it is no phantasy but a real remembrance; fortunately, however, it is
still not as often real as it seemed at first from the results of
analysis. Seduction by children of the same age or older is more
frequent than by adults; and when girls who bring forward this event in
the story of their childhood fairly regularly introduce the father as
the seducer, neither the phantastic character of this accusation nor the
motive actuating it can be doubted. When no seduction has occurred, the
phantasy is usually employed to cover the childhood period of
auto-erotic sexual activity; the child evades feelings of shame about
onanism by retrospectively attributing in phantasy a desired object to
the earliest period. Do not suppose, however, that sexual misuse of
children by the nearest male relatives is entirely derived from the
world of phantasy; most analysts will have treated cases in which such
occurrences actually took place and could be established beyond doubt;
only even then they belonged to later years of childhood and had been
transposed to an earlier time.
All this seems to lead to but one impression, that childhood experiences
of this kind are in some way necessarily required by the neurosis, that
they belong to its unvarying inventory. If they can be found in real
events, well and good; but if reality has not supplied them they will be
evolved out of hints and elaborated by phantasy. The effect is the same,
and even to-day we have not succeeded in tracing any variation in the
results according as phantasy or reality plays the greater part in these
experiences. Here again is one of those complemental series so often
referred to already; it is certainly the strangest of all those we have
encountered. Whence comes the necessity for these phantasies, and the
material for them? There can be no doubt about the instinctive sources;
but how is it to be explained that the same phantasies are always formed
with the same content? I have an answer to this which I know will seem
to you very daring. I believe that these _primal phantasies_ (as I
should like to name these, and certainly some others also) are a
phylogenetic possession. In them the individual, wherever his own
experience has become insufficient, stretches out beyond it to the
experience of past ages. It seems to me quite possible that all that
to-day is narrated in analysis in the form of phantasy, seduction in
childhood, stimulation of sexual excitement upon observation of parental
coitus, the threat of castration—or rather, castration itself—was in
prehistoric periods of the human family a reality; and that the child in
its phantasy simply fills out the gaps in its true individual
experiences with true prehistoric experiences. We have again and again
been led to suspect that more knowledge of the primordial forms of human
development is stored up for us in the psychology of the neuroses than
in any other field we may explore.
Now these things that we have been discussing require us to consider
more closely the origin and meaning of that mental activity called
“phantasy-making.” In general, as you know, it enjoys high esteem,
although its place in mental life has not been clearly understood. I can
tell you as much as this about it. You know that the Ego in man is
gradually trained by the influence of external necessity to appreciate
reality and to pursue the reality-principle, and that in so doing it
must renounce temporarily or permanently various of the objects and
aims—not only sexual—of its desire for pleasure. But renunciation of
pleasure has always been very hard to man; he cannot accomplish it
without some kind of compensation. Accordingly he has evolved for
himself a mental activity in which all these relinquished sources of
pleasure and abandoned paths of gratification are permitted to continue
their existence, a form of existence in which they are free from the
demands of reality and from what we call the exercise of ‘testing
reality.’ Every longing is soon transformed into the idea of its
fulfilment; there is no doubt that dwelling upon a wish-fulfilment in
phantasy brings satisfaction, although the knowledge that it is not
reality remains thereby unobscured. In phantasy, therefore, man can
continue to enjoy a freedom from the grip of the external world, one
which he has long relinquished in actuality. He has contrived to be
alternately a pleasure-seeking animal and a reasonable being; for the
meagre satisfaction that he can extract from reality leaves him
starving. “There is no doing without accessory constructions,” said
Fontane. The creation of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete
counterpart in the establishment of “reservations” and “nature-parks” in
places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threaten
to change the original face of the earth rapidly into something
unrecognizable. The “reservation” is to maintain the old condition of
things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere
else; there everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what
is useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasy is
also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the
reality-principle.
The best-known productions of phantasy have already been met by us; they
are called day-dreams, and are imaginary gratifications of ambitious,
grandiose, erotic wishes, dilating the more extravagantly the more
reality admonishes humility and patience. In them is shown unmistakably
the essence of imaginary happiness, the return of gratification to a
condition in which it is independent of reality’s sanction. We know that
these day-dreams are the kernels and models of night-dreams;
fundamentally the night-dream is nothing but a day-dream distorted by
the nocturnal form of mental activity and made possible by the nocturnal
freedom of instinctive excitations. We are already familiar with the
idea that a day-dream is not necessarily conscious, that unconscious
day-dreams also exist; such unconscious day-dreams are therefore just as
much the source of night-dreams as of neurotic symptoms.
The significance of phantasy for symptom-formation will become clear to
you in what follows. We said that under privation the Libido
regressively invests the positions it had left, but to which
nevertheless some portions of its energy had remained attached. We shall
not retract or correct this statement, but we shall have to interpolate
a connecting-link in it. How does the Libido find its way back to these
fixation-points? Now the objects and channels which have been forsaken
by the Libido have not been forsaken in every sense; they, or their
derivatives, are still retained to some degree of intensity in the
conceptions of phantasy. The Libido has only to withdraw on to the
phantasies in order to find the way open to it back to all the repressed
fixations. These phantasies had enjoyed a certain sort of toleration; no
conflict between them and the Ego had developed, however sharp an
opposition there was between them, as long as a certain condition was
preserved—a condition of a _quantitative_ nature, now disturbed by the
return of the Libido-stream on to the phantasies. By this accession, the
investment of the phantasies with energy becomes so much augmented that
they become assertive and begin to press towards realization; then,
however, conflict between them and the Ego becomes unavoidable. Although
previously they were preconscious or conscious, now they are subject to
repression from the side of the Ego and are exposed to the attraction
exerted from the side of the Unconscious. The Libido travels from the
phantasies, now unconscious, to their sources in the Unconscious—back to
its own fixation-points again.
The return of the Libido on to phantasy is an intermediate step on the
way to symptom-formation which well deserves a special designation. C.
G. Jung has coined for it the very appropriate name of INTROVERSION, but
inappropriately he uses it also to describe other things. We will adhere
to the position that _introversion_ describes the deflection of the
Libido away from the possibilities of real satisfaction and its
excessive accumulation upon phantasies previously tolerated as harmless.
An introverted person is not yet neurotic, but he is in an unstable
condition; the next disturbance of the shifting forces will cause
symptoms to develop, unless he can yet find other outlets for his
pent-up Libido. The unreal character of neurotic satisfaction and the
disregard of the difference between phantasy and reality are already
determined by the delay at this stage of introversion.
You will doubtless have noticed that in these last remarks I have
introduced a new factor into the concatenation of the ætiological
chain—namely, the _quantity_, the magnitude of the energies concerned;
we must always take this factor into account as well. A purely
qualitative analysis of the ætiological conditions does not suffice; or,
to put it in another way, a purely _dynamic_ conception of these
processes is insufficient, the _economic_ aspect is also required. We
have to realize that the conflict between the two forces in opposition
does not break out until a certain intensity in the degree of investment
is reached, even though the substantive conditions have long been in
existence. In the same way, the pathogenic significance of the
constitutional factor is determined by the preponderance of one of the
component-instincts in _excess_ over another in the disposition; it is
even possible to conceive disposition as qualitatively the same in all
men and only differentiated by this quantitative factor. No less
important is this quantitative factor for the capacity to withstand
neurotic illness; it depends upon the _amount_ of undischarged Libido
that a person can hold freely suspended, and upon _how large_ a portion
of it he can deflect from the sexual to a non-sexual goal in
sublimation. The final aim of mental activity, which can be
qualitatively described as a striving towards pleasure and avoidance of
pain, is represented economically in the task of mastering the
distribution of the quantities of excitation (stimulus-masses) present
in the mental apparatus, and in preventing the accumulation of them
which gives rise to pain.
I set out to tell you as much as this about symptom-formation in the
neuroses. Yes, but I must not neglect to mention once more that
everything said to-day relates only to symptom-formation in hysteria.
Even the obsessional neurosis shows great differences, although the
essentials are the same. The ‘counter-charges’ from the Ego against the
demands made by instincts for satisfaction, mentioned already in
connection with hysteria, are more strongly marked in the obsessional
neurosis and govern the clinical picture in the form of what we call
‘reaction-formations.’ Similar and more extensive deviations still are
found in the other neuroses, in which field researches into the
mechanisms of symptom-formation are not yet complete in any direction.
Before you leave to-day I should like to direct your attention for a
moment to a side of phantasy-life of very general interest. There is, in
fact, a path from phantasy back again to reality, and that is—art. The
artist has also an introverted disposition and has not far to go to
become neurotic. He is one who is urged on by instinctive needs which
are too clamorous; he longs to attain to honour, power, riches, fame,
and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these
gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns
away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his Libido
too, on to the creation of his wishes in the life of phantasy, from
which the way might readily lead to neurosis. There must be many factors
in combination to prevent this becoming the whole outcome of his
development; it is well known how often artists in particular suffer
from partial inhibition of their capacities through neurosis. Probably
their constitution is endowed with a powerful capacity for sublimation
and with a certain flexibility in the repressions determining the
conflict. But the way back to reality is found by the artist thus: He is
not the only one who has a life of phantasy; the intermediate world of
phantasy is sanctioned by general human consent, and every hungry soul
looks to it for comfort and consolation. But to those who are not
artists the gratification that can be drawn from the springs of phantasy
is very limited; their inexorable repressions prevent the enjoyment of
all but the meagre day-dreams which can become conscious. A true artist
has more at his disposal. First of all he understands how to elaborate
his day-dreams, so that they lose that personal note which grates upon
strange ears and become enjoyable to others; he knows too how to modify
them sufficiently so that their origin in prohibited sources is not
easily detected. Further, he possesses the mysterious ability to mould
his particular material until it expresses the ideas of his phantasy
faithfully; and then he knows how to attach to this reflection of his
phantasy-life so strong a stream of pleasure that, for a time at least,
the repressions are out-balanced and dispelled by it. When he can do all
this, he opens out to others the way back to the comfort and consolation
of their own unconscious sources of pleasure, and so reaps their
gratitude and admiration; then he has won—through his phantasy—what
before he could only win in phantasy: honour, power, and the love of
women.
TWENTY-FOURTH LECTURE
ORDINARY NERVOUSNESS
After such a difficult piece of work as we got through in our last
lecture I shall leave the subject for a time and turn to my audience.
For I know that you are dissatisfied. You imagined that _Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis_ would be something quite different. You
expected illustrations from life instead of theories; you will tell me
that the story of the two children, on the ground-floor and in the
mansion, revealed something of the causation of neurosis to you, except
that it ought to have been an actual fact instead of an invention of my
own. Or you will say that, when at the beginning I described two
symptoms to you (not also imaginary, let us hope), and unfolded the
solution of them and their connection with the lives of the patients, it
threw some light on the meaning of symptoms, and you had hoped I would
continue in the same way. Instead of doing so I gave you long-drawn-out
and very obscure theories which were never complete, and to which I was
constantly adding something; I dealt with conceptions which I had not
yet introduced to you; I let go of descriptive explanation and took up
the dynamic aspect and dropped this again for a so-called economic one;
made it difficult for you to understand how many of these technical
terms mean the same thing and are only exchanged for one another on
account of euphony; I let vast conceptions, such as those of the
pleasure and reality principles, and the inherited residue of
phylogenetic development, appear, and then instead of explaining
anything to you I let them drift away before your eyes out of sight.
Why did I not begin the introduction to the study of the neuroses with
what you all know of nervousness, a thing that has long roused your
interest, or with the peculiar nature of nervous persons, their
incomprehensible reactions to human intercourse and external influences,
their excitability, their unreliability, and their inability to do well
in anything? Why not lead you step by step from an explanation of the
simple everyday forms of nervousness to the problems of the enigmatic
extreme manifestations?
Indeed, I cannot deny any of this or say that you are wrong. I am not so
much in love with my powers of presentation as to imagine that every
blemish in it is a peculiar charm. I think myself that I might with
advantage to you have proceeded differently, and, indeed, such was my
intention. But one cannot always carry through a reasoned scheme;
something in the material itself often intervenes and takes possession
of one and turns one from one’s first intentions. Even such an ordinary
task as the arrangement of familiar material is not entirely subject to
the author’s will; it comes out in its own way and one can but wonder
afterwards why it happened so and not otherwise.
One of the reasons probably is that my theme, an introduction to
psycho-analysis, no longer covers this section dealing with the subject
of the neuroses. The introduction to psycho-analysis lies in the study
of errors and of dreams; the theory of neurosis is psycho-analysis
itself. I do not think that in such a short time I could have given you
any knowledge of the material contained in the theory of the neuroses
except in this very concentrated form. It was a matter of presenting to
you in their proper context the sense and meaning of symptoms, together
with the external and internal conditions and mechanisms of
symptom-formation. This I attempted to do; it is more or less the core
of what psycho-analysis is able to offer to-day. In conjunction with it
there was much to be said about the Libido and its development, and
something about that of the Ego. You were already prepared by the
preliminary lectures for the main principles of our method and for the
broad aspects involved in the conceptions of the Unconscious and of
repression (resistance). In one of the following lectures you will learn
at what point the work of psycho-analysis finds its organic
continuation. So far I have not concealed from you that all our results
proceed from the study of one single group only of nervous
disorders—namely, the transference neuroses; and even so I have traced
out the mechanism of symptom-formation only in the hysterical neurosis.
Though you will probably have gained no very thorough knowledge and have
not retained every detail, yet I hope that you have acquired a general
idea of the means with which psycho-analysis works, the problems it has
to deal with, and the results it has to offer.
I have ascribed to you a wish that I had begun the subject of the
neuroses with a description of the neurotic’s behaviour, and of the ways
in which he suffers from his disorder, protects himself against it, and
adapts himself to it. This is certainly a very interesting subject, well
worth studying, and not difficult to treat; nevertheless there are
reasons against beginning with this aspect. The danger is that the
Unconscious will be overlooked, the great importance of the Libido
ignored, and that everything will be judged as it appears to the
patient’s own Ego. Now it is obvious that his Ego is not a reliable and
impartial authority. The Ego is after all the force which denies the
existence of the Unconscious and has subjected it to repressions; how
then can we trust its good faith where the Unconscious is concerned?
That which has been repressed consists first and foremost of the
repudiated claims of the sexuality; it is perfectly self-evident that we
shall never learn their extent and their significance from the Ego’s
view of the matter. As soon as the nature of repression begins to dawn
upon us we are advised not to allow one of the two contending parties,
and certainly not the victorious one, to be judge in the dispute. We are
forewarned against being misled by what the Ego tells us. According to
its evidence it would appear to have been the active force throughout,
so that the symptoms arise by its will and agency; we know that to a
large extent it has played a passive part, a fact which it then
endeavours to conceal and to gloss over. It is true that it cannot
always keep up this pretence—in the symptoms of the obsessional neurosis
it has to confess to being confronted by something alien which it must
strenuously resist.
It is certainly plain sailing enough for anyone who does not heed these
warnings against taking the falsifications of the Ego at their
face-value; he will escape all the opposition which psycho-analysis has
to encounter in accentuating the Unconscious, sexuality, and the
passivity of the Ego. He can agree with Alfred Adler that the “nervous
character” is the cause of the neurosis, instead of the result; but he
will not be in a position to account for a single detail of
symptom-formation or a single dream.
You will ask: May it not be possible to do justice to the part played by
the Ego in nervousness and in symptom-formation without absolutely
glaring neglect of the other factors discovered by psycho-analysis? I
reply: Certainly it must be possible, and some time or other it will be
done; but the work which lies at hand for psycho-analysis is not suited
for a beginning at this end. One can, no doubt, predict the point at
which this task also will be included. There are neuroses, called by us
the _narcissistic_ neuroses, in which the Ego is far more deeply
involved than in those we have studied; analytic investigation of these
disorders will enable us to estimate impartially and reliably the share
taken by the Ego in neurotic disease.
One of the relations the Ego bears to its neurosis is, however, so
conspicuous that it was quite appreciable from the beginning. It never
seems to be absent; but it is most clearly discernible in a form of
disorder which we are far from understanding, the traumatic neurosis.
You must know that in the causation and mechanism of all the various
different forms of neurosis the same factors are found at work over and
over again, only that in one type this factor and in another type that
factor is of greatest significance in symptom-formation. It is just the
same as with the personnel of a theatrical company, where every member
plays a special type of part—hero, confidant, villain, etc; each of them
will choose a different piece for his own benefit-performance. Hence,
the phantasies which are transformed into the symptoms are nowhere so
manifest as in hysteria; the ‘counter-charges’ or reaction-formations of
the Ego dominate the picture in the obsessional neurosis; the mechanism
which in dreams we called ‘secondary elaboration’ is the prominent
feature in the delusions of paranoia, and so on.
In the _traumatic neuroses_, especially in those arising from the
terrors of war, we are particularly impressed by a self-seeking,
egoistic motive, a straining towards protection and self-interest; this
alone perhaps could not produce the disease, but it gives its support to
the latter and maintains it once it has been formed. This tendency aims
at protecting the Ego from the dangers which led by their imminence to
the outbreak of illness; nor does it permit of recovery until a
repetition of the dangers appear to be no longer possible, or until some
gain in compensation for the danger undergone has been received.