Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

by Sigmund Freud

  VI

  In the course of these battles one can observe two symptom-forming activities on the part of the ego that merit particular attention, since they are clearly surrogates for repression and therefore ideally placed to throw light on its purpose and technique. Perhaps we may also regard the appearance of these auxiliary and surrogate techniques as proof that the substantive repression process encounters difficulties when put into operation. The fact that repression manifests such a variety of forms will perhaps seem more readily comprehensible to us when we consider that in obsessional neurosis the ego is so much more a locus of symptom-formation than it is in hysteria; that it clings tenaciously to its relationship to reality and to consciousness, and devotes its entire intellectual capacities to that end; that indeed the whole process of thought appears hyper-cathected and eroticized.

  The two techniques referred to are obliteration of past events,32 and isolation. The first of these is applied across a very large area, and reaches far back into the past. It is negative magic, so to speak; rather than targeting merely the consequences of an event (of something experienced or witnessed), it seeks by means of motor symbolism33 to make the event itself ‘vanish into thin air’. By using this latter expression we want to point up the role that this technique plays not only in neurosis, but also in magic, folk-lore and religious ritual. In obsessional neurosis one encounters the obliteration phenomenon first of all in the two-phase symptoms mentioned earlier, where the second action in effect cancels the first, as though it had never happened, whereas in reality both have happened. Obliteration also constitutes the second of the two root objectives underlying ritual behaviour in obsessional neurosis, the first being prevention, that is the adoption of precautionary measures to ensure that a particular event does not happen, or does not recur. The difference between the two is easy to see: the precautionary measures are rational; the ‘cancellations’ by means of obliteration are irrational and magical in nature. One must naturally suppose that this second root objective is the older one, dating from when the world around was seen in animistic terms. In normal behaviour the tendency to obliteration appears in modified form in the determination to treat an event as if it had never happened – but one then takes no further action on the matter, bothering neither about the event nor its consequences, whereas the neurotic seeks to cancel the past itself, to repress it through motor processes. This same proclivity may also account for the compulsion to repeat so common in obsessional neurosis, the actual enactment of which then becomes the rallying point for a variety of conflicting purposes. Anything that did not happen in the way the person wanted it to happen is obliterated by being subjected to repetition in a different way – which prompts all the various motive forces to appear on the scene and join in for the duration of the repetitions. As the neurosis proceeds, a marked tendency to obliterate a specific traumatic experience often reveals itself to be a major motive force causing symptoms to form. Thus we unexpectedly gain insight into a new defensive technique involving motor processes - or, as we may say with rather more precision here, a new repressive technique.

  The other technique being described here for the first time is that of isolation, a process peculiarly appropriate to obsessional neurosis. It, too, relates to the motor sphere. What happens is that directly after a disagreeable event, and likewise after any activity on the part of the subject himself that is significant within the context of the neurosis, a pause is interpolated during which nothing else may happen; no sensory perceptions are made and no actions are carried out. Although puzzling at first, this response soon reveals its connection to repression. In hysteria, as we know, it is possible to have a traumatic experience ‘swallowed up’ by amnesia. In obsessional neurosis this has often not been fully accomplished; the experience is not forgotten – but it is shorn of its affect, and its associative connections are suppressed or interrupted, with the result that it exists in isolation, so to speak, and furthermore is not reproduced in any thought processes. Now the outcome of isolating the experience in this way is the same as that attained by repression involving amnesia. This latter technique is thus reproduced in the isolation processes of obsessional neurosis, but at the same time it is also intensified at the motor level in order to produce the requisite magic effect. The elements that are thus kept apart from each other are precisely those that belong associatively together; motor isolation is intended to guarantee that the links remain broken whenever thinking is going on. This neurotic procedure is offered a useful pretext by the normal phenomenon of concentration, which ensures that the process of taking in any particular impression or carrying out any particular task that seems significant to us remains undisturbed by the intrusion of alien thought processes or activities. But even in normal behaviour, the device of concentration is used for protection not only from whatever is irrelevant and extraneous, but also and especially from whatever is unsuitable and antipathetic. What is felt to be most intrusive of all is any combination of things that originally belonged together but were subsequently wrenched apart as development progressed – for instance, if the ambivalence of the father-complex finds expression in the context of our relationship to God, or if our excretory organs make themselves felt in the midst of erotic arousal. The isolating process thus constitutes a major task that the ego routinely accomplishes in controlling the sequence of thoughts; and as we know, in our psychoanalytical practice we have to train the ego to relinquish this particular function for the time being, thoroughly justified though it is in itself.

  We have all had experience of the fact that obsessional neurotics find it particularly difficult to adhere to the basic rule of psychoanalysis. Their ego is more vigilant, and more stringent in its use of isolation, probably as a result of the high degree of antagonistic tension between their super-ego and their id. While they are engaged in thinking, their ego has too many things to fight off the intrusion of unconscious fantasies, the emergence of the various ambivalent tendencies lurking within. It cannot afford to relax; it must be constantly ready for battle. It then backs up this compulsion to concentrate and isolate by means of those ‘magical’ acts of isolation that acquire such prominence and practical significance as symptoms, while being in themselves quite useless, of course, and in the nature of mere ritual.

  In thus seeking to prevent associations and thought-connections, however, the ego is obeying one of the oldest and most fundamental imperatives of obsessional neurosis: the taboo on touching. If we ask ourselves why the avoidance of touch, contact, contagion plays such a major role in this particular neurosis, and is made the focus of such complex systems, then we find our answer in the fact that touch, bodily contact, is the immediate goal of both the aggressive and affectionate forms of object-cathexis. Eros seeks physical contact because it strives for union, for the removal of any barriers of distance between ego and love-object; but destruction of an enemy – which prior to the invention of remote weapons could only be accomplished at close quarters – in principle also presupposes physical contact, that is, one person getting his hands on the other. To ‘touch up’ a woman is the standard euphemism for treating her as a sexual object; ‘Don't touch your penis’ is the standard form of words forbidding autoerotic gratification. Obsessional neurosis being relentlessly hostile to touching, first in its erotic form and then, once regression has occurred, in its guise as aggression, there is nothing it deems so utterly despicable and reprehensible, nothing that is so well suited to becoming the pivot of a whole system of prohibitions. Isolation, however, removes any opportunity for touching; it is a device for preventing something from coming into any form of contact with anything else. Thus when a neurotic isolates a particular experience or activity by interpolating a pause, he is giving us symbolically to understand that he does not want to let his thoughts on the matter in question come into associative contact with any others.

  Our investigations into symptom-formation take us thus far, but no further. There is little to be gained by summarizing th
em: they remain inconclusive, their results are meagre, and they have produced very little that we didn't already know. It would be futile to look at symptom-formation in other disorders besides phobias, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, as too little is known about it. But even the very act of dealing jointly with these three neuroses raises a severe problem that has to be faced without further delay. The starting-point for all three neuroses is the destruction of the Oedipus complex; in all of them, we assume, fear of castration is the motor driving the ego's vigorous resistance. But fear of this kind is actually apparent only in the phobias; only here is it openly avowed. What has become of it in the other two disorders? How has the ego saved itself from fear of this sort? The problem becomes even more acute when we reflect on the possibility – mentioned earlier – that the fear arises, via a kind of fermentation process, out of the libido-cathexis itself when the ordinary progression of the latter is interrupted. And on top of that: is it absolutely certain that fear of castration is the sole motor of repression (of the defence process) ? We are bound to doubt this if we turn our mind to women's neuroses: even though a castration complex is plainly observable in their case, we certainly can't speak of a fear of castration – in any proper sense of the word – where castration is already a fait accompli.

  VII

  Let us return to the topic of infantile animal phobias – after all, we understand these cases better than any others. Here, then, the ego has to take action against a libidinal object-cathexis on the part of the id (whether involving the positive or the negative form of the Oedipus complex), because it is convinced that giving in to it would incur the risk of castration. We have already dealt with this in some detail, but would like to take this opportunity to resolve a doubt that still remains from that earlier discussion. In the case of Little Hans (that is, of a positive Oedipus complex), are we to suppose that it is the affectionate impulse in favour of his mother, or the aggressive impulse directed against his father, that provokes the ego into mounting its defence? From a practical point of view this might seem immaterial, particularly since the two impulses are conditional upon each other; but the question is interesting in theoretical terms, since only the affectionate feeling for the mother can be regarded as a purely erotic one. The aggressive feeling towards the father is essentially dependent on the destruction drive, and we have always supposed that in neurosis the ego defends itself against the demands of the libido, not of the other drives. And we do indeed find that once the phobia had formed, Little Hans's affectionate attachment to his mother to all intents and purposes disappeared, having been comprehensively dealt with by the repression process, whereas his aggressive impulse showed full-scale symptom-formation (formation of a surrogate). The situation is rather more straightforward in the case of the Wolf-man: the repressed impulse really is an erotic one – his feminine attitude to his father – and it is here, too, that symptom-formation takes place.

  It is almost enough to make us feel ashamed that for all our protracted labours we still encounter difficulties in trying to understand the most fundamental phenomena; but we are determined to simplify nothing and conceal nothing. If we are incapable of seeing things clearly, we do at least wish to see with absolute clarity what is unclear. What is impeding us here is plainly some kind of flaw in the way we have developed our theory of drives. Initially, we tracked the forms of libido oganization through their various stages from the oral via the sadistic-anal to the genital and, in so doing, represented the components of the sexual drive as being all on the same footing as each other. Later, however, sadism appeared to us to represent a different drive altogether, and one antithetical to Eros. This new conception envisaging two groups of drives seems on the face of it to demolish the earlier theory of successive phases of libido organization. But we have no need to invent some new explanation to help us out of this difficulty, for the solution presented itself to us long ago, to the effect that we practically never find ourselves dealing with pure, unalloyed drive-impulses, but invariably with combinations of both kinds of drives in varying proportions. Thus a sadistic object-cathexis also has a perfect right to be treated as a libidinal one, the aggressive impulse directed against the father has just as much right to become an object of repression as the affectionate impulse in favour of the mother – and there is accordingly no need for us to revise our view of the various forms of libido organization. All the same, let us note for later consideration the possibility that repression is a process that has a particular affinity with the genital phase of libido organization, and that the ego resorts to different methods of defence when it has to fight off the libido in its other organizational phases. Let us also add that a case like Little Hans's does not allow us to resolve the issue one way or the other: here, an aggressive impulse is indeed dealt with by means of repression, but at a point when genital organization has already been attained.

  We do not want to lose sight this time of the fear nexus. We mentioned earlier that as soon as the ego becomes aware that there is a danger of castration it gives out a fear signal, and then – in some way that we do not understand beyond the fact that it involves the agency of the pleasure/unpleasure principle – inhibits the cathexis process within the id that is threatening it. At the same time, the relevant phobia takes shape. The fear of castration acquires a different object and a deformational form of expression: it becomes fear of being bitten by a horse (eaten by a wolf), instead of being castrated by the father. The forming of a surrogate has two obvious advantages. First, it avoids an ambivalence conflict (the father being at one and the same time an object of love). Second, it allows the ego to stop any further fear being generated; for the fear pertaining to phobias is facultative,34 appearing only when its object is directly perceived. That is quite right, too, for only then is the danger situation actually present; if the father is absent, there is no need to fear castration at his hands. The father cannot be got rid of, however: he can reappear whenever he chooses. But if he is substituted by an animal, then one need only avoid the sight – i.e. the presence – of the animal in order to remain free of danger and fear. Little Hans therefore imposes a restriction on his ego; he produces the inhibition stopping him from going out of doors, in order not to encounter any horses. Things are even easier for our young Russian: he loses precious little by not looking at a particular picture-book any more. If his naughty sister didn't keep showing him the picture of the wolf standing on its hind legs that appears in this book, he would be able to feel completely safe from his fears.

  I once characterized phobias as being in the nature of a projection, in that they substitute a danger perceived in the world without for a danger posed by drives within; this has the advantage that one can protect oneself from an external danger by fleeing from it, or avoiding all sight of it, whereas flight is quite useless if the danger emanates from within.35 My assertion was not wrong, but it certainly didn't get to the heart of the matter. After all, the pressure exerted by a drive is not a danger in itself, but only because it brings with it a real external danger, namely that of castration. When it comes down to it, therefore, what actually happens in a phobia is simply that one external danger is replaced by another. The notion that in phobias the ego has only to take avoiding action, or deploy a symptom of inhibition, in order to keep fear at bay, accords extremely well with the proposition that this fear is merely a signal of affect, and that the economic situation has not changed in any way.

  On this view, then, fear in animal phobias is an affective reaction to danger on the part of the ego, and the danger being signalled here is that of castration. The sole difference between this and the objective fear normally manifested by the ego in danger situations is that the content of the fear remains essentially unconscious, entering consciousness only in the guise of a deformation.

  I rather think that this same view will prove to be valid in respect of adults' phobias, too, even though a much greater wealth of material is processed by the neurosis in such cases, and
even though various additional factors besides symptom-formation come into the picture. The pattern is basically the same. The agoraphobe imposes a restriction on his ego in order to escape a danger posed by his drives. This danger resides in the temptation to give in to his erotic desires, which would result in him once again conjuring up the fear of castration (or some analogous fear), just as in his childhood. As a straightforward example of this, I would cite the case of a certain young man who became agoraphobic because he was afraid of yielding to the allurements of prostitutes and catching syphilis as a punishment.

  I am well aware that many cases show a more complicated structure, and that many other repressed drive-impulses can feed into the phobia, but these latter are only auxiliary in nature, and for the most part impinge on the core of the neurosis at a relatively late stage. The symptomatology of agoraphobia is complicated by the fact that the ego is not entirely satisfied by simply avoiding something: it takes other action as well in order to remove the danger from the situation. This additional action commonly consists in a temporal regression into infancy (in extreme cases right back into the womb, to a period that afforded protection from the danger that now threatens), and this then becomes the sole condition under which the avoidance mechanism remains in abeyance. Thus the agoraphobe can go out into the street provided that – like a small child – he is accompanied by someone he trusts. By the same token he may also be able to go out alone, provided he does not go further than a certain distance from his home, or does not go into areas that are unfamiliar to him or where people don't know him. In his choice of such provisos he reveals the influence of the infantile factors that dominate his life through his neurosis. One particularly clear example – even in the absence of any such infantile regression – is the phobia involving fear of being alone, the essential purpose of which is to avoid the temptation to indulge in solitary masturbation. Needless to say, infantile regression can only occur in individuals who are no longer children.