Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

by Sigmund Freud

  On the other hand, however, we can see this same ego as a poor little creature subjected to servitude in three different ways, and threatened in consequence by three different dangers – one posed by the external world, one by the libido of the id, and one by the harshness of the super-ego. Corresponding to these three dangers are three different kinds of fear, for fear is the manifestation of a retreat from danger. As an entity located on the border between the world and the id, the ego seeks to mediate between them: it seeks to make the id tractable to the world; and by means of the muscle activity it instigates, it seeks to make the world match the wishes of the id. In fact it behaves rather as the physician does in psychoanalytic therapy: it commends itself, and its regard for the objective world, to the id as a potential libido-object, and seeks to divert the id's libido onto itself. It is not merely the id's adjutant, but a grovelling lackey desperate to win his master's love. It does its utmost to stay on good terms with the id; it dresses up the latter's Ucs commands in its own Pcs rationalizations; when reality wags its finger, it feigns obedience on the part of the id, even when the id has in fact remained obdurate and intransigent; it hushes up the id's conflicts with reality, and also, wherever possible, its conflicts with the super-ego. Positioned as it is between the id and reality, it yields all too often to the temptation to fawn, to lie, to do whatever may be opportune, rather like a politician who knows full well what he ought to do, but wants none the less to preserve his popularity in the eyes of the public.

  The ego does not show impartiality in its dealings with the two types of drives. Through the work it does to bring about identifications and sublimations it helps the death drives to assert control over the libido, but it thereby runs the risk of itself becoming the object of the death drives and thus perishing. In order to provide such help, it must make itself replete with libido, thereby becoming a representative of Eros, keen to live and be loved.

  However, since its sublimational work results in a de-mergence of drives and the unleashing of aggressive drives within the super-ego, its battle against the libido exposes it to the danger of suffering harm and death. If the aggression of the super-ego causes it to suffer or even perish, then its fate is analogous to that of the protista, which are destroyed by the products of their own catabolism. Viewed in economic terms, the morality operative within the super-ego seems to us to be just such a product of catabolism.91

  Amongst the ego's various forms of dependence, the most interesting is probably its dependence on the super-ego.

  The ego is of course the true locus of fear.92 Threatened by dangers from three different directions, the ego displays the flight reflex by withdrawing its own cathexis from the perception of the threat or from the process within the id that is deemed to be posing the threat, and re-deploying it as fear. This primitive reaction is later superseded by the enactment of protective cathexes (the phobia mechanism). It is impossible to say precisely what the ego fears from the danger without, and from the libidinal danger within the id; we know it involves being overwhelmed or destroyed – but we cannot apprehend it analytically. The ego simply responds to the warning given by the pleasure principle. On the other hand it is possible to say what lies hidden behind the ego's fear of the super-ego, behind its consciential fear.93 At some point in the past there was a threat of castration at the hands of the superior being that subsequently turned into the ego-ideal, and the fear of castration provoked by this is probably the core around which consciential fear subsequently accretes; consciential fear is the continuation of that castration fear.

  The grandiloquent assertion that ‘all fear is essentially fear of death’ is more or less meaningless, and in any event impossible to justify.94 On the contrary, it seems to me altogether right to distinguish fear of death from objective fear and neurotic libido-fear.95 The fear of death poses a severe problem for psychoanalysis, for death is an abstract concept with negative content for which no unconscious correlative can be found. The mechanism behind the fear of death could only be that the ego very largely jettisons its narcissistic libido-cathexis, thus forsaking its own self in much the same way as it forsakes external objects in other fear situations. I rather think that the fear of death is something that evolves between the ego and the super-ego.

  Fear of death arises, as we know, in two sets of circumstances (both incidentally directly analogous to those that apply in other instances where fear is generated): as a reaction to an external danger; and as an inner process, for instance in melancholia. Once again, the neurotic scenario may help us to understand the objective one.

  There is only one possible explanation for the fear of death that arises in melancholia, namely that the ego gives up on itself because it feels itself to be hated and persecuted by the super-ego instead of loved. For the ego, therefore, ‘to live’ means the same as ‘to be loved’ – to be loved by the super-ego, which in this context, too, serves to represent the id. The super-ego plays the same protective, salvatory role as the father once did, and as providence or destiny will do later on. But the ego must inevitably draw the very same conclusion when confronted by a massive danger in the objective world that it believes itself powerless to overcome: it sees itself as deserted by all the forces that could have protected it, and lets itself die. Incidentally, this is the same situation as that which underlay the first great fear-state of birth and the fear-cum-longing96 of infancy, namely separation from the protecting mother.

  On the basis of these considerations, therefore, fear of death, like consciential fear, can be viewed as a modified form of castration fear. Given the enormous importance of guilt-feeling in neuroses, we cannot by any means dismiss the idea that ordinary neurotic fear may well be compounded in severe cases by the fear generated through the interaction between ego and super-ego (castration fear, consciential fear, fear of death).

  The id – to which we finally return – has no means of showing the ego either love or hate. It cannot declare its will, for no single, unified will has ever lain within its means. Eros and the death drive do battle within it; we have already seen the various means that the two sets of drives deploy in their fight with each other. We could depict the id as being entirely under the control of the mute but mighty death drives, who seek peace and, prompted by the pleasure principle, seek to pacify Eros the troublemaker – but we fear that to do so would be to underestimate the part that Eros plays.

  (1923)

  Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear

  I

  When we are describing pathological phenomena, ordinary linguistic usage allows us to distinguish between ‘symptoms’ and ‘inhibitions’, but attaches no particular significance to this distinction. We ourselves would scarcely muster any interest in differentiating the concepts of ‘inhibition’ and ‘symptom’ from one another if we did not encounter cases of illness obliging us to attest that they display no symptoms, only inhibitions, and if we did not wish to know the conditions that give rise to this.

  The two concepts have different provenances. ‘Inhibition’ relates particularly to function, and does not necessarily signify anything pathological; we can just as well describe any normal restraint of a function as an ‘inhibition’ thereof.1 ‘Symptom’, on the other hand, means something like ‘indicator of a disease process’. Thus an inhibition, too, can be a symptom. The standard practice, then, is to speak of ‘inhibition’ where there is a straightforward diminution of any given function, and ‘symptom’ where the function in question shows unusual changes or behaves in some new way. In many cases it appears to be a matter of purely arbitrary choice as to whether one stresses the positive or the negative side of the pathological process and characterizes its outcome as ‘symptom’ or as ‘inhibition’.2 All this is really very uninteresting, and the problem as we initially formulated it turns out to offer very little promise.

  Since inhibition is so intimately linked to function, one might usefully entertain the idea of investigating the different ego functions with a view to establishing
the ways in which the disturbance of any of these functions manifests itself in the various neurotic disorders. For the purposes of this comparative study we have chosen the following areas: the sexual function, eating, locomotion, occupational work.

  a) The sexual function is subject to disturbances of many different kinds, most of them displaying the characteristics of straightforward inhibitions. These are summarily termed ‘psychic impotence’. The successful completion of normal sexual activity presupposes a highly complicated sequence of events, susceptible to disturbance at any point. In the male the principal manifestations of inhibition are successively as follows: blocking of the libido necessary for initiating the process (lack of desire at the psychic level); absence of physical preparedness (lack of erection); abbreviation of the act (premature ejaculation) – which can just as readily be described as a positive symptom; cessation of the act before its natural conclusion (lack of ejaculation); non-appearance of the appropriate psychic effect (i.e. of the pleasurable sensation of orgasm). Other disturbances result where the sexual function is combined with particular factors of a perverted or fetishistic nature.

  It cannot escape our attention for very long that inhibition is related to fear.3 Numerous inhibitions clearly consist in relinquishing a particular function because fear would result if it were to be carried out. In women, direct fear of the sexual function is common. We class this as a form of hysteria, as we also do in the case of the defensive symptom of disgust, which initially sets in as a post factum reaction to the passively experienced sexual act, and subsequently appears whenever the sexual act is visualized. In addition, a large number of compulsive acts turn out to be precautions and safeguards against sexual experience, and are accordingly phobic in nature.

  This really doesn't add very much to our understanding. All we can do is to note that a great variety of means are deployed to disrupt the sexual function: 1) straightforward blocking of the libido – which more readily than anything else appears to produce what we term a pure inhibition; 2) spoiling the actual execution of the function; 3) rendering the function more difficult by adding special conditions, or modifying it by reorienting it towards different objectives; 4) averting it by dint of protective measures; 5) in cases where its inception can no longer be prevented: interrupting it by engendering fear; and finally 6) in cases where, despite everything, the function is carried through to its conclusion: provoking a post factum reaction that protests against what has occurred and seeks to undo it.

  b) The most common disruption affecting the eating function is lack of interest in food due to withdrawal of libido. An increased interest in food is also not uncommon; the compulsion to eat is motivated by fear of starvation, and has been little researched. The symptom of vomiting is familiar to us as a hysterical defence against eating. Refusal to eat as a result of fear is a characteristic of psychotic states (delusional fear of poisoning).

  c) Locomotion is inhibited in some neurotic disorders, both by lack of interest in walking and by physical weakness related specifically to walking. The disability is hysterical in nature, and operates by either paralysing the motor function of the leg muscles or inducing a specific suspension of this particular function (abasia). Especially characteristic is the process whereby locomotion is rendered more difficult by the introduction of special conditions, the non-fulfilment of which gives rise to fear (phobia).

  d) Inhibitions affecting the ability to work – which so often present for treatment as an isolated symptom – reveal themselves to us in the form of diminished pleasure, inferior performance, or reactive phenomena such as tiredness, vertigo, nausea in cases where the person is forced to carry on working. Hysteria forces the person to stop working altogether by paralysing organs and functions in a way that makes it impossible for the work to be carried out. Obsessional neurosis disrupts the work process by making the person prone to constant distractions, and making him waste time by repeating and dwelling on things unnecessarily.

  We could extend this brief survey to other functions as well, but we could not reasonably expect to gain anything by so doing, as we would not succeed in penetrating beyond the outer surface of things. Let us therefore settle without further ado on a hypothesis that rids the concept of inhibition of almost all its mystery. An inhibition is the manifestation of a restriction of function in the ego, which can itself have a whole variety of different causes. We are already very familiar with one general tendency displayed by this abnegation of function, and with some of its mechanisms.

  The said tendency is more readily identifiable in the various specific inhibitions. In cases where piano-playing, writing and even walking are affected by inhibitions, psychoanalysis shows that this is caused by excessive eroticization of the organs involved, namely the fingers and the feet. We have already come to appreciate on a more general level that the ego function of an organ is impaired if there is an increase in its erogeneity, its sexual significance. If we might venture to use a somewhat farcical comparison: it behaves like the family cook who refuses to carry on working at the kitchen stove because the master of the house has started an affair with her. If writing – which consists in letting fluid flow from a tube onto a sheet of white paper – has acquired the symbolic significance of coitus, or if walking has become a symbolic surrogate for stamping on the body of mother earth, then both activities, writing and walking, are abandoned, since it would otherwise seem as if one were performing the forbidden sexual act. The ego abnegates its due functions in order to avoid having to carry out a fresh act of repression, in order to avoid a conflict with the id.

  Other inhibitions clearly serve the purposes of self-punishment, as is not infrequently the case with those affecting work activities. These are things that the ego is not allowed to do because they would bring advantage and success, something that the stern super-ego has forbidden. The ego therefore refrains from these activities too – in order not to enter into conflict with the super-ego.

  The more generalized inhibitions of the ego are subject to a different, very straightforward mechanism. If the ego is put under strain by particularly severe demands on the psyche, such as sorrow4 for example, or a major suppression of emotion, or the need to stifle a constant welling of sexual fantasies, then it is left with so little spare energy that it has to stop expending it at numerous places all at once, like a speculator who is short of cash because he has tied it all up in his various projects. I was able to observe an instructive instance of such generalized inhibition, brief but intense, in the case of a patient suffering from obsessional neurosis, who fell into a paralysing torpor lasting anything from a day to several days in circumstances that clearly ought to have given rise to an explosion of rage. This must surely open the way to an understanding of the kind of generalized inhibition that characterizes depressive states, notably the most severe of these: melancholia.

  By way of conclusion, therefore, we can say of inhibitions that they constitute a restriction of ego function, occurring either as a precautionary measure, or because so much energy has already been used up elsewhere. It is now easy to see in what way an inhibition differs from a symptom; and a symptom can clearly no longer be described as a process operating within, or acting upon, the ego.

  II

  We long ago made a study of the essential elements of symptom-formation, and offered a description of them that we hope is incontestable. On this view, a symptom is both sign and surrogate of a drive that has remained ungratified; it is a product of the repression process. The latter emanates from the ego, which – perhaps at the behest of the super-ego – refuses to go along with a drive-cathexis instigated within the id.5 Repression enables the ego to prevent the notion serving as the vehicle of the disagreeable6 impulse from entering consciousness – though psychoanalysis often shows it to have survived as an unconscious formation.7 Everything seems clear enough up to this point; but as soon as we venture beyond it we encounter unresolved difficulties.

  In our earlier descriptions of the rep
ression process we emphatically stressed its success in keeping things from consciousness, but left various other matters open to doubt. One question that arose was this: what happens to drive-impulses activated within the id that seek gratification as their goal? Our answer was an indirect one, to the effect that the process of repression transforms the expected pleasure of gratification into unpleasure; and this left us facing the problematic question as to how the gratifying of a drive can possibly result in unpleasure. In the hope that this will clarify matters, we wish to argue in no uncertain terms that as a result of repression the excitatory process originally intended within the id does not in fact take place at all; the ego succeeds in inhibiting or deflecting it. If this is so, then we need no longer be puzzled by the ‘transformation of affect’8 brought about by repression. But at the same time we have conceded that the ego can exert a very considerable influence on events in the id, and we must accordingly learn to understand the means by which the ego is able to achieve this surprising degree of power.

  I believe that the ego derives this influence from its very close links to the perceptual system, which indeed constitute its essence, and the grounds for its differentiation from the id. The function of this Pcpt-Cs system,9 as we have termed it, is connected to the phenomenon of consciousness. The system receives excitations from within, as well as from without, and on the basis of the sensations of pleasure/unpleasure reaching it from that quarter it attempts to control the evolution of all psychic events in accordance with the pleasure principle. We so readily imagine the ego as being powerless against the id, but whenever it wants to resist a drive process within the id it need only give out a signal of unpleasure in order to achieve its ends, thanks to the assistance of the almost all-powerful agency of the pleasure principle. To consider this circumstance in isolation for a moment, we can illustrate it with an example borrowed from a different sphere. Let us suppose that in some state or other a certain clique is opposed to a measure which, if passed, would perfectly accord with the desires of the masses. This minority grouping therefore takes control of the press, uses it to manipulate ‘public opinion’ as the supreme political force, and thereby succeeds in ensuring that the proposed measure is not brought in.