Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Sigmund Freud

  A second objection is that in attempting to flee from an external danger we are purely and simply increasing the physical distance between ourselves and whatever is threatening us; we don't try to defend ourselves, nor do we seek to alter the status of the danger itself – as would be the case if we set about the wolf with a big stick or shot at it with a gun. But what the defence process does seems to amount to more than a mere attempt at flight: it engages with the drive process that is threatening it, suppresses it in some way, deflects it from its goal, and thereby renders it harmless. This objection seems irrefutable, and we must take due account of it. We believe that in all probability there are indeed defence processes that can reasonably be compared to an attempt at flight, while in others the ego responds far more aggressively and takes energetic counter-measures. Unless of course the comparison between flight and the defence process is altogether vitiated by the fact that both the ego and the drive within the id are parts of one and the same organic whole, not separate entities like the wolf and the child, with the result that any kind of behaviour on the part of the ego is bound to affect the drive process as well, and alter it in some way.

  By dint of studying the determinants of fear we have inevitably seen the ego's behaviour in the defence process bathed, as it were, in the clear light of rationality. Each danger situation corresponds to a particular stage of life or to a particular phase in the development of the psychic apparatus, and seems to be appropriate to it. A very young child really isn't equipped to assert psychic control over large quanta of excitation arriving from without or within; what really does matter most at the relevant stage of an individual's life is that the people he is dependent on do not withdraw their loving care. If, as a boy, he perceives his mighty father as a rival vis-à-vis his mother, and becomes aware of his aggressive inclinations towards the one and sexual intentions towards the other, then he is perfectly justified in being afraid of his father, and his fear of punishment can easily be phylogenetically reinforced and manifest itself as fear of castration. Once he begins to enter social relationships, then fear of the super-ego, or conscience, becomes an absolute imperative, and any lapsing of this factor becomes the source of severe conflicts and dangers etc. However, a new problem is raised by precisely this circumstance.

  Let us try for a moment to replace the affect of fear by another one, for instance the affect of pain. We regard it as entirely normal for a girl to weep pain-racked tears at the age of four if one of her dolls breaks, at age six if her teacher scolds her, at sixteen if her beloved pays her too little attention, at twenty-five perhaps if she has to bury her own child. Each of these pain-determinants has its own particular time, and vanishes once that time has passed; the last of them, the definitive ones, then remain in force throughout the rest of the individual's life. However, we would find it striking indeed if as a woman and mother this same girl were to sob over a broken knick-knack. But that is exactly how neurotics behave. All the various systems for taking control of stimuli across a very broad area have long since become fully established in their psychic apparatus; they are adult enough to be able to gratify most of their needs; they learned long ago that castration is not used as a punishment any more. And yet they behave as if the old danger situations still existed; they hold fast to all the earlier fear-determinants.

  Finding the answer to this puzzle will take quite a while. The essential first step is to look carefully at the facts. In a great many cases the old fear-determinants are indeed relinquished, having already generated neurotic reactions. The phobias of very young children with respect to strangers, the dark, and being on their own – phobias that can almost be termed normal – generally fade away within a few years; to use a phrase often applied to other childhood disorders, children simply ‘grow out of them’. Animal phobias, common as they are, share the same destiny, and many of the childhood conversion hysterias show no recurrence in later years. Ritual behaviour is an extremely common phenomenon in the latency period, but only a very small percentage of such cases later develop into full-blown obsessional neurosis. So far as we are able to judge on the basis of our experience of white urban children subject to quite sophisticated socio-cultural expectations, childhood neuroses in general are passing phases that occur routinely in the course of children's development – although too little attention is paid to them, now as ever. There is never a single adult neurotic who does not show the telltale signs of childhood neurosis, whereas by no means all children who display such signs become neurotics in later life. It must thus be part and parcel of the maturation process for fear-determinants to be relinquished, and for danger situations to lose their importance. A further consideration is that some of these danger situations manage to survive into a much later period by modifying their fear-determinant to suit it. Thus for instance fear of castration carries on in the guise of syphilis phobia, the subject having discovered that while castration may no longer be customary as a punishment for indulging sexual desire, severe diseases have replaced it as the danger threatening anyone who plays free with their drives. Other fear-determinants, such as fear of the super-ego, are not destined for oblivion at all, but are meant to accompany us throughout the whole of our life. What differentiates neurotics from normal people, therefore, is that their reactions to these dangers are excessively intense. Finally, even adulthood does not offer sufficient protection against the return of the primal traumatic fear-situation; it seems likely that everyone has a limit beyond which their psychic apparatus is no longer capable of controlling the quanta of excitation that require urgent processing.

  These minor adjustments to our argument are by no means intended to detract from the basic fact at issue here, namely that so many people remain infantile in their response to danger, and fail to put fear-determinants behind them once their time has passed. To deny this would be to deny the very fact of neurosis, for such people are precisely those we term ‘neurotics’. But how is this possible? Why aren't all neuroses just passing phases in a person's development, phases that end once the next begins? What makes these reactions to danger so enduring? What gives the affect of fear the advantage that it seems to enjoy over all the other affects, namely the ability to call forth reactions which stand out from the others as plainly abnormal, and which are counter-purposive in obstructing the steady flow of life? We find ourselves, in other words, unexpectedly confronted once again with the same old conundrum: Where does neurosis come from? What is the force that ultimately and particularly drives it?57 Despite decades of exertions in the field of psychoanalysis, this problem still looms before us, just as inviolate58 as it was at the beginning.

  X

  Fear is the reaction to danger. Given that the affect of fear is able to commandeer a special position for itself in the psychic economy, it is surely plausible to suppose that this has to do with the nature of danger itself. But dangers are common to all mankind, they are the same for each and every individual. What we need – yet do not have – is some key factor that will explain how those particular individuals are selected who are able to subordinate the affect of fear to their normal psychic processes despite its special status; or, alternatively, a factor that determines which individuals are doomed to fail in this task. To the best of my knowledge, two attempts have so far been made to uncover such a factor (understandably enough, any attempt in this direction can expect a sympathetic reception, since it promises to relieve an agonizing need). The two attempts are complementary to each other, in that they approach the problem from opposite directions. The first was undertaken more than ten years ago by Alfred Adler. Reduced to its bare essentials, his argument is that those who fail to master the task that danger poses them, do so because the inferiority of their organs is such as to cause them insurmountable difficulties. If only we could put our faith in the adage simplex sigillum veri,59 then we should have to hail Adler's solution as the answer to all our prayers. On the contrary, however, the critiques that have appeared over the last decade have irrefutably
demonstrated the total inadequacy of this account – which, moreover, blithely ignores the entire wealth of material that has been discovered thanks to psychoanalysis.

  The second attempt was undertaken by Otto Rank in 1923 in his book Das Trauma der Geburt [The Trauma of Birth]. It would be unfair to compare Rank's attempt to Adler's in any respect other than the one highlighted here, for it remains entirely within the realm of psychoanalysis, builds on its ideas, and deserves recognition as a legitimate bid to solve its problems. Taking the ‘individual’/ ‘danger’ relation as a given, Rank shifts attention away from the individual and the frailty of his organs, and focuses instead on the variable intensity of the danger. The birth process is the first danger situation; the economic upheaval that it causes becomes the paradigmatic fear reaction. We earlier traced the line of development that links this first danger situation and fear-determinant to all the subsequent ones, and we saw that they all share a common factor, in that they all in one sense or another signify separation from the mother, at first only in biological terms, then in terms of object-loss – direct object-loss to start with, and indirect later on. The discovery of this crucial linkage is an undisputed merit of Rank's hypothesis. Now the trauma of birth affects different individuals with differing degrees of intensity, and as the intensity of the trauma varies, so too does the intensity of the fear reaction; according to Rank, it is the degree of fear thus generated at the very beginning that determines whether an individual will ever be able to assert control over it that is, whether he will become neurotic or normal.

  It is not our concern here to offer a detailed critique of Rank's ideas, but merely to consider whether they can help us find a solution to our specific problem. Rank's proposition that people become neurotics because the intensity of their birth trauma is such that they never succeed in fully abreacting it – is highly questionable from a theoretical point of view. It isn't at all clear what is meant by ‘abreacting the trauma’. If we take it literally, then we arrive at the untenable proposition that the neurotic will get closer and closer to being healthy the more frequently and more intensively he reproduces the affect of fear. Indeed, it was precisely because it thus contradicted reality that I had by that time already abandoned the abreaction theory, which played such a major role in the practice of catharsis.60 Rank's emphasis on the variable intensity of the birth trauma takes no account of the perfectly sound aetiological credentials of hereditary constitution; and yet it is an organic factor that behaves in a quite random way by comparison with the constitution, and is itself dependent on numerous other factors that can only be termed random, such as the timely advent of help during the birth process. Rank's theory leaves both constitutional and phylogenetic factors completely out of account. But any attempt to accommodate the importance of the constitution – for instance by modifying the argument to the effect that what matters is rather the extent to which the individual reacts to the variable intensity of the birth trauma – simply robs the theory of its entire impact, and relegates the new factor introduced by Rank to a secondary role. The key factor that determines whether an individual ultimately develops neurosis thus lies in some other realm after all – and one that remains, as before, quite unknown to us.

  The fact that the birth process is common both to humans and to the other mammals, whereas a special propensity for neurosis is a human privilege not vouchsafed to animals, is hardly likely to dispose anyone very favourably to Rank's theory. The chief objection to it, however, is that it is all up in the air, instead of being based on sound empirical evidence. There is no reliable body of research to show whether there is any clear correlation between a difficult and protracted birth, and the development of neurosis, or indeed whether it is exclusively children born in such circumstances that exhibit the characteristic signs of early infantile anxiety61 longer or more intensely than the norm. The point might be made that induced births, and births that are easy for the mother, may possibly mean severe trauma for the child; but this does not detract from the proposition that births involving asphyxia are certain to show the purported consequences. Rank's aetiology arguably does have a particular advantage in that it gives pre-eminence to a factor that can be tested against the empirical evidence; until it has indeed been tested in this way, it is impossible to form a judgement as to the real value of his hypothesis.

  At the same time, I cannot share the view that Rank's theory contradicts the long-established tenet of psychoanalysis as to the aetiological importance of the sexual drives, for it bears solely on the individual's relationship to the danger situation, and leaves us to come to our own conclusions on the uplifting proposition that anyone incapable of dealing satisfactorily with the dangers that occur at the beginning of their life is also bound to fail in the situations of sexual danger that arise later on, and thus fall prey to neurosis.

  I do not believe, then, that Rank's attempt provides us with the answer to our question as to why neurosis arises, and while it clearly does contribute to a solution, I think it is still too early to say just how significant that contribution may be. If research reveals that a difficult birth does not have a significant effect on the individual's susceptibility to neuroses, then Rank's contribution will have to be considered slight. It is very much to be feared that our need for a tangible and coherent ‘ultimate cause’ of nervous disorders will never be satisfied. The ideal answer – and one that doctors probably aspire to even today - would be to identify a bacillus that could be isolated and pure-cultured, and on inoculation would produce the same specific disorder in each and every individual. A somewhat less fantastical answer would be to identify particular chemical substances, the administering of which would induce or dispel specific neuroses. But solutions of this sort are not very likely.

  What psychoanalysis enables us to say is less simple and less satisfying. I have nothing new to add here: I can only repeat what has long been known. If the ego succeeds in warding off a dangerous drive-impulse, by means of the repression process for instance, then it certainly inhibits and impairs the relevant part of the id – but at the same time it also grants it a certain element of independence, and forgoes a certain portion of its own sovereignty. This is an inevitable consequence of the very nature of repression, which in essence is an attempt at flight. The repressed element is now at large ‘beyond the pale’: excluded from the grand organization of the ego, and subject only to the laws that prevail in the realm of the unconscious. If the danger situation now alters in such a way that there is nothing motivating the ego to take defensive action against a new drive-impulse similar to the repressed one, then the consequences of the ego's restriction become apparent. The course of the new drive-impulse proves subject to automatism – or, as I should prefer to say, to the compulsion to repeat – and thus follows the same path as the earlier, repressed one, as if the danger situation that had already been successfully overcome were still in existence. The fixating factor in repression is thus the unconscious id's compulsion to repeat, which is normally neutralized only by free-moving62 ego function. Now the ego may occasionally succeed in breaking down the barriers of repression that it has itself erected, thus enabling it to reassert its influence on the drive-impulse and control the course of the new one in accordance with the changed danger situation. But the fact of the matter is that it generally fails in this respect and is unable to reverse its repressions. The quantitative ratios involved may be the decisive factor in determining the outcome of this conflict. Our impression is that in quite a number of cases there is only one possible outcome: the regressive attraction exerted by the repressed impulse and the force of the repression itself are so great that the new impulse has no choice but to obey the compulsion to repeat. In other cases we see the effect of a different interplay of forces: the attraction of the repressed original impulse is reinforced by the repulsion generated by the objective difficulties that hinder the new impulse from following any other course.

  That this is indeed the way in which the subject
comes to be fixated on the repression, and to hold to a danger situation that no longer exists, is clearly borne out by the sheer fact of psychoanalytic therapy, which, though modest enough in itself, is enormously significant in theoretical terms. When in the course of psychoanalysis we give the ego the requisite help that enables it to lift its repressions, it recovers its power over the repressed id, and can get the drive-impulses to pursue their course as if the old danger situations no longer existed. Our achievements in this regard are fully in accord with the limited scope of our powers in medicine generally. In our therapeutic practice, after all, we must be content as a rule to achieve the same benign outcome that would have materialized anyway given the right circumstances – but to do so more rapidly, more reliably, and with less fuss.

  Our deliberations thus far have shown us that it is the quantitative ratios of the various factors involved – ratios that cannot be directly demonstrated but only indirectly inferred – which determine whether old danger situations are perpetuated, whether repressions effected by the ego are maintained, whether childhood neuroses are continued in later life. Among the factors that are involved in the causation of neuroses – having created the conditions in which the various psychic forces do battle with each other – three in particular seem to us to stand out: a biological one, a phylogenetic one, and a purely psychological one.

  The biological factor is the very lengthy period during which the young of the human species remain in a state of helplessness and dependence. The intra-uterine existence of human beings appears somewhat abbreviated by comparison with that of most animals, and they come into the world less able to cope. As a result, the objective external world exerts a more powerful influence on them, and the ego is encouraged to differentiate from the id at a very early stage; furthermore, the dangers posed by the external world become more significant, and the importance of the object – the only thing that can protect them from these dangers and make up for the loss of their intra-uterine existence – is vastly increased. This biological factor thus produces the first danger situations in each child's life, and generates the need to be loved – a need that stays with him throughout his life.