A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis · Sigmund Freud
GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES
In the famous _Struwelpeter_ by the pediatrist Hoffman, of Frankfort, rhymes which owe their popularity to his very fine understanding of the sexual and other complexes of childhood, you find a milder substitute for castration in the cutting off of the thumbs as a punishment for insistent sucking. But it is highly improbable that the threat of castration is actually made as often as it occurs in the analyses of neurotics. We are content to understand that the child imaginatively constructs this threat for himself from suggestions, from the knowledge that auto-erotic satisfaction is forbidden, and from the impression of castration he has received in discovering the female genital. It is, moreover, in no way impossible that the little child, so long as he is not credited with any understanding or memory, will, even in families outside the proletariat, become a witness to the sexual act between his parents or some other group-ups, and it cannot be disproved that the child _subsequently_ understands this impression, and may react upon it.
But when this intercourse is described with minute details which could hardly have been observed, or if it turns out to be, as it so frequently does, an intercourse which was not face to face, _more ferarum_, there is no longer any doubt that this phantasy is derived from the observation of the intercourse of animals (dogs) and the unsatisfied curiosity of the child in his period of puberty. The greatest feat of the imagination is the phantasy of having witnessed the coitus of the parents while still unborn in the mother's womb. Of especial interest is the phantasy of having been seduced, because so often it is not a phantasy at all, but a real memory. But luckily it is not real so often as first appears from the results of analysis. Seduction by older children, or children of the same age, is much more frequent than seduction by adults, and if, in the case of little girls, the father quite regularly appears as the seducer in the occurrences which they relate, neither the fantastic nature of this accusation nor its motive can be doubted. The child as a rule covers the autoerotic period of his sexual activity, where there has been no actual seduction, with the seduction-phantasy. He spares himself the shame of onanism by imagining the presence of an object for his desires in that early period. As a matter of fact, you must not be misled in attributing sexual misuse of the child by its nearest male relatives solely and always to phantasy. Most analysts have probably treated cases in which such relations were real and could be proved beyond doubt, with the qualification that in such cases they belong to the later years of childhood and were transposed to an earlier time.
We cannot avoid the impression that such experiences of childhood are in some way necessary to the neurosis, that they are claimed by its iron rule. If they exist in reality, then well and good, but if reality has withheld them they are constructed from suggestions and supplemented by the imagination. The result is the same, and to this day we have been unable to trace any difference in the results, whether fancy or fact played the larger part in these childish occurrences. Here again we encounter one of the complementary relationships so frequently met with; it is, to be sure, the most estranging of all those we have become acquainted with. Whence comes the need for these phantasies, and the material for them? There can be no doubt as to the sources of the impulse, but we must explain why the same phantasies are always created with the same content. I have an answer in readiness which I know you will think very far-fetched. I am of the opinion that these _primal phantasies_--so I should like to term these, and certainly some others also--are a phylogenetic possession. In them the individual reaches out beyond his own life, into the experiences of antiquity, where his own experience has become all too rudimentary. It seems very possible to me that everything which is obtained during an analysis in the guise of phantasy, the seduction of children, the release of sexual excitement by watching parental intercourse, the threat of castration--or rather castration itself--were once realities in the primeval existence of mankind and that the imaginative child is merely filling in the gaps of individual truth with prehistoric truth. We have again and again suspected that the psychology of neuroses stores up more of the antiquities of human development than all other sources.
What we have just discussed makes it necessary for us to enter further into the origin and significance of that mental activity that is called imagination. As you well know, it enjoys universal esteem, although we have never clearly understood its place in the psychic life. I have this much to say about it. As you know, the ego of man is slowly educated by the influence of external necessity to an appreciation of reality and a pursuit of the principle of reality, and must therefore renounce temporarily or permanently various objects and goals of its strivings for satisfaction, sexual and otherwise. But renunciation of gratification has always been difficult for man. He cannot accomplish it without something in the nature of compensation. Accordingly he has reserved for himself a psychological activity wherein all these abandoned sources of pleasures and means of pleasurable gratification are granted a further existence, a form of existence in which they are freed from the requirements of reality and what we like to call the test of reality. Every impulse is soon transformed into the form of its own fulfillment. There is no doubt that dwelling on the imagined fulfillment of a given wish affords some satisfaction, although the realization that it is unreal is unobscured.
In the activity of the imagination, man enjoys that freedom from external compulsion that he has long since renounced. He has made it possible to be alternately a pleasure-seeking animal and a reasoning human being. He finds that the scant satisfaction that he can force out of reality is not enough. "There is no getting along without auxiliary-constructions," Th. Fontaine once said. The creation of the psychic realm of fancy has its complete counterpart in the establishment of "preserves" and "conservation projects" in those places where the demands of husbandry, traffic and industry threaten quickly to change the original face of the earth into something unrecognizable. The national reserves maintain this old condition of things, which otherwise has everywhere been regretfully sacrificed to necessity. Everything may grow and spread there as it will, even that which is useless and harmful. The psychic realm of phantasy is such a reservation withdrawn from the principles of reality. The best known productions of phantasy are the so-called "day dreams," which we already know, pictured satisfactions of ambitious, of covetous and erotic wishes, which flourish the more grandly the more reality admonishes them to modesty and patience. There is unmistakably shown in them the nature of imaginative happiness, the restoration of the independence of pleasurable gratification from the acquiescence of reality. We know such day dreams are nuclei and models for the dreams of night. The night dream is essentially nothing but a day dream, distorted by the nocturnal forms of psychological activity, and made available by the freedom which the night gives to instinctive impulses. We have already become acquainted with the idea that a day dream is not necessarily conscious, that there are also unconscious day dreams. Such unconscious day dreams are as much the source of night dreams as of neurotic symptoms.
The significance of phantasy for the development of symptoms will become clear to you by the following: We have said that in a case of renunciation, the libido occupies regressively the positions once abandoned by it, to which, nevertheless, it has clung in certain ways. We shall neither retract this statement nor correct it, but we shall insert a missing link. How does the libido find its way to these points of fixation? Well, every object and tendency of the libido that has been abandoned, is not abandoned in every sense of the word. They, or their derivatives, are still held in presentations of the phantasy, with a certain degree of intensity. The libido need only retire to the imagination in order to find from them the open road to all suppressed fixations. These phantasies were happy under a sort of tolerance, there was no conflict between them and the ego, no matter how acute the contrast, so long as a certain condition was observed--a condition _quantitative_ in nature that is now disturbed by the flowing back of the libido to the phantasies. By this addition the accumulation of energy in the phantasies is heightened to such a degree that they become assertive and develop a pressure in the direction of realization. But that makes a conflict between them and the ego inevitable. Whether formerly conscious or unconscious, they now are subject to suppression by the ego and are victims to the attraction of the unconscious. The libido wanders from phantasies now unconscious to their sources in unconsciousness, and back to its own points of fixation.
The return of the libido to phantasy is an intermediate step on the road to symptom development and well deserves a special designation. C. G. Jung coined for it the very appropriate name of _introversion_, but inappropriately he also lets it stand for other things. Let us therefore retain the idea that introversion signifies the turning aside of the libido from the possibilities of actual satisfaction and the excessive accumulation of the phantasies hitherto tolerated as harmless. An introvert is not yet a neurotic, but he finds himself in a labile situation; he must develop symptoms at the next dislocation of forces, if he does not find other outlets for his pent-up libido. The intangible nature of neurotic satisfaction and the neglect of the difference between imagination and reality are already determined by arrest in the phase of introversion.
You have certainly noticed that in the last discussions I have introduced a new factor into the structure of the etiological chain, namely, the quantity, the amount of energy that comes under consideration. We must always take this factor into account. Purely qualitative analysis of the etiological conditions is not sufficient. Or, to put it in another way, a _dynamic_ conception alone of these psychic processes is not enough; there is need of an _economic_ viewpoint. We must say to ourselves that the conflict between two impulses is not released before certain occupation-intensities have been reached, even though the qualitative conditions have long been potent. Similarly, the pathogenic significance of the constitutional factors is guided by how much _more_ of a given component impulse is present in the predisposition over and above that of another; one can even conceive the predispositions of all men to be qualitatively the same and to be differentiated only by these quantitative conditions. The quantitative factor is no less important for the power of resistance against neurotic ailments. It depends upon _what amount_ of unused libido a person can hold freely suspended, and upon _how large a fraction_ of the libido he is able to direct from the sexual path to the goal of sublimation. The final goal of psychological activity, which may be described qualitatively as striving towards pleasure-acquisition and avoidance of unpleasantness, presents itself in the light of economic considerations as the task of overcoming the gigantic stimuli at work in the psychological apparatus, and to prevent those obstructions which cause unpleasantness.
So much I wanted to tell you about symptom development in the neuroses. Yes, but do not let me neglect to emphasize this especially: everything I have said here relates to the symptom development in hysteria. Even in compulsion neuroses, which retain the same fundamentals, much is found that is different. The counter-siege directed against the claims of the instincts, of which we have spoken in connection with hysteria, press to the fore in compulsion neuroses, and control the clinical picture by means of so-called "reaction-formations." The same kind and more far-reaching variations are discoverable among the other neuroses, where the investigations as to the mechanism of symptom development have in no way been completed. Before I leave you today I should like to have your attention for a while for an aspect of imaginative life which is worthy of the most general interest. For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is--art. The artist is an incipient introvert who is not far from being a neurotic. He is impelled by too powerful instinctive needs. He wants to achieve honor, power, riches, fame and the love of women. But he lacks the means of achieving these satisfactions. So like any other unsatisfied person, he turns away from reality, and transfers all his interests, his libido, too, to the elaboration of his imaginary wishes, all of which might easily point the way to neurosis. A great many factors must combine to present this termination of his development; it is well known how often artists especially suffer from a partial inhibition of their capacities through neurosis. Apparently their constitutions are strongly endowed with an ability to sublimize and to shift the suppression determining their conflicts. The artist finds the way back to reality in this way. He is not the only one who has a life of imagination. The twilight-realm of phantasy is upheld by the sanction of humanity and every hungry soul looks here for help and sympathy.
But for those who are not artists, the ability to obtain satisfaction from imaginative sources is very restricted. Their relentless suppressions force them to be satisfied with the sparse day dreams which may become conscious. If one is a real artist he has more at his disposal. In the first place, he understands how to elaborate his day dreams so that they lose their essentially personal element, which would repel strangers, and yield satisfaction to others as well. He also knows how to disguise them so that they do not easily disclose their origin in their despised sources. He further possesses the puzzling ability of molding a specific material into a faithful image of the creatures of his imagination, and then he is able to attach to this representation of his unconscious phantasies so much pleasurable gratification that, for a time at least, it is able to outweigh and release the suppressions. If he is able to accomplish all this, he makes it possible for others, in their return, to obtain solace and consolation from their own unconscious sources of gratification which had become inaccessible. He wins gratitude and admiration for himself and so, by means of his imagination, achieves the very things which had at first only an imaginary existence for him: honor, power, and the love of women.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.