substitutes for the missing satisfaction. This of course does
not mean that every privation in regard to libidinal satisfaction makes
everyone who meets with it neurotic, but merely that in all cases of
neurosis investigated the factor of privation was demonstrable. The
statement therefore cannot be reversed. You will no doubt have
understood that this statement was not intended to reveal the whole
secret of the ætiology of the neuroses, but that it merely emphasized an
important and indispensable condition.
Now in order to consider this proposition further we do not know whether
to begin upon the nature of the privation or the particular character of
the person affected by it. The privation is very rarely a comprehensive
and absolute one; in order to have a pathogenic effect it would probably
have to strike at the only form of satisfaction which that person
desires, the only form of which he is capable. In general, there are
very many ways by which it is possible to endure lack of libidinal
satisfaction without falling ill. Above all we know of people who are
able to take such abstinence upon themselves without injury; they are
then not happy, they suffer from unsatisfied longing, but they do not
become ill. We therefore have to conclude that the sexual
impulse-excitations are exceptionally ‘plastic,’ if I may use the word.
One of them can step in in place of another; if satisfaction of one is
denied in reality, satisfaction of another can offer full recompense.
They are related to one another like a network of communicating canals
filled with fluid, and this in spite of their subordination to the
genital primacy, a condition which is not at all easily reduced to an
image. Further, the component-instincts of sexuality, as well as the
united sexual impulse which comprises them, show a great capacity to
change their object, to exchange it for another—i.e. for one more easily
attainable; this capacity for displacement and readiness to accept
surrogates must produce a powerful counter-effect to the effect of a
privation. One amongst these processes serving as protection against
illness arising from want has reached a particular significance in the
development of culture. It consists in the abandonment, on the part of
the sexual impulse, of an aim previously found either in the
gratification of a component-impulse or in the gratification incidental
to reproduction, and the adoption of a new aim—which new aim, though
genetically related to the first, can no longer be regarded as sexual,
but must be called social in character. We call this process
SUBLIMATION, by which we subscribe to the general standard which
estimates social aims above sexual (ultimately selfish) aims.
Incidentally, sublimation is merely a special case of the connections
existing between sexual impulses and other, asexual ones. We shall have
occasion to discuss this again in another context.
Your impression now will be that we have reduced want of satisfaction to
a factor of negligible proportions by the recognition of so many means
of enduring it. But no; this is not so: it retains its pathogenic power.
The means of dealing with it are not always sufficient. The measure of
unsatisfied Libido that the average human being can take upon himself is
limited. The plasticity and free mobility of the Libido is not by any
means retained to the full in all of us; and sublimation can never
discharge more than a certain proportion of Libido, apart from the fact
that many people possess the capacity for sublimation only in a slight
degree. The most important of these limitations is clearly that
referring to the mobility of the Libido, since it confines the
individual to the attaining of aims and objects which are very few in
number. Just remember that incomplete development of the Libido leaves
behind it very extensive (and sometimes also numerous) Libido-fixations
upon earlier phases of organization and types of object-choice, mostly
incapable of satisfaction in reality; you will then recognize fixation
of Libido as the second powerful factor working together with privation
in the causation of illness. We may condense this schematically and say
that Libido-fixation represents the internal, predisposing factor, while
privation represents the external, accidental factor, in the ætiology of
the neuroses.
I will take this opportunity to warn you against taking sides in a quite
superfluous dispute. It is a popular habit in scientific matters to
seize upon one side of the truth and set it up as the whole truth, and
then in favour of that element of truth to dispute all the rest which is
equally true. More than one faction has already split off in this way
from the psycho-analytic movement; one of them recognizes only the
egoistic impulses and denies the sexual; another perceives only the
influence of real tasks in life but overlooks that of the individual’s
past life, and so on. Now here is occasion for another of these
antitheses and moot-points: Are the neuroses exogenous or endogenous
diseases—the inevitable result of a certain type of constitution or the
product of certain injurious (traumatic) events in the person’s life? In
particular, are they brought about by the fixation of Libido and the
rest of the sexual constitution, or by the pressure of privation? This
dilemma seems to me about as sensible as another I could point to: Is
the child created by the father’s act of generation or by the conception
in the mother? You will properly reply: Both conditions are alike
indispensable. The conditions underlying the neuroses are very similar,
if not exactly the same. From the point of view of causation, cases of
neurotic illness fall into a _series_, within which the two
factors—sexual constitution and events experienced, or, if you wish,
fixation of Libido and privation—are represented in such a way that
where one of them predominates the other is proportionately less
pronounced. At one end of the series stand those extreme cases of whom
one can say: These people would have fallen ill whatever happened,
whatever they experienced, however merciful life had been to them,
because of their anomalous Libido-development. At the other end stand
cases which call forth the opposite verdict—they would undoubtedly have
escaped illness if life had not put such and such burdens upon them. In
the intermediate cases in the series, more or less of the disposing
factor (the sexual constitution) is combined with less or more of the
injurious impositions of life. Their sexual constitution would not have
brought about their neurosis if they had not gone through such and such
experiences, and life’s vicissitudes would not have worked traumatically
upon them if the Libido had been otherwise constituted. In this series I
can perhaps admit a certain preponderance in the effect of the
predisposing factor, but this admission again depends upon where you
draw the line in marking the boundaries of nervousness.
I shall now suggest to you that we should call series such as these
_complemental series_, and will inform you beforehand that we shall find
occasion to establish others of this kind.