Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings

by Sigmund Freud

  The memory-image44 of the longed-for person no doubt becomes intensely cathected, at first probably in a hallucinatory manner. But this does not produce the desired result, and it seems as if this longing then changes abruptly into fear. This fear conveys a strong sense of being an expression of utter bewilderment on the child's part, as if this still very undeveloped creature knew no better way of giving vent to its highly cathected longing. Fear thus emerges as a reaction to the distressing absence of the object – and at this point two parallels come forcefully to mind: the fact that in castration fear, too, the issue is separation from a highly prized object; and the fact that the very first manifestation of fear, namely the ‘primal fear’ of birth, arises out of separation from the mother.

  Our next consideration takes the argument beyond this specific focus on object-loss. The fact that babies want their mother within sight is surely for the sole reason that they already know from experience that she will instantly gratify all their needs. The situation that the child registers as ‘dangerous’, and from which it seeks to be protected, is accordingly that of non-gratification, of an increase in the tension caused by unmet needs, in the face of which it is entirely powerless. To my mind, everything falls neatly into place once considered in this perspective. The situation of non-gratification, in which the quanta of stimulation reach an unpleasurable level without being brought under control through processes of psychic utilization and release, must seem to the baby directly analogous to the experience of being born; it must seem to be a repetition of that same danger situation. The common factor in both is the economic disruption caused by the sudden increase in the quanta of stimulation demanding urgent processing; this factor is accordingly the real nub of the ‘danger’. Fear presents itself as a reaction in both circumstances - and in the case of the baby, too, proves to be just as purposive as before, in that its form of release via the respiratory and vocal muscles causes the mother to come and attend to the child's needs, much as it caused its lungs to become active on parturition in order to get rid of the internal stimuli. There is no reason whatever to suppose that a child retains anything from its birth other than this means of identifying danger.

  With the child's realization that an external, directly apprehensible object can put an end to the dangerous situation that harks back to its birth, the burden of the danger accordingly shifts from the economic situation to the factor determining it, namely loss of the object. It is now the distressing absence of the mother that constitutes the danger, and the baby gives out a fear signal as soon as this danger presents itself, even before the economic situation it so dreads has come into being. This change represents the first major step forward in the self-preservation regime of the child, in the process embracing the transition from a state whereby fear recurs automatically and involuntarily, to a state whereby it is intentionally reproduced as a signal of danger.

  In both respects – as an automatic phenomenon and also as a rescue signal – fear is manifestly a product of the infant's psychic helplessness, which is self-evidently the counterpart of its biological helplessness. The striking symmetry whereby fear during birth and fear in the baby once it is born are both determined by separation from the mother requires no psychological interpretation: a perfectly straightforward biological explanation resides in the fact that the mother, having first satisfied the entire needs of the foetus by means of her own bodily mechanisms, then carries on precisely this same function after parturition as well, while drawing to some extent on other means too. Intra-uterine life and the initial phase of childhood are much more of a continuum than the very marked caesura of the birth process might lead us to suppose: the child's psychic situation of having the mother as its object amply takes the place of its biological situation in the womb – though this should not cause us to forget that the mother was not an object for the child in its intra-uterine life, and indeed that no objects at all existed at that stage.

  It is plain that there is no scope in this context for abreacting the birth-trauma, and that the sole identifiable function of the child's fear is to serve as a signal in order to prevent a potential danger situation. However, object-loss as the determinant of this fear has very considerable further repercussions. For the next form of fear that ensues, namely the fear of castration that emerges in the phallic phase, likewise consists in fear of separation, and entails this same determinant. The danger here is that of being separated from one's genitals. An altogether plausible hypothesis of Ferenczi's permits us to see very clearly how this links back to the subject's earlier perceptions45 of the danger situation. The high narcissistic value placed upon the penis can be attributed to the fact that possession of this organ guarantees reunification with the mother (in the form of a mother-surrogate) through the act of coitus. To be robbed of it is tantamount to being separated from the mother all over again, and thus it also means becoming the helpless victim of unpleasurable tension caused by an unmet need – just as happened during birth. As before, the individual is afraid that the need will intensify – but the need is now a specific one, namely that of genital libido, and no longer a generalized one as was the case in infancy. I would add here that the fantasy of returning to the womb represents the coitus-substitute of the impotent (those inhibited by the threat of castration). Taking Ferenczi's lead, we can say that such individuals, having previously sought a vicarious return to the womb by means of their genital organ, now regressively substitute their entire person for that organ.

  The steady progression in the child's development, his increasing independence, the ever clearer separation of his psychic apparatus into several areas with distinct responsibilities, the emergence of new needs – these factors inevitably influence his perception of the danger situation. We have already seen how it changes from ‘loss of the mother as object’ to ‘castration’ – and we can now go on to see how the next step in the process is brought about by the power of the super-ego. With the increasing depersonalization of the parental voice – the quarter from which, so one feared, castration would come – the danger becomes less specific. Fear of castration evolves into consciential fear, into social fear.46 It is no longer quite so easy to say what this fear is afraid of.47 The formula ‘separation – exclusion from the horde' relates only to that later element of the super-ego that develops on the basis of social paradigms, and not to the central core of the super-ego, which represents the parental voice in introjected form. To express it in more general terms: in the estimation of the ego, the potential danger – which it responds to by giving out a fear signal – resides in the possibility that the super-ego might visit wrath or punishment upon it, or withdraw its love. The final variant of this fear of the super-ego, so it seems to me, is the fear of death (or of life) 48 – fear, that is, of the super-ego in projected form busily determining the forces that rule our destiny.49

  I once attached considerable importance to the view that it is the cathexis withdrawn in the course of repression that is utilized for the release of fear. Today this notion seems to me scarcely worthy of any attention. The difference lies in the fact that whereas in those days I believed that in every case without exception fear arose automatically as the result of an economic process, our present conception of fear as an intentional signal deployed by the ego in order to exert influence on the pleasure/unpleasure matrix50 shows us to be independent of that economic automatism. Needless to say, no objection can be raised to the supposition that it is indeed precisely the energy freed up by being withdrawn during the process of repression that is utilized by the ego in order to generate the requisite affect; but the question as to which particular portion of energy is involved has become entirely irrelevant.

  Another erstwhile proposition of mine that needs re-examining in the light of our new conception of fear is my assertion that the ego is the true locus of fear.51 I rather think this will prove to be correct. We certainly have no reason to attribute any manifestation of fear whatsoever to the super-ego. If on the other ha
nd there is mention of ‘fear within the id’, then one has to say that this notion is clumsily expressed rather than downright wrong. Fear is a state of affect, which of course can only be felt by the ego. Unlike the ego, the id is incapable of experiencing fear; it is not an organization,52 and cannot make judgements as to whether or not there is a danger situation. However, it is an altogether common occurrence for processes to take place, or take shape, in the id that prompt the ego to generate fear; in fact the repressions that probably happen earliest of all are activated precisely by this kind of fear on the ego's part of individual processes within the id – as are the majority of those that happen later on. Here again we have every reason to draw a clear distinction between two different cases: one in which something occurs in the id that activates one of the various danger situations for the ego, and thereby causes it to give out a fear signal in order to trigger an inhibition; and another in which a situation analogous to the trauma of birth constitutes itself within the id, and automatically gives rise to a fear reaction. We can bring these two cases somewhat closer together by emphasizing the point that the second one corresponds to the original, primal danger situation, while the first corresponds to one of the fear-determinants derived at a later stage from that primal situation. Or to relate them to the disorders specifically manifested by patients: the latter case is operative in the aetiology of the ‘actual’ neuroses, while the former remains a characteristic feature in that of the psychoneuroses.

  We can thus see that we have no need to jettison our earlier findings, but merely to adjust them in line with our more recent insights. It is an undeniable fact that in circumstances of sexual abstinence, or when sexual excitation is improperly disrupted or deflected from the processing due to it in the psyche, fear arises directly out of libido; in other words, in the face of excessive tension caused by unmet needs a state of helplessness is induced in the ego that culminates – as in the birth process – in the generation of fear. And it is altogether possible, though of no particular moment, that it is precisely the surplus quantity of unutilized libido that finds release in the generation of fear. We can see that psychoneuroses develop particularly easily on the basis of these ‘actual’ neuroses, which presumably means that the ego, having already learned how to keep fear temporarily in abeyance, makes various attempts to evade it altogether and annex it by means of symptom-formation. Analysis of traumatic war neuroses – albeit a term that embraces a very wide variety of disorders – would probably have shown that a number of them share characteristics particular to the ‘actual’ neuroses.

  In describing how the various danger situations evolved out of their paradigm in the birth process, we by no means intended to argue that each subsequent fear-determinant simply cancels out the preceding one. However, as the development of the ego progresses, this does indeed tend to help to diminish and marginalize earlier danger situations, so that we might reasonably say that each stage of development has its own appropriate fear-determinant. The danger of psychic helplessness befits the period of life in which the ego is still immature – and by the same token the danger of object-loss befits early childhood and the dependent status it entails, the danger of castration befits the phallic phase, fear of the super-ego befits the latency period. But it is perfectly possible for all these danger situations and fear-determinants to go on existing side by side with each other and to trigger a fear reaction in the ego at a later juncture than is appropriate to them; alternatively, several of them may become operative at the same time. There may well also be quite a close connection between the danger situation that happens to be operative, and the form of neurosis that follows it.53

  When we had occasion earlier in this study to note that the danger of castration is of significance in quite a number of neurotic disorders, we none the less admonished ourselves not to overestimate the importance of this particular factor, since it clearly cannot play a decisive role in the case of women – who are surely more prone to neurosis than men are. There is now clearly no danger of our declaring fear of castration to be the sole motor driving the defence processes that lead to neurosis. I have shown elsewhere how in the development of young girls the castration complex directly conduces to affectionate object-cathexis.54 It is precisely in women that the danger situation of object-loss appears to have remained most effective. As regards the fear-determinant in this particular case, we might add the minor modification that it is no longer a matter of the actual loss of the object itself or distress at such loss, but rather the loss of the object's love. Given the well-established fact that hysteria has a stronger affinity to femaleness, just as obsessional neurosis has a stronger affinity to maleness, we may readily suppose that loss of love plays the same kind of role as a fear-determinant in hysteria as the threat of castration does in the phobias, and fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

  IX

  All that now remains for us to do is to deal with the relationship between symptom-formation and fear-generation.

  There seem to be two very widely held opinions on this matter. One regards the fear element as being itself a symptom of the neurosis, while the other believes the two to be far more closely and subtly connected.55 According to this latter view, symptom-formation is undertaken wholly and solely for the purpose of evading fear: the symptoms serve to annex the psychic energy that would otherwise find release as fear. In this perspective fear is the core phenomenon in the neurosis, and its chief problem.

  That this second approach is at least partly justified may be demonstrated by some telling examples. If, having accompanied an agoraphobe out into the street, we then abandon him to his own devices, he will produce an attack of fear; if we stop an obsessional neurotic from washing his hands after he has touched something, he will become prey to almost unbearable fear. It is thus clear that the proviso of venturing out only if accompanied, and the obsessional procedure of hand-washing, are intentional – and successful – mechanisms for preventing such attacks of fear. Considered in this light, every inhibition that the ego imposes on itself can be termed a symptom.

  Having argued earlier that fear-generation is attributable to the danger situation, we prefer to say that symptoms are created in order to extricate the ego from the danger situation. If symptoms are prevented from forming, then the danger becomes an actual reality; that is, a situation arises, analogous to birth, in which the ego finds itself helpless in the face of ever-increasing demands asserted by the drives – the first and most primal of all the fear-determinants. On our particular view of things, the connection between ‘fear’ and ‘symptom’ proves to be less close than was supposed – a result of the fact that we have interposed another factor between them, namely the ‘danger situation’. In addition, we would contend that fear-generation is the prelude to symptom-formation, indeed a necessary prerequisite of it, for if the ego didn't jolt the pleasure/ unpleasure matrix into action by generating fear, it would not acquire the power to halt the process that was instigated in the id and that now threatens danger. At the same time there is an unmistakable tendency on the part of the ego to limit itself to generating the bare minimum of fear and to use it only as a signal, for otherwise the unpleasure threatened by the drive process would simply be felt somewhere else instead – an outcome that would certainly not count as a success in terms of the pleasure principle, but is none the less a common enough occurrence in neuroses.

  Symptom-formation thus really does succeed in neutralizing the danger situation. There are two aspects to this process: one remains entirely hidden from us and consists in producing the change in the id by means of which the ego is removed from danger, while the other openly displays what it has brought about in place of the deflected drive-process – namely the formation of a surrogate.

  We ought to express ourselves more accurately, however: what we have just said about symptom-formation should instead be applied to the defence process, while the term ‘symptom-formation’ should be treated as synonymous with ‘surrogate
-formation’. It then seems plain that the defence process is analogous to the act of flight whereby the ego escapes an external danger, and indeed itself represents an attempt at flight in the face of the [internal] danger posed by a drive. The misgivings prompted by this comparison will help us to clarify matters further.

  First, it might be countered that object-loss (or loss of the object's love) and the threat of castration are external dangers just as much as, say, a ravening animal is, and are therefore not dangers that emanate from drives. But the situation is clearly not the same. The wolf would probably attack us anyway, regardless of how we behaved towards it; but the loved person would not withdraw their love from us, nor would we be threatened with castration, if we did not harbour certain feelings and intentions within us. These drive-impulses thus become the determinants of external danger, and as such become dangerous themselves with the result that we can now fight the danger without, by means of measures directed at the dangers within. In the case of animal phobias the danger appears still to be experienced as a wholly external one, just as it likewise undergoes external displacement in the relevant symptom. In obsessional neurosis the danger is much more internalized: that part of an individual's fear of the super-ego that is social fear represents the ongoing inner surrogate of an external danger, while the other part, i.e. consciential fear, is entirely endopsychic.56