Freud: A Modern Reader (Whurr Series in Psychoanalysis)

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Freud

A Modern Reader Edited by Rosine Jozef Perelberg

W WHURR PUBLISHERS LONDON AND PHILADELPHIA

Freud

Whurr Series in Psychoanalysis The purpose of this series, edited by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target of University College London, is to publish c l i c a l and research based texts of academic excellence in the field. Each title makes a signilkant contribution and the series is open-ended. The readership is academics and graduate students in psychoanalysis, together with clinical practitioners, worldwide. INTRODUCTION TO KLEINIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS A Contemporary Perspective Edited by Catalina Bronsteiti 2001 ISBN 1 86156 226 8 paperback PSYCHOANALYSIS,SCIENCE AND MASCULINITY Karl Figlio 2000 ISBN 1 86156 20.3 9 paperback PSYCHOANALYTICTHEORIES Perspectives from Developmental Psychopathology Peter Fonagy and Mary Target 2003 ISBN 1 86156 239 X paperback ORGANISATIONS, ANXIETY AND DEFENCE Edited by Bob Hinshelwood and Marco Chiesa 2001 ISBN 1 86156 214 4 paperback THE PERVERSION OF LOSS Edited by Susan Levy and Alessandra Lemma 2004 ISBN 1 86156 433 3 paperback OUTCOMES OF PSYCHOANALYTICTREATMENT Edited by Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber and Mary Target 2002 ISBN I 86156 279 9 paperback A LANGUAGE FOR PSYCHOSIS

Edited by Paul Williams 2001 ISBN 1 86156 166 0 paperback

Freud

A Modern Reader Edited by Rosine Jozef Perelberg

W WHURR PUBLISHERS LONDON AND PHILADELPHIA

0 2005 Whurr Publishers Ltd First published 2005 by Whurr Publishers Ltd 19b Compton Terrace London N12UN England and 325 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia PA 19106 USA

Reprinted 2005 and 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Whurr Publishers Limited.

This publication is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’sprior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon any subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 10- 1861-56402-3 pib ISBN 13- 978 1-861-56-402-3Pib

Printed and bound in the UK by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne &Wear.

Contents

Vii ix xi

Series foreword Acknowledgements Contributors

1

Introduction RosineJozef Perelberg

Part I The Early Phase

29

1 ‘Anna0: The First Case, Revisited and Revised’

31

Ronald Britton

Part II The Second Phase: The Birth of Psychoanalysis

45

2 ‘Dora.Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria’

47

Monique Cournut-Janin

3 ‘TheAnalysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-OldBoy’

61

Jane Temperley

4 ‘On Narcissism’

72

RosineJozef Perelberg

Part III Metapsychology

91

5 Clinical observation, theoretical construction, metapsychological

93

thought Jean-Claude Rolland

6 ‘The Unconscious’

109

Luiz Eduardo Prudo de OEiueira 7 The wound, the bow and the shadow of the object: notes on Freud’s ‘Mourningand Melancholia’ Ign& Sodd

V

124

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Freud: A Modern Reader

8 ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’

142

Gilbert Diatkine Part IV The Structural Model of the M i n d

163

9 Towards the structural model of the mind Margret Tonnesmann

165

Part V Some Further Clinical Cases

175

10 ‘Notesupon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’

177

Paul Williams 11 Gaze, dominance and humiliation in the Schreber case

189

John Steiner 12 Unconscious phantasy and apres-coup: ‘Fromthe History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (the Wolf Man)

206

RosineJozef Perelberg

13 Clinical and metapsychological reflections on ‘A Child Is Being

224

Beaten’ Catherine Chabert

14 ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality’ Susan Budd

234

Part W Later Papers

251

15 ‘Negation’ Andre‘ Green

253

16 ‘Splittingof the Ego in the Process of Defence’ Donald Campbell

274

Index

287

Series foreword

After the first hundred years of its history, psychoanalysis has matured into a serious, independent intellectual tradition, which has notably retained its capacity to challenge established truths in most areas of our culture. The biological psychiatrist of today is called to task by psychoanalysis, as much as was the specialist in nervous diseases of Freud’s time, in turn-of-thecentury Vienna. Today’s cultural commentators, whether for or against psychoanalytic ideas, are forced to pay attention to considerations of unconscious motivation, defences, early childhood experience and the myriad other discoveries which psychoanalysts brought to 20th-century culture. Above all, psychoanalytic ideas have spawned an approach to the treatment of mental disorders, psychodynamic psychotherapy, which has become the dominant tradition in most countries, at least in the Western world. Little wonder that psychoanalytic thinking continues to face detractors, individuals who dispute its epistemology and its conceptual and clinical claims. While disappointing in one way, this is a sign that psychoanalysis may be unique in its capacity to challenge and provoke. Why should this be? Psychoanalysis is unrivalled in the depth of its questioning of human motivation, and whether its answers are right or wrong, the epistemology of psychoanalysis allows it to confront the most difficult problems of human experience. Paradoxically, our new understanding concerning the physical basis of our existence - our genes, nervous systems and endocrine functioning - rather than finally displacing psychoanalysis, has created a pressing need for a complementary discipline which considers the memories, desires and meanings which are beginning to be recognized as influencing human adaptation even at the biological level. How else, other than through the study of subjective experience, will we understand the expression of the individual’s biological destiny, within the social environment? It is not surprising,then, that psychoanalysis continues to attract some of the liveliest intellects in our culture. These individuals are by no means all psychoanalytic clinicians or psychotherapists. They are distinguished scholars in an almost bewildering range of disciplines, from the study of vii

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mental disorders with their biological determinants to the disciplines of literature, art, philosophy and history. There will always be a need to explicate the meaning of experience. Psychoanalysis, with its commitment to understanding subjectivity, is in a premier position to fulfil this intellectual and human task. We are not surprised at the upsurge of interest in psychoanalytic studies in universities in many countries. The books in this series are aimed at addressing the same intellectual curiosity that has made these educational projects so successful. We are proud that the Whurr Series in Psychoanalysis has been able to attract some of the most interesting and creative minds in the field. Our commitment is to no specific orientation, to no particular professional group, but to the intellectual challenge to explore the questions of meaning and interpretation systematically, and in a scholarly way. Nevertheless, we would be glad if this series particularly spoke to the psychotherapeutic community, to those individuals who use their own minds and humanity to help others in distress. Our focus in this series is to communicate the intellectual excitement which we feel about the past, present and future of psychoanalytic ideas. We hope that our work with the authors and editors in the series will help to make these ideas accessible to an ever-increasing and worldwide group of students, scholars and practitioners. Peter Fonagy Mary Target University College London

Acknowledgements

A book such as this is the product of co-operation, creativity and trust between colleagues. I am grateful first and foremost to each and every one of the contributors to this book, especially to those who have been waiting quite some time for their work to be published. I had each of them in mind when I first conceived of this book. My thanks also go to: The many students who have attended my Freud seminars over a span of thirty years, from the time I started to teach Freud, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in the 1970s. To my students at the British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP), the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis and the Masters in Psychoanalytic Theory at University College London, for their continuous interest and challenging questions, which never allow one to take one’s knowledge for granted. That indeed would be against the grain of psychoanalysis. To Sophie Bennett, for her enormous help in chasing references and quotations, and to Andrea Chandler, librarian at the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, for her help in chasing obscure bibliographic references and sending them to me, as if on a magic carpet. To Peter Fonagy and Mary Target for backing this project, and to Colin Whurr for the freedom he allowed me in the preparation of the book, and for supporting my desire to invite my French colleagues to contribute to the volume, at a time when it is so difficult to find backing for translations. My participation in the life of the British Psycho-Analytical Society has given me over the years the opportunity for scientific and clinical exchanges with so many friends and colleagues, which I have greatly valued. It is impossible to name everybody here, or to refer to each of the many important conversations at the ‘Spanish Club’, with the ‘Musketeers’,at the ‘annual reunions’, and so on. However, I would especially like to acknowledge Don Campbell, Sira Dermen and Gregorio Kohon, my CPD group, for our ongoing discussions on questions of theory and clinical practice; Anne-Marie Sandler, a constantly inspiring colleague; my friends and colleagues in France who

ix

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have not participated in this book, especially Marilia Aisenstein, Paul Denis, Jean Luc Donnet, Chantal Lechartier-Atlan;and Flavio Jozef and Ruth Naidin, in Brazil. To Judith Perle, my ever-present friend and expert on the English language. To Bella and Georges, for their continuous support and source of inspiration. To my family who were my internal companions during their last trip to Yosemite, during the final stages of the preparation of the manuscript. To the International Journal of Psycho-AnaZysds for permission to publish the following papers: Perelberg RJ (2004) Narcissistic configurations:violence and its absence in treatment. InternationalJournalof Psycho-Analysis80: 31-45. Steiner J (2004) Gaze, dominance, and humiliation in the Schreber case. International Journalof Psycho-Analysis85: 269-84 (originally commissioned for this book).

Contributors

Ronald Britton is well known internationally as a psychoanalytic writer, teacher and clinician. He is a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psycho-analytical Society. His books include The Oedipus Complex Today, Belief and Imagination, Sex, Death and the Superego. In addition to clinical papers he has written on the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature, philosophy and religion. He has been Chair of the Children & Families Department Tavistock Clinic, President of the British Psycho-analyticalSociety and a Vice-president of the International PsychoanalyticalAssociation.

Susan Budd is a member of the British Psycho-analytical Society, and is in private practice in London and Oxford. She was previously editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, is a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the British Journal of Psychotherapy, and has been an advisor to the Training in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Birmingham for many years. She has written a number of articles in sociology, intellectual history and psychoanalysis. With Richard Rusbridger she has co-edited Introducing Psychoanalysis: K q Terms and Issues.

Donald Campbell is a Training Analyst and Supervisor and Past President of the British Psycho-analytical Society, and is also a child and adolescent analyst. He is currently Secretary General of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is a former Chair of the Portman Clinic in London and has published on such subjects as violence, suicide, child sexual abuse, fetishism and adolescence. Monique Cournut-Janinis a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the Paris Psycho-analytical Society. She was the coordinator of the Centre for Consultation and Psychoanalytic Treatment, Jean Favreau. She is European Coordinator of COWAP (Committee for reflection on women and psychoanalysis of the IPA). She is the author of numerous papers and books, including Fbminin etfiminiti (1998).

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Catherine Chabert is a Training Analyst and Supervisor, Vice-president of the Association Psychanalytique de France (APF), Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology of the University R e d Descartes - Paris V She is Director of the collection ‘Psychopathologieet Psychanalyse’ (Dunod) and, with Jean Claude Rolland, is Co-Director of the journal Libres Cahiers pour la Psychanalyse. Her publications include F h i n i n me‘lancolique (2003); Processus de la schizophre‘nie (with C. Azoulay, J. Gortais, Ph. Jeammet, 2003); L‘oubli dup&e, (co-edited with Jacques Andre, 2004). Gilbert Diatkine is a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and Past President of the Paris Psycho-analyticalSociety. He is now Associate Director for Training of the Han Groen-Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe. He is the author of numerous papers in scientific journals and of the bookJacques Lacan, in the collection Psychanalyste d’aujourd hui, No. 11. Andre Green is an Honorary Member of the Paris Psycheanalytical Society, an Honorary Member of the British Psycho-analyticalSociety, Ex-Professor Freud Memorial Chair and Honorary Professor Buenos Aires University. He is the author of numerous books, among which are On Private Madness (1986); The Work of the Negative (1999); Life Narcissism and Death Narcissism (2001). Rosine Jozef Perelberg is a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psycho-analytical Society, where she is currently Chair of the Curriculum Committee. She is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Theory at University College London. She is on the Board of Assessors of a number of scientific journals. She co-edited with Ann Miller, Gender and Power in Families (1990) and with Joan Raphael-Leff, Female Experience: Three Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women (1997). She edited Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide (1998) and Dreaming and Thinking (2000), as well as having numerous publications in international scientific journals. She works in London, in private practice. She is currently preparing Freud: The Wnamics of the Unconscious. Lub Eduardo Prado de Oliveira trained at the Association Psychanalytique de Paris. He is Director of Research at the Ecole Doctorale ‘Recherche en Psychanalyse’,Universite de Paris 7 - Denis Diderot. He is the editor Le Cas Schreber - contributionspsychanalytiques de langue anglaise (19791, and author of several other books including Freud et Schreber: le meurtre &&me (1996); Freud et Schreber: les sources &mitesdu ddire, entre psychose et culture, (1997). He translated The Freud-Klein Controversies into French (1996).

Contributors

Xiii

Jean-Claude Rolland is a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the French Psychoanalytic Association. With Catherine Chabert he is Co-Director of the journal Libres Cahiers pour lu Psychanalyse. He has published numerous papers in scientific journals and is the author of G u k i r du ma1 d’airner (1998). IgnCs Sodre qualified as a clinical psychologist in Brazil before coming to London in 1969 to do her psychoanalytic training. She is a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psycho-analytical Society, and has taught extensively in London and abroad. She has published papers on psychoanalysis and on literature, and has co-authored a book with A S . Byatt, Imagining Characters (1995).

John Steiner is a Training Analyst and Supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society and works in private practice as a psychoanalyst. He was formerly a psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the Maudsley Hospital, and from 1972 until his retirement in 1996 at the Tavistock Clinic. He is the author of several psychoanalytic papers and the book Psychic Retreats, published in 1993by the New Library of Psychoanalysis.

Jane Temperley is a psychoanalyst of the British Psycho-analytical Society. She has a BA in Modern History from St Anne’s College, Oxford and subsequentlyobtained a master’sdegree in social work from the University of Connecticut. She worked as a psychiatric social worker at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and then at the Tavistock Clinic, where she became principal social worker in the Adult Department. She qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1975 and for many years taught Freudian studies at the Institute of PsychoAnalysis as well as at University College London. Margret Tonnesmann is a Member of the British Psycho-analytical Society and a retired Consultant Psychotherapist. She has lectured widely to trainees at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,to the Masters in Psychoanalytic Theory at University College London, and abroad, on the work of Sigmund Freud and on contributions mainly from psycho-analysts of the Independent Group of Psycho-analysts of the British Psycho-analytical Society. She is the editor of Paula Heimann:About Children and Children-No-LongerCollected Papers, and has written several papers on relevant psychoanalytic topics. Paul Williams is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-analyticalSociety, a Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Joint Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at Anglia Polytechnic University, UK. He has edited a number of books including Unimaginable Storms: A Search for Meaning in Psychosis (with Murray Jackson, 1994); Cruelty, Violence and Murder:

xiv


Understanding Criminal Thinking: The Collected Papers of Arthur HyattWilliams (1 999); Psychosis (Madness) (Key Papers on Borderline States, 1999); Terrorism and War: Unconscious Dynamics of Mass Destruction (co-edited with C. Covington, J. Cox and J. Arundale, 2002); and The Generosity of Acceptance: Eating Disorders in Adolescents and Children (with G. Williams, J. Desmarais and K. Ravenscroft, 2003). He has published numerous articles in psychoanalytic journals on borderline and psychotic states.

Introduction

ROSINE JOZEF PERELBERG Over many years of teaching Freud to university students and to candidates at the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis, I have felt the lack of a single book that would give an overview of the complexity and subtlety of Freud’s thinking, and a vision of the dialogue between the different traditions, that have been so important in my own ‘formation’ as a psychoanalyst. The scholarship of Freud’s work, the overdetermination of meanings in his ideas, the questions that he raises, and the discussions he opens up, cannot be comprehended in a single country or language, but span the continents. The British tradition has made a special contribution with an emphasis on the internal world of the individual, a focus on the transference and countertransference, and has offered a specific contribution to the development of a Freudian tradition centred on clinical practice. It is however in France that the metapsychology has survived in its complexity, but most of the French debates have not been translated into English. A great deal can be learnt from a dialogue between these two traditions, and this is the way I tend to teach my own students. Up to now there was no textbook to offer the student of Freud; I hope this book will fill that gap. I have selected some of Freud’s key papers that are taught at the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis and in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, and for each of them have invited an analyst from England or abroad who I think has made an important contribution to the understanding of that specific topic to write about it. Each chapter of the book presents a text or theme that we discuss in our programmes. All the contributors to this book are clinicians, teachers and writers, and therefore provide a multifaceted perspective, as did Freud himself. Most chapters have a similar structure. First, they summarize the main ideas or themes of the paper in question. They then identify key concepts connected to those themes, and discuss the origins of the ideas and their further development in Freud’s thinking. Each chapter finishes with an appreciation by the writer. Although 1

2


most of the chapters have followed this structure, some have taken on a life of their own, so that Freud’s original paper, in those cases, provides the inspiration for the writer’s own thinking. This book combines a deep analysis of Freud’s original work with some of the most modern understanding of it, and demonstrates the revolutionary contribution made by Freud. It is common in the psychoanalytical literature for an author to present Freud’sthinking in order to indicate how it has been superseded by more modern writers. This is not necessarily the case for all the authors in this book. At times, one can see how Freud was indeed more revolutionary than many of his followers, for instance in relation to the primacy of sexuality, and especially infantile sexuality (see Chapters 1 , 2 , 3 , 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16), in the complexity of his various notions of time (Chapters 1 , 2 , 8 , 12, 13, 14, 16) and the relationship between memory and phantasy (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), his acknowledgement of a force in psychic life that leads us in a peremptory way - the drive; the structuring importance of the negative in psychic lge (especially Chapters 15 and 16); and finally his understanding of the structuring role of the Oedipus complex (in all the clinical cases), in both its negative and positive configuration,in the shaping of the mind. I will now look at each of these themes in turn.

Sexuality Hysteria

The concern with sexuality, specifically female sexuality, permeates Freud’s work from his early days, with ‘Studies on Hysteria’ (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95) until the last papers, such as ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (Freud, 1937a). Aspects of his views on female sexuality changed according to changes in his theory. For example, the distinction between the descriptive unconscious and the dynamic unconscious, the elaboration of the concept of the superego, and the various formulations of the conflicts between the drives (e.g. the opposition between selfpreservative and libidinal drives; libido and aggression; and the life and death instincts) led to changes in his formulations on female sexuality. At the end of the nineteenth century, medical circles vigorously debated whether hysteria was an organic or a psychological illness. The majority of the patients presenting hysterical symptoms were women and the symptoms they presented were a challenge to the medical knowledge of the time, as there was no verifiable organic lesion that corresponded to them. From 1882 onwards Freud started working with Breuer, using suggestion and hypnosis. In 1885 Freud spent five months in Paris, working with the French physician Charcot, by whom he was greatly impressed. Freud’s method, however, differed from Charcot’s in many ways, including the way in which the

Introduction

3

theatrical, public nature of Charcot’s approach, was replaced by the silent setting of Freud’s consulting room and the invisibility of the analyst (Pontalis, 1977). In ‘Studies on Hysteria’, Freud and Breuer discuss the work they undertook with five patients, and each writes a theoretical chapter. Between 1880 and 1895 they developed the cathartic method by which they helped the patient to remember the traumatic event which marked the appearance of the hysterical symptom. Both Breuer and Freud noted that the symptom would progressively disappear as the patient remembered and relived these events. Freud initially used suggestion in his treatment of these patients, but progressively realized that if the patients were allowed to speak freely about their memories, the same result was observed. This is how the method of free association emerged. With this method, many of the key aspects of psychoanalysis,such as repression, transference, resistance, free associations and the unconscious, were discovered. ‘Studies on Hysteria’ is viewed as belonging to the fvst phase of Freud’s work, known as ‘the affect trauma theory’ (Sandler et al., 1997, p. 12). This phase can be viewed as starting with Freud’s return to Vienna in 1886 after his visit to Charcot, and ending in 1897 with his discovery that the traumas produced by his hysterical patients had not necessarily occurred in reality, but may have been childhood daydreams. The incestuous incidents recalled by his patients, which he had previously taken literally, he now saw as representing wishes on the part of his patients gratified by fulfilment in phantasy. The investigation of hysteria clearly revealed that patients’ behaviour could not be explained, indeed could not be identified, without reference to certain ideas or thoughts of which the patient had no awareness. For both Breuer and Freud, the hypothesis that hysterical manifestations were ideogenic in character was treated as given by observation. Disagreement between them arose because Breuer explained the symptoms in terms of hypnoid states, whereas Freud favoured a mechanism of defence. In Chapter 1 of this book, ‘Anna 0:The First Case, Revisited and Revised’, Ronald Britton puts us in contact with the very foundations of psychoanalysis, the heart of what led Freud to the discovery of key psychoanalytic ideas. The case of Anna 0 also raises central, modern issues about the mutual influences that may unwittingly be present in treatment, questions about the relationship between interpretation and suggestion. Britton’s paper is rich, and contains many important ideas. First, there is the distinction between borderline and hysterical patients. Whereas in hysteria priority is given to the claim to possess the object in the realm of love, in the borderline syndrome the claim is to possess in the realm of knowledge. In hysteria there is an interplay between love and death, a reminder of Donnet’s statement that in the hysteric, the declaration of love is simultaneously a declaration of war. Britton proposes a distinction between imagination, vision and hallucination, a point he has discussed more fully in previous

4


papers and in his book (Britton, 1998). He also points out the importance of the analytic stance in dealing with erotic transference and raises questions about its defensive use by the patient. Britton’smain hypothesis in his paper is the suggestion that ‘a central feature of hysteria is the use of projective identification by the subject to become in phantasy one or other or both members of the primal couple’ (p. 34, this volume). He says: ‘The hysteric, I suggest, gets in on the act; mounts the stage and takes one of the parental parts. By an omnipotent phantasy of projective identification they believe they are one of the primal couple performing whatever they imagine takes place in the phantasized primal scene’ (p. 41, this volume). Britton points out the relevance of the development of the transference for the progression of Anna 0’s symptoms. He also raises the question: What is the erotic transference a defence against? Britton presents one of his own cases, and shows that once the eroticized phantasy towards the analyst is addressed, it allows the maternal transference to come to the fore (p. 42, this volume). I will return to this point later. It was in the discussion of the case of Katharina that Freud first related hysteria to the primal scene. He added later in a footnote the case of a young married woman who told him that her first attack of anxiety was when, as a little girl, she often saw her father get into bed with her mother and heard sounds that greatly excited her. Freud mentioned at least three further cases linking hysteria to the primal scene in a letter to Fliess, in his paper on anxiety neurosis (1895), and in his analysis of Dora, although, throughout his work, he oscillated between regarding this as a ‘realevent’ and a ‘phantasy’. Freud attributed increasing importance to primal scene phantasies and later in his work he linked the origins of the function of phantasizing itself to these primal phantasies (see Chapter 13). According to him there is a specific, imaginary configuration to these scenes: from the child’simaginary perspective, they represent a scene of violence, where the father is inflicting anal pain on the mother. Although at the beginning of his work Freud thought that the child had actually witnessed these scenes, he increasingly believed that they were childhood phantasies about parental sexuality. Freud later suggested that hysterical attacks represented phantasies about the sexual encounter as a scene of rape (see also Perelberg, 1999). Hysteria and bisexuality are essentially linked for Freud, who suggested that hysterical attacks express an experience of rape where the hysteric plays both parts. The hysteric represents a scene of war between the sexes, where the masculine wins over the feminine. Hysteria becomes, fundamentally, a mode of thinking about sexuality and the sexual object (Schaeffer, 1986). Kohon has suggested that the hysterical stage, within the context of the oedipal drama, is ‘a specific moment in which the subject - caught up between the need to change object from mother to father - is unable to make the necessary choice’ (1999, p. 18). ‘In fact, stuck in her divalent stage, the hysteric ... cannot define herself as a man or as a woman because she cannot

Introduction

5

finally choose between her father and her mother’ (1999, p. 19). Schaeffer (using an expression coined by Michel Cachoux) suggests that the hysteric, like the ruby, displays what she is in fact rejecting. The ruby is a stone that has a horror of red. It absorbs and retains all the other colours, but rejects and expels red. Thus the hysteric has a horror of red, of sexuality, while at the same time displaying it. Hysteria works by imitation; the difference between identification and imitation is that between ‘being like the object’ and ‘being the object’. Thus when Anna 0 looks at herself in the mirror she sees her father’s skull. When she has a series of bodily symptoms she seems to be imitating the sexual act: her symptoms become like a theatre of the sexual act in an attempt both to deny and to represent the primal scene and deny mourning her incestuous sexual desires (Perelberg, 1999). Ronald Britton has rightly suggested that it is, however, the relinquishing of hysterical sexuality that makes it possible for the individual to discover their own sexuality.

Dreams and sexuality The theme of hysteria and its relationship to sexuality continues in the discussion of Dora, in Chapter 2. Dora’s analysis expresses the interest that Freud had in the sexual origins of hysterical symptoms, as well as in the role of dreams as expressingunconscious conflicts.The hysterical symptom ‘enacts a fantasy with a sexual content’ (Cournut, p. 50, this volume), even if a single unconscious phantasy is generally not sufficient to engender a symptom. In this analysis, Freud is still interested in the reconstruction of the trauma that had led to the appearance of the symptom, through the analysis of dreams and free associations. This clinical emphasis would change in later years, when Freud started to see the analytic process more in terms of a process of construction. I will return to this later. In this case, Freud also discovers the crucial relevance of the transference. ‘Theyare new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person with the person of the physician’ (1905a[1901], p. 116). At the time of the analysis itself, Freud emphasizes the paternal transference, and it is only retrospectively, after Dora breaks off the analysis, that Freud identifies the relevance of the maternal transference. Freud was later to elaborate further on the role of transference in his papers (‘The Dynamics of Transference’, 1912; ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, l914b; ‘Observations on Transference Love’, 1915a[1914]; ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, 1920b). Freud was to write to Fliess about the role of bisexuality in Dora’s symptoms, and in a several footnotes added to the text of the analysis of Dora he indicated his mistake in underestimating Dora’slove for Frau K.: ‘I failed to

6

Freud: A Modem Reader

discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life’ (Freud, 1905a[1901],p. 120). Crucial psychoanalytic concepts were developed in his reflections on the analysis of Dora: the mechanisms of repression, regression, fixation and identifications. The mobility of identifications,both feminine and masculine, clearly demonstrated to him the primacy of bisexuality in every individual. In Chapter 2, Cournut suggests that in the discussion of Dora, Freud appeared to envisage a precocious knowledge of the vagina, as a hollow organ, in a small girl who would be primarily a girl and not a ‘smallman’ first, as she was subsequently featured for a long time in his theory (Cournut, p. 57, this volume). In her contemplation of the Sistine Chapel, and in her love for Frau K., whose importance Freud then recognized, Cournut identifies a maternal phantasy. Dora, who is still adolescent, ‘also loves the woman she herself will be, in the person of the lovely Frau K., who is desirable, as her father has clearly indicated to her’. The work on Dora also contains a description of the psychoanalytic method of free association: I now let the patient himself choose the subject of the day’swork, and in that way I start out from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment. But on this plan everything that has to do with the clearingup of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal, woven into various contexts, and distributed.(Freud, 1905a[1901], p. 12)

Freud’s revolutionary idea that the concern with sexuality makes its appearance early in children and may be found at the origin of many childhood symptoms is confirmed in the analysis of Little Hans, the first case of child psychoanalysis. The case, discussed in Chapter 3 by Jane Temperley, illustrates the importance of infantile sexuality, not by inference from adult neurosis, but by direct observation of a child. It also provides a description of how, with the repression of infantile sexuality, a neurotic compromise, a symptom, is formed. The analysis took place between January and May 1908, on the basis of notes that the father took and then discussed with Freud. These notes contain evidence of Little Hans’s great interest in his penis, and in the difference between the sexes. Does his mother have a ‘widdler’?And what about his sister? How are babies born? One can only admire Little Hans for persisting in his enquiries, in spite of the ambiguous responses given by both his mother and father that, for instance, women also have a ‘widdler’,or that children are brought by storks. As Temperley states: In one of the most charming and convincing passages in the paper Hans teasingly reveals to his father that he knew the baby had been with them ‘inside the stork box’ during the summer before her birth. He is immensely impressed by the joys of parenthood and surrounds himself with his toy children. When his father

Introduction

7

informs him that only women can give birth to babies he protests that this is not so, denying this sexual difference as fiercely as some little girls deny their ‘castration’. (p. 63, this volume)

Little Hans expressed jealousy towards his father and a desire to give his mother babies, thus revealing himself as a ‘little Oedipus’.At the same time, however, his homosexual attachment to his father is also recognized. The account of the case gives plenty of evidence of Hans’s identification with his mother and the wish to give birth to babies, although this is not explored by Freud in the paper and will be discussed only in 1926 in ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’.There Freud suggests that both Hans’s and the Wolf Man’s animal phobias are derived from tender, passive, homosexual desires towards the father which have been distorted by regression to the oral phase, as well as by repression. I would suggest that the interplay of masculine and feminine identifications in relation to the primal scene is a thread which permeates Freud’s case studies from Dora, to Little Hans, the Rat Man, Schreber, the Wolf Man, and ‘Psychogenesisof a Case of Sexuality in a Woman’ (all of which are discussed in this book). At the time he wrote about Little Hans, Freud regarded the prevalence of irrational anxiety in neurotic patients as due to a transformation of repressed libido into anxiety. Once the libido was transformed by repression into anxiety, it could not be re-transformed. Freud suggests that Hans’s original outbreak of anxiety was not organized around a phobia. The phobia is a secondary defence against the anxiety hysteria, achieved by organizing the anxiety around a phobic object. It restricted Hans’s mobility and his psychic exploration of the world of sexuality represented by the horses and wagons in the street, but kept him in the house near his mother. This paper is an account of the development of a phobia. It is also an account of its alleviation by means of psychoanalytic intervention. Once his wish to supplant his father and have sexual possession of his mother is interpreted to Hans, there is an alleviation of the symptoms.

Narcissism Narcissism marks a transition in Freud’s thinking, originating a set of conflicts in Freud’s theory that paved the way for the structural model of the mind. As Perelberg indicates in Chapter 4, ‘On Narcissism’radically changed the concept of the ego. From then on, the ego was no longer just a place for mastering the drives, but became an ‘object’, an image, a vestige of past identifications. The ego is no longer seen as independent of any relationship, but is rather the result of the internalization of relationships (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985). This idea was to be more fully developed in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1 9 17[ 19151) where Freud gave a full account of an internal object relationship that involved projection and identification. In this paper,


8

it is the loss of the object which makes the subject aware of it. This opened the way for the theory more fully presented in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (Freud, 1923) of an ego built from and modified by ‘abandoned object cathexes’. In ‘Leonardoda Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’(1910) Freud gives his first theoretical statement on narcissism, as he tries to explain the mechanism of a libidinal cathexis that leads to narcissistic choice: The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses new objects of his love ... He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism. (1910, p. 100)

Narcissistic object choice is a theme that can be found in Freud’s papers on Leonardo (1910), the Rat Man (1909b), Schreber (191 1) and the WolfMan (1918[1914]). In ‘TotemandTaboo’(1913) Freud suggests that in the stage of narcissism ‘the hitherto isolated sexual instincts have already come together into a single whole and have also found an object’ (1913, p. 147). In the paper ‘On Narcissism’, Freud discusses types of object choice, and goes on to put forward for the first time his idea of an ego ideal. Each individual has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego (1914a, p. 93). This formation of an ideal is for Freud the conditioning factor of repression. This ideal ego is the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the ego, ‘the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal’ (ibid., p. 94). The paper shows Freud’s growing interest in an internal world. The paper also exposes the inadequacy of Freud’s early division of the drives into the sexual and the egotistic. He did not, however, want to supplant libido with a universal energy, as he chargedJung had done; nor did he wish to supplant libido with a universal aggressive force, which, he said, was Adler’s mistake. The metapsychological papers will pave the way to the reformulation of Freud’s theory of drives to the conflict between life and death drives (see footnote 3, page 89, this volume).

M etapsychology Freud’spapers on metapsychology can be seen as having no connection with a theory of practice, but rather as an expression of an intellectual tradition, a path taken by Freud in his work that is crucial to the understanding of his formulations. In Britain and America, with rare exceptions, the metapsychological papers are regarded as a relic of the past. It is in France that these papers come alive and are part of an intellectual tradition that gives Freud’swork enormous depth. As Jean-Claude Rolland emphasizes in Chapter 5 , the metapsychologicalpapers cannot be read in the same way as so many of the more clinical papers. They are pervaded by a sense of ‘strangeness’(p.96, this volume) in which it is almost as if it is Freud’s unconscious that speaks to

Introduction

9

the reader’s unconscious, opening doors which illuminate the enigma of the unconscious: ‘metapsychology has no more decisive deftnition than to be, like instinct is for psychical activity, the call to work imposed on the theoretician by the concern to make clinical experience ever more coherent’ (Rolland, p. 97, this volume). Rolland points out how these texts had to be in place before Freud could take the leap towards the even stranger text of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and the structural model of the mind. He adds: The game, for child and man, is certainly something as grave and complex as metapsychology is for the theoretical analyst. And metapsychology should always be for the latter as enjoyable and liberating as playing is for the child something between appropriation and discovery. (Rolland, p. 101,this volume)

We are told by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay that between 1914 and 1915 Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomk and Abraham of his project to write a book of twelve essays on metapsychology called ‘Preparatory Essays for Metapsychology’. The metapsychological papers appear to be the culmination of Freud’s exploration of the topographical model of the mind, the distinctions between the systems Pcs-Cs and UCS, the first theory of drives with its distinction between pleasure/unpleasure, and between primary process and secondary process. These papers also lie at the crossroads that will lead to new ideas such as processes of identifications, the importance of the object, repetition compulsion, negative therapeutic reaction and the role of aggression. In 1915 Freud used the term ‘repression’ to stand for a whole range of mental processes designed to exclude an instinctual wish from awareness. He regards ‘the mind as a battleground’. There are all too many prospective pleasures that turn into pain because the human mind is not a monolith. The Oedipus complex in its various incarnations is the most telling instance of such domestic conflicts (Gay, 1988, p. 365). Freud illustrated his general points with clinical instances. For example, Freud indicates how the work of repression needs to be repeated over and over again: ‘Repressiondemands a persistent expenditure of force’ (1915c, p. 151). What has been repressed has not been wiped out, but has only been stored in the unconscious where it continues to press for gratification. ‘The Unconscious’ is the third and the longest of the metapsychological papers. The concept of the unconscious was fmst introduced in connection with repression or defence, as a way of characterizing the fate of ideas that incur repression. Freud put it explicitly: ‘We obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression’ (Freud, 1923, p. 15). A cycle of the following kind was postulated: An idea, for some reason or other, is repressed. It remains in the mind, at once removed from consciousness and yet operative; and then, in certain favoured circumstances, it may reappear in


10

consciousness.Importantly,the unconscious was thus linked to the notion of discontinuitiesin our mental processes. The paper on the unconscious is divided into seven chapters which cover a variety of subjects: a justification for the concept, the various meanings of the term and the topographical point of view, unconscious emotions, the topography and dynamics of repression, the special characteristics of the Ucs system, the communication between the two systems, i.e. the unconscious and the conscious, and, finally, the assessment of the unconscious. According to Luiz Eduardo Prado de Oliveira (Chapter 6), this text is of considerable importance: It represents a great effort to answer a set of questions which appears often enough in Freud’sworks: may a single thing exist simultaneouslyat several different places and manifest itself obeying several different manners? (p. 115, this volume)

And furthermore: can two or more different things simultaneously occupy a single place and manifest themselves in similar modes? The answer to these questions is always positive. The concept of over-determination or of multiple determination underlies this answer and brings it all its richness and ramifications. Prado de Oliveira suggests that this concept, one of the most revolutionary in Freud’s thought, remains largely unexplored, not only in psychoanalysis, but generally. Rolland (Chapter 5 ) suggests that the metapsychological papers indicate an important distinction between clinical fact, theoretical concept and methodological tool: we now have solid bases to differentiate more clearly a clinical fact, a theoretical concept and what for lack of a better word I shall call a metapsychological ‘tool’.A clinical fact is obvious to each of us: a phenomenon that attentive observation presents as an opposition to our immediate understanding because it appears to disturb the normal course of life or upset the logic we spontaneously accord it. (pp. 101-102, this volume)

And again: Based on multiple clinical facts, proceeding from places of observation that are diverse but, by analogy, remain centred on the powerfully regressive conduct that certain patients adopt in the cure, Freud postulated a theoretical concept, repetition compulsion, which he defined like this: ‘The repetition compulsion thus brings back experiences from the past which contain no possibility of pleasure and that even in their day proved incapable of providing satisfaction, not even to the instinctual drives that were ultimately repressed.’ The third moment of his work consisted in giving to this concept a metapsychological basis. (p. 105, this volume)

According to Rolland, Freud denied nothing of the work of sexuality in the repetition compulsion when he invoked the action that falls to the death

Introduction

11

instinct: the latter merely explains what encumbers the course of the former, fixes it to ‘traumatic’situations from the past, and conceals access to the objects of the present. Rolland regards ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ as enormously influential in the development of the concept of the repetition compulsion. Moreover, he suggests that the text does not establish a discontinuity between the death instinct as a force distinct from the sexual instinct. His reading leads him to consider this textual discontinuity as an echo of the fracture over which the two currents of Eros explode. The death instinct represents and designates, in sexual life, the originating tendency which forces the libido to remain attached to its incestuous objects, opposes their being renounced and, by the same token, opposes the liaison of this primordial instinct (which pushes toward objects because it cannot do without them) to objects of substitution.The pair sexual instinct, death instinct, incarnates in a ‘paradigmatic’ opposition the duality of libidinal movement oscillating between incestuous attraction commanded by unconscious fantasy and object-libido, submitted, by a lengthy travail of civilization, to repression. (p. 107, this volume)

Rolland’s views of Freud’s paper are in contrast to Gilbert Diatkine’s, who in Chapter 8 regards the death instinct as a clinical concept. Diatkine indicates three main reasons for the postulation of the concept of the death instinct. Firstly, he believes that the theory of civilization which Freud had defended since the very birth of psychoanalysiswas struck a terrible blow by the First World War, which made it impossible to believe in a theory of humanity governed by the pleasure principle. Secondly, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ contained a striking description of sadism directed towards the internalized object. Thirdly, he suggests that the need for repetition is used to satisfy the need for suffering which had been described in the Wolf Man case study. Diatkine traces the debates in France around the concept of the death instinct and gives a fine illustration of current work amongst French psychoanalysts who utilize the concept (including the work of Andre Green, Denys Rybas, the French School of Psychosomatics, Claude Balier and Patrick Decklerk, as well as opponents of the concept such as Paul Denis).

‘Mourning and Melancholia’ In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) Freud gives a full account of an internal object relationship that involved projection and identification. If in mourning the person knows they have lost someone, in melancholia it is a part of the self that has been lost. Freud describes the processes of loss of the object, ambivalence and regression of the libido into the ego (ibid., p. 258). The melancholic is back to a narcissistic identification with the object, which also implies idealization. The ego treats itself as an object, and falls apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second. There is a monumental step taken in this work in terms of shifting attention to the ego:


12

let us dwell for a moment on the view which the melancholic disorder affords of the constitution of the human ego. We see how in him one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and as it were, takes it as its object. Our suspicion that the critical agency which is here split off from the ego might also show its independence in other circumstances will be c o n f i i e d by every further observation. We shall really find grounds for distinguishing this agency from the rest of the ego. What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called conscience. (ibid., p. 247)

This agency called ‘conscience’will become the ‘superego’in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), and the concept of ‘splitting’will find further elaboration in the papers ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1940[19381) and ‘Fetishism’(1927). In melancholia there is a process of oral introjection of the object which is ‘devoured’, and identification with it. The melancholic blames the object with which the ego is identified - and it looks as if it is blaming itself. Freud’s description of the process through which the ego unconsciously identifies with the introjected bad object (the rejecting loved object), thus becoming a victim of its own superego, was one of the most important discoveries in psychoanalysis. The idea is that when one is attacking oneself one is in fact unconsciously accusing somebody else whose victim one feels one is but whom, through a process of introjection and identitication, one has become. In discussing this paper in Chapter 7, Inges Sodre indicates how Freud implicitly describes an internal situation that involves different introjections and identifications. The ego and the internalized object(s) changing roles and geographical positions in the mind, but also in which two scenarios with very different emotional tones constantly interweave: the ego darkened by the shadow of the object, and the ego cannibalisticallydevouring the object; grief and guilt in constant oscillation with hatred and grievance. Depression can only be understood if one keeps in mind the dynamics of these mutuaily influencing and always, at some level, omnipresent states. (p. 140, this volume)

And also: The loved object is hated for its cruel desertion. But the ego, perceiving itself as full of hatred for the object, is also felt to be unlovable. (p.127, this volume).

The link with the external object is lost, ‘but the withdrawal into an apparently objectless state implies in fact an internal, powerfully possessive relationship with the object which now resides only in the inner world’. Sodre adds: This is the beginning of the theory of internal object relations: the inner world conceptualized as a real three-dimensional space where self and object have muItifaceted, variously changeable relationships with each other. What is ‘so disagreeable’ in the counter-transference,when experiencing the melancholic world of

Introduction

13

the patient, is the tyrannical nature of the immobilization caused by the need to keep the object (the internal one, and also the analyst in the transference) forever imprisoned. (pp. 129-30, this volume)

Sodre illustrates some of her views on the text with a clinical example from one of the first pioneers of psychoanalysis, the Viennese psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch. The title of her paper is derived from an essay by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, ‘The Wound and the Bow’, in which he discusses Sophocles’ play Philoctetes. Conflicts involving guilt, responsibility and grievance lie at the core of this play, and Sodre suggests it provides a good illustration of Freud’s statement: ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies [...I from all directions, emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished’(1917, p. 253). Sodre concludes that understanding a melancholic patient means unravelling the various identifications with different aspects of the internal objects, as well as all the variations of tone from cannibalistic murderous rage to sadness and guilt and horror at the destruction caused by the self - and the consequent experience of the pain of being unloved, justly so, as it were, and therefore unlovable forever: ‘the ego lets itself die’. (p.134, this volume)

Identifications, superego and the structural model of the mind The concept of narcissism,which described how the self can be cathected as an object, and the metapsychological papers, especially ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, expressed the tensions and contradictions in Freud’s topographical model of the mind which led to the elaboration of the structural model of the mind. In Chapter 9 Margret Tonnesmann indicates some of these tensions, and traces the shift from a model of the mind conceived of areas, to a model of the mind composed of agencies, the id, the ego and superego. One such tension was the way in which Freud had attempted to distinguish between the dynamic unconscious and the descriptive unconscious. In the descriptive sense, Freud used the term to refer to a quality of mental state, indicating that a particular mental event or process existed outside conscious awareness. The system Ucs indicated, by contrast, a specific topographical location within the mental apparatus. In a dynamic sense it referred to mental contents which were not allowed to reach consciousness or motor expression. With the introduction of a second censorship (1915d), in the paper ‘The Unconscious’, between the PreConscious and Conscious systems it became evident that many preconscious derivatives of the Ucs could be dynamically Ucs while not located in system Ucs (see Sandler et al. (1997) for a discussion of this point). In her chapter, Tonnesmann focuses on how the concept of the ego ideal

14


was partially replaced by that of the superego. In ‘On Narcissism’ and ‘Group Psychology’, Freud discusses a special segment of the ego which critically watches over it. The clarification of the concept of the superego occupies Freud throughout ‘The Ego and the Id’. It has been suggested that the book should have been called ‘The Ego, the Id and the Superego’ (Sandler et al., 1997). In his ‘New Introductory Lectures’ (1933), written a decade later, Freud viewed the formation of the superego as dependent on the growth of identifications. Children first choose their parents as objects of their love and are then forced to relinquish these choices as unacceptable, and identlfy with them by taking their attitudes into themselves. Having begun by wanting to have their parents, they end up wanting to be Zike them. They construct their identifications on that the model of the parental superego. Radical changes also took place in the ego of the structural model, in the idea that a part of the ego is unconscious. The unconscious ceases to be just what is repressed, but becomes a containing structure. Green considers that the most important change in the structural mode is the unconsciousness of the ego.

Psychoanalysis as a method: the single case study Freud studied the various psychopathologies of his time. He utilized the clinical model of investigation, based on a single qualitative case study, through which he constructed a theory of obsessional neurosis (based on his understanding of the Rat Man),of paranoia (based on the Schreber case) and of hysteria. One can identify the way in which his case studies are understood by means of the simultaneous study of structure and history. In the single case study, the aim is the understanding of the working of a functional structure. In each case, the structural approach is inseparable from the developmental approach. In this way, Freud constructed hypotheses about the successive stages that gave rise to the structure. This can be beautifully attested to through the detailed analysis of his case studies as presented in this volume. In the process of analysing several case studies, Freud constructed a ‘family of cases’ which led to models of psychopathologies(Perron, 1998). It is the clinical investigation that allowed Freud to construct theoretical models (see Perelberg, 2003). We discussed earlier the way in which Little Hans can be viewed as a text about Freud’s thinking on psychosexuality. The enigma of psychosexuality, with the primary phantasies of castration, primal scene and seduction, resides in the quc:stions that are asked about the body of the other. It is in relation to his male cases (Little Hans and the Wolf Man) that Freud encounters the phantasy of castration. In the ‘Three Essays’ (1905b), Freud suggested that it is voyeurism that provides the energy for the drive for knowledge. This drive for knowledge is

Introduction

15

anchored in infantile sexuality: the need for mastery, the need to make sense of the arrival of a new baby, which is linked to the risk of the loss of the love of the object. Some of the symptoms presented by his patients were indeed severe, and this seems to be in contradiction with his own belief that he was dealing with neurotic patients. In Chapter 10 Paul Williams discusses the Rat Man (Paul Lorenz), who experienced disturbing impulses such as a desire to cut his throat or to commit suicide in other ways and had imposed a range of prohibitions on himself that restricted his life, to the point of despair. Freud describes a bright, shrewd young man whose emotional, sexual and social development had been severely stunted by obsessional thinking, the roots of which appeared to stretch back into his infancy. He also described a precocious sexual life: at the age of four he had undertaken explorations of his governess’sgenitals. In this case, once again, Freud gives a vivid description of the conflict of identifications. There is an account of Lorena’smasturbatory fantasies, where Freud indicates Lorenz’s longing for his father and his battles with him (especially over his choice of a girl) and a complex story of a beating by the father in which Lorenz had flown into a fury and following which, he told Freud, he had ‘become a coward’,fearing physical violence. This theme was later to be elaborated in ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ (1919) (see Chapter 13). His explanation of w e obsessionality arises is that there is a withdrawal of affect from the causes of the original conflict which is felt to be unmanageable. This leads to severance of mental connections: nevertheless, these connections persist in making themselves felt in shadowy form, via projection onto the external world. Freud emphasizes Lorenz’s disavowed hostile feelings towards his father as having greatly intensified his obsessional illness. Freud knew well that it was not only a conflict between love and hate that drove Lorenz’s illness: it was made particularly complex by pleasure, shame and disgust at the feelings and ideas associated with the conflict. Freud’s linking of obsessional thinking to anal eroticism is a clinical insight that should not be underestimated, especially as knowledge of the connection between obsessive-compulsive neurosis and anal regression only emerges in 1926 - twenty years after Lorenz’sanalysis. Williams suggests that ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neuroses’ (1909b) should be studied as one of the earliest full accounts of psychoanalysis. It provides a picture of the theoretical and technical development of psychoanalysis in 1907. The account remains captivating due to its detail and to Freud’sprescient attention to small amounts of data, an account of the internal world of an obsessional individual.This is in part because it is a ‘demonstration’by Freud of how to understand the meaning of obsessional-compulsiveneurosis, something that had eluded medicine and psychology (p. 177,this volume).

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In the discussion of the Schreber case, the theme of repressed homosexual desire from a man towards his father is again discussed. In Chapter 11,John Steiner takes us through this complex paper. After reading Daniel Paul Schreber’s ‘Memoriesof My Nervous Illness, An Autobiographical Work’ (1903; Chapter 11 of this volume), Freud hypothesizes that persecutory anxiety and paranoid delusions are the result of a defence against repressed homosexual desire. Paranoia is the transformation of love into hate, which is then projected onto an external persecutor. The person who I now hate was at one time loved (Freud, 1911, p. 41). ‘I love him’ is transformed into ‘I hate him’, which through the mechanism of projection becomes ‘he hates me’. At the centre of the paranoid persecution was an emasculation phantasy coupled with the idea that he would be transformed into a woman in the act of copulation. In the following phase, he thought he would be impregnated by the divine rays in order to produce a new race of human beings (ibid., pp. 20-1). Schreber also refers to a state of bliss, ‘uninterruptedenjoyment’,an ‘uninterruptedfeeling of voluptuousness’(ibid., p. 29), achieved through the contemplation of God. In his analysis, Freud establishes a connection between Dr Flechsig, Schreber’sphysician, God and his father, and concludes that the sun is itselfa sublimated symbol for the father. ‘Thefather’smost dreaded threat, castration, actually provided the material for his wishful phantasy ... of being transformed into a woman (ibid., p. 56). Yet, at the same time, Freud himself indicates in a footnote that the word for sun is feminine in German (ibid., p. 54). Freud states: ‘The roots of every nervous and mental disorder are chiefly to be found in the patient’s sexual life’ (ibid, p. 30). Paranoia decomposes, just as hysteria condenses, ‘paranoiaresolves once more into their elements the products of the condensations and identifications which are effected in the unconscious’(ibid., p. 49). Steiner describes the way in which Schreber’s illness began as a melancholic depression but quickly developed paranoid features which subsequently escalated into a paranoia which nevertheless retained its depressive and hypochondriacal base. Finally, the chaotic fragmentation came under the dominance of an omnipotent narcissistic organization which led to a clinical improvement without any relinquishment of his delusional beliefs. Steiner argues that it is possible to distinguish three elements in Schreber’sillness. Firstly, the depression and despair, secondly, the paranoia, and finally, a relatively organized delusional state in which the persecution appears through an identification with a redemptive femininity and an eroticized submission to the father. Steiner suggests that these three states exist ‘in an equilibrium where movements to and fro between them is always taking place even though a progression from depression to paranoia and thence to the delusional system can be recognized’ (p. 196, this volume). Steiner further suggests that Schreber’sdelusional system may be viewed as a psychic retreat based on a psychotic organization (Steiner, 1993) and one

Introduction

17

which was turned to when both depression and paranoia became unbearable. Steiner suggests that by the time Schreber had established his redemptive delusional system he had transformed the persecutions into an idealized submission and his delusional system functioned as a psychic retreat which seemed to completely protect him from shame. In Chapter 12 the Wolf Man is presented and discussed by Rosine Jozef Perelberg, who addresses four main issues: the constitutive role of phantasy for the structuring of the mind; Freud’s conceptualization of time in relation to the function of trauma and phantasy; the issue of the feminine in men; and finally the connections between the Wolf Man’sobsessionality and mourning. Following Laplanche and Pontalis, Perelberg stresses the complexity of Freud’s notions of phantasy, which appear when the external object is abandoned. Furthermore, these authors suggest that the differentiation between subject and object is abolished in phantasy (1985, p. 73). What one is left with is a ‘scene’. ‘The primary function of phantasies is the mise en sc&neof desire - a mise en sc&nein which what is prohibited (I’dnterdit)is always present in the actual formation of the wish’ (1988, p. 318). Phantasy in Freud is indissolubly linked to notions of both time and sexuality. There is a continuous reshaping of phantasy, which takes place in terms of apr&s-coup,as an ongoing work of re-elaboration constantly transforms the past. The discovery of the role of phantasies comes together with that of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. ‘A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Genesis of Sexual Perversion’ appeared in 1919, at a period of transition between Freud’s models of the mind. As Catherine Chabert indicates in Chapter 13, the text’s intention was to consider the phantasy A child is being beaten as one of the seduction fantasies, and in addition to describe the paradigmatic developments involved in the production of this phantasy. At the same time, it featured the ‘infantile’representations of masochism, heralding works still to come before the publication of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920b), and the ‘EconomicProblem of Masochism’(1924), thus anticipating the link between love and punishment, excitation and pain. The phantasy A child is being beaten is composed of three phases. The scene of the first phase appears as The father beats the child (A child is being beaten). The second phase, Freud indicates, is unconscious, and is a construction of the transference. It appears as (I [a gfrE]am beaten by my father), where the author occupies the place of the beaten child of the first scene. The third phase (which is the one that appears first in the analysis) resembles the first. The author of the phantasy again occupies the place of spectator. However, two notable elements differentiate it. The partners have changed; the beaten child of the first phase has been replaced by a multitude of unknown children, and the father (the beater) by more distant substitutes. This shift between the scenes, Chabert suggests, is a fundamental movement of the analysis, ‘a way of opening up positions of identificationin movement’

18


(p. 225, this volume) between activity and passivity, sadism and masochism, representations and actions. I have indicated in this Introduction the way in which the movement between identifications and unconscious phantasies in relation to seduction, castration and the primal scene is indeed recurrent in most of the case studies discussed by Freud. The emergence of the phantasy A child is being beaten, Chabert suggests, does not occur in all analyses. However, it surfaces in certain cures and under certain forms that do not always correspond to those described by Freud. Chabert suggests that this phantasy is one of the translations of the seduction phantasy linked to the primal scene, for ‘it presents the full set of characteristics of originating fantasies: visual, even panoramic, support, essential for giving them a form, and the passive position assigned to the subject both in the primal scene and castration’ (see p. 228, this volume). It is a phantasy paradigmatic of the analytic encounter, indicating the range of the identificatory processes available in it. ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ is central to Freud’s theoretical development and suggests a link between masochism, femininity and the guilt feelings engendered by incestuous desires towards the father, desires that are repressed and reconstructed in the analytic process. Is this seduction by the father, however, not a second one, following a first seduction by the mother?The paper was written before Freud’s reformulation of his theory of femininity and the discovery of the pre-oedipal phase. The mother, according to Freud himself, is the first seductress. ‘Thefirst sexual and sexually coloured experiences which a child has in relation to its mother are naturally of a passive character’(Freud, 1931,p. 236). At the end of his life Freud offered the enigmatic suggestion that the repudiation of femininity is the bedrock of analysis. Green has interpreted this suggestion in terms of the repudiation of the mother and the position of passivity facing her: What is in question is the repudiation of the mother’s femininity in both sexes, that is to say, her persisting action ...The mobilization of the destructive instinct in

psychosis is the supreme recourse in activity, against passivation by an object in whom it is impossible to put one’s trust. I...] Now thepsychoanalytic cure k; not possible without this confident passivation, where the analysand gives himself to the analyst‘s cure. (Green, 1986, p. 248; emphasis added)

Freud’s 1920a paper, the last of his published clinical studies, is a brief analysis of how an eighteen-year-old woman came to be homosexual. The paper was taken up as part of a contemporary debate on the nature of sexuality in women. In Chapter 14 Susan Budd gives us an account of the paper, examines how it links to Freud’s previous theory on sexuality, and traces some of the developments of these ideas in Freud’s own work. Contemporary debates on the topic are also examined.

Introduction

19

In this paper Freud thought that there is no simple distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals: ‘a masculine man, masculine in his erotic life, may nonetheless love only men’; a feminine man, who loves like a woman, may be wholly heterosexual. Similarly for women, physical sexual characteristics, masculinity or femininity, and type of object choice vary independently. All normal people, in addition to their manifest heterosexuality, contain ‘a very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality’. Human sexual differentiation is multi-factorial; there is not a separate homosexual ‘third sex’. Budd looks at the parallels between the Dora (1905a) and the Psychogenesis cases. Both girls had attempted suicide, which had forced their dominant fathers to insist they go into treatment and try to force them into heterosexual attachments; both were neglected by their mothers; and both resented their mothers’ preferences for their brother@),whose part in their story is probably major but is not examined. In both cases, Freud focuses on the relationship to the father rather than to the mother. In the Psychogenesis paper, Budd suggests, the anatomical sex is much less important than the little girl’s various identifications. Budd further suggests that the debate within psychoanalysis fragmented between national cultures. In general more attention has been focused on the very early, pre-verbal child and its relationship with its mother. She believes that the question of intrinsic differences between men and women remains a minefield. In Britain, psychoanalysts have increasingly focused on the ungendered baby of the pre-oedipal period, and on the relationship with the mother, who is phantasized to contain a penis. But in France, the father continues to be seen as crucially important, because it is he who detaches the child from a symbiotic relationship with its mother, releasing it into language. She quotes papers published in the last twenty years in Britain which still raise Freud’s original question: What role does the physical body play in the formation of sexual identity, and to what extent is our experience of our bodies psychically constructed (Mitchell and Rose, 1982; Raphael-Leff and Perelberg, 1997; Kohon, 1999)?

‘Negation’ ‘Negation’is an important short, dense work written in 1925. In Chapter 15, Andre Green suggests that though it can stand alone, it is better seen as the most important step in an exploration of a function which started much earlier. But, from another viewpoint, Green adds, it is also a breakthrough as it opens up new perspectives which may have already been sketched by Freud but will be further developed later by him or others. Green studies the precursor of negation in Freud’s work, starting with ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (Freud, 1900) and including the paper ‘On Dreams’ (1901) and the papers on metapsychology:


20

Gradually, the idea of the non-existence of the no in dreams was included in a broader conception, around 1915, defining the system unconscious. (p. 255, this volume)

Furthermore, no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty; all this is introduced by the work of the censorship between Ucs and Pcs’. [...I The absence of negation seems to be part of a larger number of related characteristics, as we find it, altogether, with other notions: no sense of time, no sense of reality. (p. 255)

Green unravels the main ideas and themes of this paper, and traces the development of some of these ideas in Freud’s oeuure as well as their importance in the work of Klein, Bion, Segal, Winnicott and Lacan. Freud considers negation in terms of its function at the beginning of the distinctions between inside and outside, as it separates between me and notme. Thus, negation lies at the origin of the activity of thinking itself, as well as the capacity to symbolize. At the beginning, when it expels outside everything that is felt to be unpleasurable, the infant knows nothing of the outside that it has ‘created’, except that he has to keep it as far as he can from his inside. This situation comes to an end with separation, which imposes the realization of the independent existence of the object. With this step, the distinction between inside and outside is finally achieved: The outside, which now includes all objects, good as well as bad, because of the occurrence of separation, induces one to find once more those objects which have already existed, but only in the form of representationspreviously introjected (and repressed). The first move of expulsion has led to a distinction between me and not-me. (p. 261, this volume)

The connections between negation and splitting are studied in Chapter 16,in which Don Campbell indicates how in Freud’s work, splitting is linked with the separationbetween inside and outside, me and not-me, pleasure and unpleasure. Green raises the question of whether the symbolization process itself may be connected with the interplay of negation and affirmation. He suggests that when Freud wrote his paper on ‘Negation’,he had two ideas at the back of his mind: The first one was to illustrate how intellectual functions may be seen as having their origins grounded in the most primitive activity as he understood it: the drives. Conversely, in the second idea, which is less explicitly stated, he seems to infer that it is the evolution and development of these basic forms of activity that give birth to intellectual functions. (p.263, this volume)

We see that later on, when Freud gave up the unconscious as an instance, in order to replace it by the id, he emphasized the idea that almost everything

Introduction

21

we know about the id is of a ‘negative character’ compared to the ego (pp. 3 1-73). Green points out how this way of thinking invalidates any idea of the negative as enclosed in the limits of pathological negativism and illuminates the generation of very general processes of psychic life, whether normal or pathological. Some of the themes of Freud’s paper on negation are developed further by Campbell. He indicates how Freud links splitting with the separation between inside and outside, me and not me, pleasure and unpleasure: In so far as the objects which are presented to it [the ego] are sources of pleasure, it takes them into itself, ‘introjects’them (to use Ferenczi’s (1909) term); and on the other hand, it expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure ... the external world is divided into a part that is pleasurable, which it has incorporated into itself, and a remainder that is extraneous to it. It has separated off a part of its own self, which it projects onto the external world and feels as hostile. After this new arrangement, the two polarities coincide once more: the ego-subject coincides with pleasure, and the external world with unpleasure (with what was earlier indifference). (Freud, 1915b, p. 136)

With the threat of castration for the little boy, an earlier memory of the female’s penis-less state is revived. Originally it had been experienced as harmless, but is now (in terms of upr&s-coup)recalled as ‘confirmation’that the threat could be realized. In the child’s mind, castration has become a danger. The boy adopts a two-part solution by, on the one hand, rejecting reality and its prohibitive power and, on the other hand, accepting reality and defending against the fear of danger by converting it into a pathological symptom. This contradiction can only be sustained by creating a split in the ego in such a way that these opposing views continue to coexist without undermining each other. By disavowing reality and endowing the female with a substitute for the missing penis, the boy surmounted what he had considered evidence for the reality of castration and, thereby, saved his own penis. In ‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’(1938), Freud extended the use of splitting to understand the existence of contradictory psychical groups ranging from fetishism to neurosis and psychosis. In the neurosis, Freud described ‘twodifferent attitudes ... one of these ... belongs to the ego and the contrary one, which is repressed, belongs to the id’ (p. 204). In psychosis, Freud maintained that the withdrawal from reality is never complete. In a recent book, Green indicates that for Freud splitting always has a positive connotation, that of recognizing a truth, on the one hand, counterbalanced by a lack of recognition, on the other (2002, p. 150). Green points out to the constant dialectic between recognition and lack of recognition in psychic work.

22


The psychoanalytic object of investigation’ Two main perspectives can be identified in the interpretation of Freudian theory: the natural science perspective, strongest in America and Britain, and the hermeneutical perspective, developed principally in Germany and France (see, for instance, Ricoeur, 1965a, 1965b; Habermas, 1971; Klein, 1976; Grunbaum, 1985; Spence, 1987; Dor, 1988 for some of the different positions in this debate). To my mind, however, Freud’s work is an example of a tension between these two approaches to psychoanalytic formulations: on the one hand, he would have liked psychology to be a natural science but, on the other hand, he viewed psychoanalysis as a new way of reinterpreting the domain of culture, from dreams and art to literature and religion (see the contributions to this debate by Duncan, 1992; and Steiner, 1992). In an attempt to give universal validity to his theories, Freud linked them to various aspects of culture, such as the history of ideas, Greek myths, literature, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and neurology, in terms of the prevailing ideas of his time. The emphasis on the up-to-date knowledge of his time, however, is not strictly speaking accurate. For instance, E. Jones pointed out how, in spite of being familiar with Darwinism, Freud utilized Lamarckism to just* some of his ideas. This was not because of a lack of familiarity with contemporary systems of knowledge, but because Freud selected those ideas that he felt were best able to justify his own ideas. These wider aspects of culture were used rather as metaphors, it seems to me, to give depth or greater validity to the ideas Freud was creating, discovering and constructing. Sometimeshe allowed contradictory ideas to coexist side by side. Most thinkers, however, have attempted to reduce Freud’s work to one or other of these approaches, and Freud has been quoted in order to support either a scientific or hermeneutic approach. Sulloway (1979), for instance, is amongst those who suggest that Freud fundamentally follows a biological rationality, and that the psychological discourse is at the surface of his system of thinking. There is a fundamental reductionism in Sulloway’s view of Freud’s thinking; the category of the unconscious is barely mentioned. Bettelheim (1983) was one of the first to suggest that in the English translation of Freud’s work there is an attempt to object@ it and give it a ‘scientific’emphasis, taking away its metaphoric and mythical meaning. He suggests that the English renditions of Freud’s writings distort much of the essential humanism that permeates the originals: This fact, combined with the erroneous or inadequate translation of many of the most important original concepts of psychoanalysis, makes Freud direct and always deeply personal appeals to our common humanity appear to the readers of English as abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical, erudite and mechanized in short, scientific - statements about the strange and very complex workings of our minds. (Bettelheim, 1983,pp. 4-5).

Introduction

23

Bettelheim states that Freud’s use of the German language is ‘not only masterly but often poetic’ (ibid., p. 8). Ricoeur indicates the tension between two types of discourse in Freud’s work: the hermeneutic and the energetic. The energetic seeks the organic basis in psychic life, perceiving the organism as a hydraulic machine and using metaphors imported from the natural sciences. The hermeneutic approach, in contrast, emphasizes meaning. ‘The Project for a Scientific Psychology’ expresses the energetic discourse; ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ the hermeneutic. Ricoeur believes that although the latter attempted to articulate both approaches, this was not successful. He believes that this articulation is more successful with the metapsychological papers: ‘The apparently insurmountable abyss between the two worlds of the psychoanalytic discourse, appears to dissipate in the metapsychological papers’ (Ricoeur, 1965, p. 125). Ricoeur takes ‘TheInterpretation of Dreams’ (1900) as paradigmatic of Freud’s work. If indeed most analysts would agree that this work marks the birth of psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on representations, the structural model is seen as re-assessing the relevance of the movement and force of the drives. The structural mode, Green argues, is based on the existence of mental structures where representations do not have such an important role as they have in neurosis (Green, 2001,2002). With Pontalis, I would agree that Freud’s work indeed takes place ‘inbetween realms’ (letter of 16 April 1896, cited by Pontalis, 1977) between what can be said and what has to be repeated, between what can be represented and what has not reached representation, indeed between the drives and their representations. As the core of the writings in this book indicates, the hermeneutic approach itself in Freud’s work cannot be comprehended outside the clinical dimension, the therapeutic context in which an interpretation has been formulated. What remains at the heart of Freud’s thinking, to my mind, is the notion of movement. Freud’s shifts in theoretical thinking do not eliminate previous ways of thinking. He is both a rationalist and a hermeneutic, he is interested in love and hate, feminine and masculine, real events and phantasies, libidinal drives and destructive drives, remembering and repeating, past and present. To borrow Pontalis’s evocative expression, Freud is positioned between dream and pain. An attempt to choose between these different approaches, interpretations and perspectives, is by definition reductionist of the multideterminism that is crucial in Freud’s formulations. Perhaps Freud’semphasis on the notion of constructionsin his later work is a compromise between the two. It is neither there, nor completely invented. It is indeed the tension between the two that becomes the motor of Freud’s genius, the propulsion that keeps his thinking in a permanent state of movement. This constant movement, for Freud, is what characterizes psychic life. Freud indicates that the conflict between approaches cannot be reduced to any simple

24


standpoint. Ricoeur himself understands that when he states: ‘Thisconnection of force with meaning is what converts the drive itself into a psychic reality or more exactly into a concept at the boundary of the organic and the psychic’ (ibid., p. 132). It is relevant to point out here the different ways in which this theory advanced in Freud’s work. Sometimes he was led by the need to understand clinical material. Examples included the clinical discoveries of the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’, the ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ that led to the formulation of the structural model of the mind, and the analysis of his own dreams that led to his statement (in a letter to Fliess) that he no longer believed that all the statements of his hysterical patients were necessarily related to real memories of abuse but represented wish-fulfilmentphantasies. At other moments, Freud’smodels are pushed ‘forward’by contradictions derived from the theory itself. An example is the way in which the concept of narcissism, with its emphasis on the libidinal cathexis of the self, led to a potential collapse of the duality of the drives and the notion of conflict between the drives. As Freud postulated the centrality of conflict in psychic life, the concept of narcissism risked a collapse of the drives into a single libidinal drive, and this implied the conceptual need for a reformulation of the theory of drives. We know that this led to the postulation of the conflict between the life and death instincts. Althusser (1977) pointed out the risk of reducing psychoanalysis to other forms of knowledge, be they biology, philosophy or anthropology, and thus losing the specificity of its theoretical content. Althusser has suggested that psychoanalysis can be summarized as (a) a practice - the analytic cure; (b) a technique (the method of the cure) that gives rise to an abstract exposition with a theoretical construct; and (c) a theory which is related to both the practice and the technique. He suggests that this organic practical, technical and theoretical whole is reminiscent of the structure of every scientific discipline. He adds that the abstractions of psychoanalysis are the authentic scientific concepts of their object (the unconscious). Bachelard (1999, p.146) has suggested that knowledge is a light that always leaves shadows. He adds that in scientific enquiry all knowledge is an answer to a question. If there is no question, there can be no scientific knowledge. When he took over the Chair of History of Science at the University of Paris in 1940, until then dominated by the positivists, he put forward his revolutionary view of science, not as a phenomenon of experience, nor a process of registration, but as a process of construction. This also implies a vision of the scientist which is intrinsically related to the model that is constructed. To write the history of a theory is to write the history of the hesitations of the scientist (Canguilhem, 1979). Bachelard suggests that the history of science is the history of thoughts; in order to derive the meaning of a concept one has to look at the context in which it is found (1999, p. 177).

Introduction

25

The same word is not the same as the concept. Knowledge of an object of knowledge is not achieved by the observation of this object only, but is mediated by the construction of a concept about this object (ibid., p. 184). Psychoanalysis is located in this vision of the world. Although Freud drew on the various domains of knowledge of his time, psychoanalysisis ultimately connected with his vision of human nature, establishing a substantive rupture with previous knowledge. The unconscious is fundamentally unknown and is reached through a process of construction. Freud is also permanently reviewing his own ideas, establishing epistemological ruptures within the body of his own theories (the various models of the mind he proposed). To isolate any one aspect of his thinking is to ignore this constant process of elaboration and transformation. I think all the contributors of this book continue this essential Freudian tradition, in their profound understanding of Freudian concepts and ideas, their deepening of their meaning and furthering the process of thinking through their own creativity. Note 1. This subject will be further elaborated in Perelberg (forthcoming).

References Althusser L (1977) A imensa revoluggo te6rica de Marx in Estruturalism. Lisboa: Portugilia Editoras. Bachelard G (1999) La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Bettelheim B (1983) Freud and Man’s Soul. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf. Bion W R (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications. Breuer J, Freud S (1893-95) Studies on Hysteria, SE 2. Britton R (1998) Belief and Imagination. New Library of Psychoanalysis no. 32. London: Rou tledge . Canguilhem G (1979) IdCologie et rationalit6 dans I’histoire des sciences de la vie. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Denis P (2000) Sigmund Freud 1905-1920. Paris: PUF. Donnet J-L (1995) Le Divan bien tempere. Paris: PUF, Le Fil Rouge. Dor J (1988) L’A-Scientificit6de la Psychoanalyse. Paris: Editions Universitaires. Duncan D (1992) Hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. The British Psycho-analytical Society Bulletin 28(10). Freud S (1895) On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’. SE 3,87-115. Freud S (1900) The Interpretation ofDreams. SE 4-5. Freud S (1901) On Dreams. SE 5. Freud S (1905a[19011) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. SE 7,7-122. Freud S (1905b) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7,130-243. Freud S (1909a) Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. SE 3-149. Freud S (1909b) Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. SE 10: 155-318. Freud S (1910) Leonard0 daVinci and a Memory of his Childhood. SE 11,63-137.

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Freud S (1911) Psycho-AnalyticNotes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia. SE 1 2 , 9 4 2 . Freud S (1912) The Dynamics ofTransference. SE 12,99-108. Freud S (1913) Totem and Taboo. SE 13,l-161. Freud S (1914a) On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE 14,67-102. Freud S (1914b) Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. SE 12,147-56. Freud S (1915a[19141) Observations on Transference Love. SE 12, 159-71. Freud S (1915b) Instincts and Theirvicissitudes. SE 14,117-40. Freud S (1915~)Repression. SE 14. Freud S (1915d) The Unconscious. SE 14: 166-204. Freud S (1917[ 19151) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14,237-60. Freud S (1918 [ 19141) From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. SE 17,7-122. Freud S (1919) A Child Is Being Beaten: a contribution to the study of the origin of the perversions. SE 17,179-204. Freud S (1920a) Psychogenesis of a Case of Sexuality in a Woman. SE 18,147. Freud S (1920b) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18, 1-64. Freud S (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18,69-143. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 1 9 , 1 4 6 . Freud S (1924) Economic Problem of Masochism. SE 19,155-70. Freud S (1925) Negation. SE 19,233-9. Freud S (1926[19251) Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. SE 20,87-172. Freud S (1927) Fetishism. SE 21, 152-7. Freud S (1931) Female Sexuality. SE 21. Freud S (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. SE 22, 5-182. Freud S (1937a) Analysis Terminable and Interminable. SE 23,216-53. Freud S (193%) Constructions inhalysis. SE 23,257-69. Freud S (1938) An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. SE 23. Freud S (1940[ 19381) Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence. SE 23,275-8. Freud S (1950[ 18951) Project for a Scientific Psychology, SE 1,281-397. Gay P (1988) Freud: A Life for Our Time. London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Granoff W (1975) Filiations: L’avenir d u complexe d’mdipe. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 200 1. Green A (1986) Passions and their vicissitudes. In A Green, On Private Madness. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis. Green A (2001) Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism. Weller A, translator. London and New York: Free Association Books. Green A (2002) Idkes directices pour une psychanalyse contemporaine. Paris: PUF. Grunbaum A (1985) The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. California: The University of California Press. HabermasJ (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Klein GS (1976) PsychoanalyticTheory. New York:International Universities Press. Laplanche J, PontalisJ-B (1985) Fantasme originaire, fantasme des origines, origines du fantasme. Paris: Hachette. Laplanche J, Pontalis J-B (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Mannoni 0 (1968) Freud. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Mitchell J, Rose J (1982) Introduction 1 to Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Macmillan, London. Perelberg RJ (1999) The interplay of identifications: violence, hysteria and the repudiation of femininity. In Kohon G (ed.), The Dead Mother: The Work of Andrk Green. London: Routledge.

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Perelberg RJ (2003) The construction of psychoanalytic models with special reference to temporality. Paper presented to the Green-Fonagy debate, ‘Can research into infancy enhance clinical psychoanalysis?’,UCL. Forthcoming in Perelberg RJ, Time and Space in Psychoanalysis. Perelberg RJ (forthcoming) Freud: The Dynamics of the Unconscious. London: Whurr. Perron R (1998) La recherche en psychanalyse et I’Association Psychanalytique Internationale. Bulletin de la Societe Psychanalytique de Paris 50: 39-5 1,July/Aug. Perron R (2001) The unconscious and primal phantasies. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 82(3). Pontalis J-B (1977) Entre le rsve et la douleur. Paris: Editions Gallimard. Popper K (1963) Conjectures and Refutations. New York: Basic Books. Prado de Oliveira LE (1997) Freud et Schreber: Les sources kcrites du delire, entre psychose et culture. Ramonville Saint-Agne:Editions Erks. Raphael-Leff J, Perelberg R (eds) (1997) Female Experience: Three Generations of Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women. London: Routledge. Ricoeur P (1965a) Freud: una interpretacion de la cultura. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, SA, 1970. Ricoeur P. (1965b) De I’lnterpretation - Essai sur Freud. Paris: Seuil. SandlerJ, Holder A, Dare C et al. (1997) Freud’s Models of the Mind. London: Karnac. SchaefferJ (1986) Le rubis a horreur du rouge. Relation et contre-investissement hysteriques. In Revue Franqaise de Psychanalyse 50, May-June, pp. 923-44. Spence DP (1987) The Freudian Metaphor: Towards Paradigm Change in Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Steiner J (1993) Psychic Retreats. New Library of Psychoanalysis London: Routledge. Steiner R (1992) Some historical and critical notes on the relationship between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. British Psycho-analytical Society Bulletin 28( 10). Sulloway F (1979) Freud: Biologist of the Mind. New York: Basic Books. Wollheim R (1973) Freud. London: Fontana Press.

PART 1

The Early Phase

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1

‘Anna 0:The First Case, Revisited and Revised’

RONALD BRITTON If it is a merit to have brought psycheanalysis into being, that merit is not mine ... I was a student and working for my final examinations at the time when another Viennese physician, Dr. Josef Breuer, fmt (in 1880-2) made use of this procedure on a girl who was suffering from hysteria ... the history of this case and its treatment, you will find set out in detail in the Studies on Hys&eriu[1895] which were published later by Breuer and myself. (Freud, 1910, p. 9).

The girl Breuer and Freud called Anna 0 was the frrst case study in their 1895 joint publication. Freud used it again to give the first of his five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909. Five years later, when writing ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’, Freud again begins with Anna 0 but this time he makes clear that the story of the illness and treatment of Anna 0 belonged to Breuer, but the conclusions that were drawn from it that led to psychoanalysis were his own. There appears to be something so basic in this case that it appeals to later generations of analysts. Michael Balint, for example, turns to the case of Anna 0 in order to describe malignant regression (Balint, 1968, pp. 139-47). Freud obviously repeatedly revisited this case in his mind when thinking of his theories and he commented, twenty years on, that anyone who reads Breuer’s account ‘will at once perceive the sexual symbolism in it and a complete prototype of what we call “transference”today’ (Freud, 1914, p. 12). There were two other important changes in Freud’s theories twenty years on from ‘Studies in Hysteria’. Then he had traced all hysterical phenomena to a recollected scene, a trauma. Twenty years later he wrote, If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes inphantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. (Freud, 1914, pp. 17-18)

31

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Another new discovery gained since 1895 was of the ubiquity of infantile sexuality and also that an inherited disposition in some individuals made traumas out of commonplace developmental experience (ibid., p. 18). So two of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis, psychic reality and infantile sexuality, were discovered after the early accounts of hysteria and both can be found in a re-examinationof the case of Anna 0.When we look at Breuer’s account through the eyes of modern analysiswe see something very different from what he did, but we also recognize what he went through because the phenomena remain the same and because his careful account enables us to look at it independently of his conclusions. So when we revisit the case will we be able to make more out of it? We have two advantages over earlier readers of the text; one, obviously, is the further development of psychoanalytic ideas in recent years; another is the greater knowledge we have about the actual case. The more we know of what was not disclosed about that treatment in the book, the clearer it is how much it influenced Freud in later years. The story as it was known to Freud is not fully told in Breuer’scase study of Anna 0.What we know about it now makes better sense in terms of modern psychoanalysis. I want to emphasize that the details that are not included in Breuer’s account were known to Freud and that he knew the subsequent development of Bertha Pappenheim’s life, as his wife was a friend of hers. At the time of their joint publication in 1895, thirteen years after the end of her treatment, both Breuer and Freud knew she was reasonably well and living in Frankfurt. In November 1882 Freud, when he was a newly qualified doctor of twenty-six,heard clinical details of this case from Breuer, five months after the treatment ceased. If this had remained his only knowledge of the case it would have provided him with the material that he needed for his early theories of unconscious mental life, repression and conversion. However, we now know that on one hot summer evening of 1883 while they dined alone together in relaxed mood, Breuer gave Freud another, much more unbuttoned, informal and intimate account of the case. This revealed the erotic psycho-drama that took place within Breuer’s treatment and potentially gave Freud raw material for his theories of the Oedipus complex, identification,transference, counter-transference,repetition compulsion and acting-out. Freud in his summarizing part of ‘Studies on Hysteria’ makes his first statement on the psychoanalytic phenomenon of ‘transference’ (Ubertragung):‘the patient is frightened at frnding that she is transferring on to the figure of the physician the distressing ideas which arise from the content of the analysis’ (Freud, 1895, p. 302). In that passage he makes no reference to Anna 0’s treatment but it is now clear that this was in his mind. Sadly, it gave Breuer no such potential insight as he seems to have remained severely traumatized by the experience and unable to profit from it. In a letter written in 1907 Breuer explained to an enquirer why after Anna 0 he did not pursue an analytic method with neurotic cases but referred them to

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Freud: I at that time learned a great deal - much that was of scientific value, but also the important practical lesson that it is impossible for a ‘generalpractitioner’ to treat such a case without his activity and the conduct of his life thereby being completely ruined. I vowed at the time never again to subject myself to such an ordeal. (Grubrich-Simitis,1997, pp. 26-7)

Even thirteen years after the treatment, at the time of its publication in 1895 every detail surrounding this case appears to have been intensely imbued with transference and counter-transference significance. Even the choice of Anna as a fictional name for Bertha Pappenheim seems especially significant. Freud gave his youngest daughter the same name later in the same year, 1895. Didier Anzieu (1986, p. 13) conjectures that Anna Lichtheim, a widow, is not only the bestower of this name on both Anna Freud and Anna 0 but also the patient Freud disguised as ‘Irma’in his famous dream of ‘Irma’s’ injection. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her biography of Anna Freud thinks that the figure ‘Irma’is a condensation of Anna Lichtheim and Emma Eckstein, the patient whose iatrogenic condition Freud almost fatally ignored because of his idealization of Fleiss who had left a surgical swab in her nose (YoungBruehl, 1988). If this is so, ‘Irma’s’presence in Freud’s dream represents counter-transference sexual attraction, medical misdemeanours, and disillusion with idealized colleagues and his own wife’s pregnancy. All these elements were present in Breuer’streatment of Anna 0, and were known to Freud at the time; he also knew about the erotic transference from his own work and the significance of erotic counter-transference from his selfanalysis. Freud confided later to Karl Abraham undisclosed free associations to his dream of Irma’s injection, and his own interpretation of it. He wrote: ‘Sexual megalomania is hidden behind it, the three women, Mathilde, Sophie and Anna, are my daughter’sgodmothers, and I have them all!’ (Abraham and Freud, 1965, p. 29). Such intimate, undisclosed knowledge was not allowed to become an inhibiting source of shame by Freud, as it was for the unfortunate Breuer, but was a great insight and the basis of his continuously evolving ideas on transference and counter-transference: The fact of the emergence of the transference in its crudely sexual form, whether affectionate or hostile, in every treatment of a neurosis, although this is neither desired nor induced by either doctor or patient, has always seemed to me the most irrefragable proof that the source of the driving forces of neurosis lies in sexual life ...As far as I am concerned, this argument has remained the decisive one, over and above the more specifc findings of analytic work. (Freud, 1914, p. 12)

The fact that Freud never made public such information has meant that some of the most crucial sources of his convictions remained undisclosed. He privately divulged undisclosed details of the Breuer-Pappenheim case to Ernest Jones, who included them in his biography of Freud (Jones, 1953, vol.

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1 , 246-8). However in one crucial detail Jones remembered the story wrongly, that is in the timing of Breuer’swife’s pregnancy. The conception of this child did not follow the termination of Bertha Pappenheim’s treatment, as Jones wrote, but ran in parallel with it (Ellenberger, 1993, p. 264). The child was born on 11 March 1882 when Anna 0 was still in treatment. The baby was named Dora, another name destined to be borrowed for a classic psychoanalytic case. As I will suggest later in this paper, this correction of the timing of the pregnancy (a pregnancy which was bound to be known to Bertha Pappenheim) enables us to make more sense of the case. Can we, a hundred years on, reading about this primal case, glean more from it or add anything to it? I think so, and I would like to use Bertha Pappenheim’s psychotherapy to put forward a suggestion that a central feature of hysteria is the use of projective identification by the subject to become in phantasy one or other or both members of the primal couple. This phantasied identification when enacted in daily life or in analysis creates an erotic drama, or it invests everyday events with an erotic resonance. It gives to the hysteric’s sexuality a theatrical quality. Freud wrote that ‘being present as an interested spectator at a ... play [schauspiel] does for adults what play does for children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-uppeople do are in that way gratified’ (Freud, 1905, p. 305). Melanie Klein, commenting on child analysis, took further what it was that ‘grown-up people do’ that was so wished for. She wrote: ‘In a number of cases it became clear those theatres ... [and] ... performance ... stand for parental coitus - listening and watching standing for observation in fact or phantasy’ (Klein, 1923, pp. 101-2). I am suggesting that in hysteria the patient, like some of Klein’s children in the playroom, mounts the stage, to become one of the characters by a phantasy of projective identification. Before taking that further I would like to review the story of Bertha Pappenheim.’There is in Frankfurt a museum devoted to Bertha Pappenheim which is located in the house that was once the residential nursery and social work school she founded. Inspired by England’s Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she also created a Jewish feminist organization in 1904. She is now seen in Germany as having been a great innovator in child care and as a hero who personally brought out of Russia more than a hundred children orphaned by the Jewish pogroms. She was lively and efficient as the somewhat authoritarian head of the children’s home where she employed her mother as a cook. This sublimation seems to have left her symptom-free but without any sexual life and determined to protect her charges and pupils from psychoanalysis. Shortly before her death in 1936 she commented: ‘if there is any justice in the next life women will make the laws there and men will bear the children’. She died in 1936 aged 77. As Anna 0, the now celebrated case of hysteria in Vienna, she became a patient in 1880. She was then aged 21, intelligent and attractive but without

‘Anna 0: The First Case. Revisited and Revised’

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ever having had any romantic attachment or, according to Breuer, any sexual thoughts. Her family was a well-connected, wealthy, Orthodox Jewish family well integrated into German culture. She had a sister ten years older, who died in adolescence, and a surviving brother who was sixteen months younger. Her relationship with her mother was described as very difficult and with her father one of a very strong mutual attachment. Breuer described her as addicted to secret daydreams which she called her ‘private theatre’. She was a difficult anti-religious adolescent with a love of ‘the theatre’. In addition to German, Anna 0 spoke English, French and Italian. I have been unable to fmd whether there was an English nanny or governess in her early childhood. The reason I am inclined to speculate on an Englishwoman as nanny, governess or even as her father’smistress, is the central importance in her story of her use of English when she lost the ability to speak German. I will now tell the story of her treatment from Breuer’s entry into the case. For some time previously she had suffered from atypical facial neuralgia. He saw her in November 1880 because she had developed a very severe ‘hysterical cough’ while nursing her sick father, who was suffering from a chest infection. In July of that year Anna 0’s father had become seriously ill and she shared nursing duties with her mother; this meant she spent the nights by his bedside in the parental bedroom and afternoons resting in her own room. She did nothing but nurse her father at night, rest in the afternoon and lapse into a trancelike state in the evening. During this time she became progressively weaker and developed anorexia. The severe cough she developed prompted the family to call in Dr Breuer. Her nursing duties were discontinued and eventually she was banished from the sickroom, but at whose instigation is not clear. What is clear is that her mother and brother stopped her nursing and later forbade her entry into her father’s room. Things rapidly became worse after she was banished and in December she took to her bed and developed a squint, various paralyses and loss of normal speech. Breuer initially explored her symptoms and signs from a neurological point of view but eventually concluded that there was no possible anatomical basis for them. The clinical picture at that time reads like a hysterical imitation of a stroke. Meanwhile, two ‘entirely distinct states of consciousness’ established themselves which required a great deal of Breuer’s close attention. In one she was ‘melancholy and anxious but relatively normal’,in the other ‘shehallucinated and was naughty’.When her mind was clear she described ‘profound darkness’ in her head, of not being able to think, of becoming blind and deaf, of having two selves, a real one and an evil one which forced her to behave badly. Her mood also oscillated from high spirits to stubborn opposition, severe anxiety and frightening hallucinations of black snakes. At night she sneaked out of bed and made her way to the parental bedroom. On one occasion her brother caught her listening at the door and shook her angrily. She subsequently linked this episode with an intermittent hysterical deafness.

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Breuer’s attentive interest in her symptoms shifted from examination of her limbs to analysis of her speech difficulties. She spoke in a telegrammatic form of ungrammatical German initially, to be followed by almost unintelligible speech composed of four or five languages. Breuer patiently followed this as a linguistic mystery but moved on to more psychological ground when she became completely mute for two weeks. Breuer made what was probably his first interpretation. He linked her silence to her feeling wounded and angry as a result of something her father had said which offended her. This produced a dramatic improvement in her pseudoneurological symptoms and a change in her use of language. She now spoke only English, which meant that Breuer understood her but her nurse did not. Her squint disappeared, and she could now support her head. A month later, on 1 April 1881,she got up for the first time. Then as Breuer puts it, ‘on the fifth of April her adored father died’ (Breuer, 1895, p. 25). She had not seen him for some time and the deterioration of his condition had been concealed from her. Her reaction was violent and furious, particularly towards her mother. She then became stuporous for two days. Following this the presence of her mother or brother provoked highly disturbed states. Apart from Breuer she could not recognize people or at times even see them. The only time she was aware of her surroundingswas with Breuer, who also became the only person who could feed her. At this time they established the pattern that persisted one way or another throughout the treatment. She would be somnolent in the afternoon, sleep deeply at sunset and then spend hours ‘talkingherself out’ to Breuer, eventually becoming ‘calm and cheerful‘ (ibid. p. 27). This rapid improvement, or transference cure as we might describe it now, was interrupted by Breuer’s introduction of another doctor before going away for ‘several days’. Anna 0 did not see or acknowledge the existence of the other doctor; Breuer described this as one of her ‘negative hallucinations’; the doctor was Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, the famous psychiatrist (Ellenburger, 1993, p. 267). Her laughing exchange with Breuer who got her to read aloud a French text in English was interrupted by KraftEbbing lighting a paper and blowing smoke in her face. She rushed to the door to take the key and after falling unconscious had a ‘short fit of anger and severe anxiety’. When Breuer returned after his short holiday break he found her much worse. She had become completely anorexic; her enacted ‘hallucinatory absences’which previously were ‘freely-createdpoetical compositions’were now terrlfying hallucinations of ‘deaths heads’.This, however, changed with the resumption of Breuer’s sessions with her. Now the pattern was hallucinations in the day, somnolence in the afternoon and what she called ‘clouds’, which Breuer called auto-hypnosis. During this latter state she would narrate to Breuer the content of her daily hallucinations after which, lucid and cheerful, she would write or draw far into the night.


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According to Freud, Mathilde Breuer became jealous and angry about the time her husband spent either with his patient, or talking about her. His attempts to take more time away from her may have played a part in the events that led him to hospitalize Anna 0 against her will on 7June 1881. She had become intermittently suicidal during the day when he was not present. She was placed in a villa of the Inzerdorf Sanatorium, outside Vienna, ‘without deceit, but by force’. Breuer visited her every third day for what she now called the ‘talking cure’ or ‘chimney sweeping’ (Ellenburger, 1993, p. 268). The double entendre of this latter term, chimney sweeping, like the rest of the sexual symbolism, went unnoticed by Breuer but the subsequent hysterical pregnancy and labour which Freud knew about ensured that it did not escape his attention. In the sanatorium she was under the care of Dr Hermann Breslauer who, unlike Breuer, had no way of contacting or influencing her and resorted to drugs on which she eventually became dependent. After admission she did not sleep or eat for three days, she made numerous attempts at suicide, smashed windows and hallucinated. Breuer on his visits was able to transform her mental state by listening to her stories. In order to be recognized he had to take her hands and to persuade her to tell him her stories by beginning himself in English in a stereotyped way (ibid.). The pattern of Anna 0’s behaviour was now even more clearly linked to Breuer. He described it like this, ‘I used to visit her in the evening when I knew I should find her in hypnosis, and I then relieved her of the whole stock of imaginative products which she had accumulated since my last visit.’ Following this she was calm and cheerful but became increasingly moody and difficult until the next visit. Breuer was convinced that this was simply due to accumulated ‘imaginativeproducts’ which only he knew how to release. Later this was further elaborated by him into his theory of catharsis. In August, while she was still in the sanatorium, he went on holiday for five weeks. On his return from this ‘break’he found her in a pitiful condition; inert, malicious, unamenable. This confirmed for Breuer his belief that she suffered from accumulated ‘ideational complexes’ which were relieved by verbal expression in either induced or auto-hypnosis.He solved the problem by bringing her back to Vienna for a week and having a session each evening. After that the former rhythm was resumed in the sanatorium. She returned to Vienna considerably improved in the autumn of 1881. Her steady improvement was maintained until December 1881, when she markedly deteriorated, becoming once more gloomy and irritable. A new phase in her condition developed: she now had alternating states of mind each day. In one of these states, though it was now the winter of 1881/2, ‘she lived in the winter of 1880/81’.This began on the anniversary of the day she was forbidden to see her father. She shared this replayed winter with Breuer. He was now seeing her twice a day in order to relieve her by using either her

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auto-hypnosisor his induced hypnosis to enable her to recall her impressions of the previous year. These included the circumstances of the death of her father but mainly they were centred on ‘the events and vexations of 1881’ which involved Breuer (Breuer, 1895,II,p. 33). We have to remind ourselves when reading the account of 1895 that it was written by Breuer twelve years after the treatment terminated, when he knew that she had recovered. A year after the end of the treatment he, like his former patient, was still suffering. He ‘confided to Freud that she was quite unhinged and that he wished she would die and so be released from her suffering’(Jones, 1953,p. 247). He comments, several times, that when he is present she is euphoric and when he is absent she is anxious; he notes that each time he leaves she markedly deteriorates. His solution of seeing her daily eventually gives way to twice daily, but even in retrospect he does not link her states of mind to her attachment to him. Freud clearly saw it differently. When in the final contribution to ‘Studies in Hysteria’ he enunciates, for the fust time, his concept of transference, he does so without citing its most obvious example, Anna 0 (1910, p. 302). In order to remain in step with Breuer’s theory he even accepted Anna 0 as an example of something he tells us he has personally never met, i.e. a case of ‘hypnoid hysteria’. Freud added: ‘Any [such] that I took in hand has turned into a defence hysteria.’ With the newer information of Ellenberger we can draw attention to a parallel event which has been obscured by Ernest Jones mistaking the sequence of the events told to him by Freud. As I said earlier, Frau Breuer had become angry and impatient with Breuer’sinvolvement with his patient and I suggested that Anna 0 ’ shospitalization on 7 June 1881 was a consequence of Frau Breuer’sinsistence that he spend more time with her. They left for a few days and during that month their daughter was conceived. Anna 0 was an intimate of the Breuer circle and would have discovered the existence of this pregnancy, probably some time after her return from hospital to a new home in Vienna in the autumn of 1881. The Breuer’s child was born in March 1882 while Anna 0 was still in treatment. It is in that context that Anna 0 obliterated the present in her hysterical states and returned in daydream to living in the previous year. She behaved in her new room as if she was in her old room. In the hot spring of 1882 when Breuer’s child was in her early infancy and presumably at her mother’s breast Anna 0 developed a new symptom: ‘she suddenly found it impossible to drink’ (Breuer, 1895, p. 34). She took no fluids but survived on fruit such as melons for the six weeks this lasted before being relieved by a reminiscence during her hypnosis: she grumbled about her English lady-companion whom she did not care for, and went on to describe, with every sign of disgust, how she had once gone into that lady’s room and how her little dog - horrid creature! had drunk out of a glass there. (ibid., p. 34)


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This episode is very much highlighted by Breuer as it was the prototype for his new method of retracing symptoms to recollected specific ‘traumatic’ events. When with anger and disgust she ‘recalled’this episode, her drinking phobia remitted. It does not seem too fanciful from our psychoanalytic vantage point to re-interpret this drinking phobia as a reaction to her phantasies of Frau Breuer, her quasi-English doctor’s wife, giving the new baby a drink from her breast. As an infant of sixteen months she had probably witnessed the feeding of her newborn baby brother. Breuer now, in his twice daily visits, invited her to tell him the origin of each symptom or changed mood in a recollection, or phantasy, of the past. He called these past recollections her ‘caprices’,in his original report of 1882 (Ellenberger, 1993, p. 268). Thus, together, Anna 0 and Breuer invented the theory of catharsis and each of her symptoms disappeared. At some point she decided that her treatment should end precisely on 7 June 1882, which was the anniversary of her committal to the sanatorium. I think that Anna 0 believed that this was when the Breuers conceived their new baby. Thus it was that the case reached its dknouement or rather its double denouement: the first climax was recounted by Breuer in the published case study; the second climax, or anti-climax, was the one he confided to Freud in the summer of 1883. The final scene of the official treatment took place on schedule on 7 June 1882.Anna 0 rearranged her room so that it resembled her father’sbedroom during his final illness. She then enacted the terrifying hallucination that she believed began her illness in the autumn of 1880. Sitting at his bedside she saw a black snake coming towards her father to bite him and she tried to keep it off. Her arm was paralysed and when she looked at her hand the fingers turned into little snakes with death’sheads at their extremities. When the snake vanished she was terrified and tried to pray but her language failed until she thought of some child’sverses in English which she recited. The day after this hallucination a crooked tree branch revived her memory of the snake and her right arm immediately became rigidly extended. This recollection accounted for her subsequent symptoms in accordance with Breuer’s new trauma theory and appeared to confirm their jointly inspired concept of catharsis or ‘chimneysweeping’. After re-enacting this scene for Breuer on 7 June 1882 she was able to speak German again and was free from her ‘innumerabledisturbances’ (ibid., p. 40). This is the end of the official story. The second denouement described to Freud in the summer of 1883 he recounted to Jones and also in a letter to Stefan Zweig. After leaving Anna 0 for the last time Breuer was called back to frnd her confused and writhing with abdominal cramps. Asked what was the matter, she replied, ‘Now comes Dr. B’s child.’ Freud commented ‘at that moment Breuer held the key in his hand but he dropped it’. In conventional horror he took flight and left the patient to a colleague (Gay, 1988, pp. 66-7). In fact Breuer had her admitted to the Bellevue Sanatorium, Kreuzlingen,

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near Lake Constance, where she remained until October 1882. There were other fairly brief hospital admissions before her mother took her to live in her own home town of Frankfurt where she became and remained well.

Discussion of the case of Anna 0 I would like now to give an account of the case as I imagine it. In a paper on ‘Reality and Unreality in Phantasy and Fiction’ I suggested that in order to

‘imagine things’ we need a phantasied mental space in which these events can take place (Britton, 1995, pp. 120-7). In common speech we call this ‘our imagination’. I equated this phantasied space with what I called ‘the other room’ and suggested that originally it was the place where the primary object continued to exist when physically absent. As, I proposed, an object could not be ‘imagined’to exist except in relation to another object it was the setting for the invisible primal scene of infancy. Other people’s rooms and ‘other rooms’ play a significant part in the case of Anna 0. The story begins in her father’s bedroom, the exclusion from which led to her breakdown. If I were to schematize Anna 0 ’ s case in these terms I would see it beginning in the parental bedroom with her cough, anorexia and progressive weakness. A deadly union, by identification, with her dying father. Her cough was associated with dance music heard at the bedside and subsequently provoked by rhythmical music. The hallucination of the black snake I take to be death by intercourse and her death’s head frngers a deadly form of masturbation. This was interrupted by her removal from her father and the parental bedroom. Her subsequent paralysis expressed the infantile lack of locomotory power and the chaos of her movements and stiff-limbed contractures a caricature of a primal couple in intercourse. Her speech mirrored her limb movement: infantile, dislocated and polysyllabic. At this point the development of the transference changed the situation. Now Breuer became her partner in a manically reparative symbolic intercourse, while her mother and brother became the bad, transference couple whom she eventually annihilated by negative hallucination. Now it seemed that Breuer and Anna 0 were the occupants of an imaginary ‘other room’ as the primal couple telling ‘fairy stories’. This halcyon period was brought to an end by the threat of his departure and the introduction of a third person into the situation, Dr Kraft-Ebbing. Breuer and his patient struggled to reinstate the previous equilibrium, only to lose it again with a five-week summer break. Restored to Vienna but in a new house Anna 0 and Breuer reestablished their partnership, but now Anna’s illusional relationship required two prolonged visits each day. It now had to contend with a new circumstance, namely Breuer’s wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his child. Anna 0 then annihilated the past year by returning to her previous relationship with Breuer and insisting she was in her old

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room with him. The climax on the anniversary of what Anna 0 imagined to be the date of the conception of the Breuer’sbaby was the recreation, staged by Anna 0 in her copy of her father’s bedroom, of the hallucination that gave birth to her hysterical illness. A performance that united the couple in sex and death; father’s black penis poisoning its possessor and death’s head fingers declaring her death by masturbatory phantasy. She rescued herself by replaying the bedtime verses of her childhood, thus placing herself in her own room, the nursery. There she recovered her mother tongue. This ‘cathartic drama’ was followed by Breuer returning to fmd Anna 0 back in that ‘other room’ and other identity, in hallucinatory labour bringing forth their phantasied child. I have given this somewhat melodramatic account in order to emphasize how the consulting room of the analysis can be colonized by the events which should be taking place in the patient’s imagination - the ‘other room’ of the patient’s mind. When we locate our phantasies in this ‘other room’, a room defined by our physical absence from it, we say we are imagining something. It is the space for fiction. When we misguidedly locate phantasies that properly belong in the imagination in the realm of perceptual space, we have visions. Outside dreams such visions are regarded as hallucinations, as with Anna 0,or as supernaturalvisitations by others, such as William Blake. If we are prepared to limit these phantasies to the ‘otherroom’we can use our imaginations.This Anna 0 did prior to her illness in what she called the ‘private theatre’ of her daydreams; a place where she spent a great deal of time. I suggested in my earlier account that the ‘other room’ of the imagination comes into existence developmentally when the primary object is believed to continue existing in its perceptual absence. It is the place where the object spends its invisible existence. I think it is conceived inevitably as in relationship with another object which is a condition of existence. The ‘other room’ is, in other words, the location of the invisible primal scene. Klein placed the primal scene centre stage in her analyses of young children. In her analysis of h a , a six-year-oldgirl, she found ‘thattheatre and performances of all kinds symbolized coitus between her parents’ mein, 1924, p. 39). The hysteric, I suggest, gets in on the act; mounts the stage and takes one of the parental parts. By an omnipotent phantasy of projective identification they believe they are one of the primal couple performing whatever they imagine takes place in the phantasied primal scene. This I think constitutes hysterical enactment, phantasy in action such as that so vividly described in the case of Anna 0.The ‘privatetheatre’of her daydreaming became incarnate in a bodilybased psychic drama enacted by herself, and in which she subsequently involved her family and her doctor in a total transference scene.

Discussion and summary Like Andre Green (Green, 1997, pp. 39-42) I see hysteria as a distinct

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psychoanalytic state which, though it has features in common with the borderline syndrome, is not the same. If I were to generalize about the difference between the essential thrust of the two syndromes it would be to say that in hysteria priority is given to the claim topossess the object in the realm of love whereas in the borderline syndrome the claim is topossess it in the realm of knowledge. Thus in hysteria the insistence is on possessing exclusively the analyst’s love, leading to a transference ‘illusion’ which ignores the importance of any other reality than love and annihilates the analyst’s erotic bonds with anyone else. In the borderline transference the insistence is on complete inter-subjective understanding with the annihilation of anything which might hint at the analyst having derived knowledge from or shared significant knowledge with anyone else. As a consequence of the different use of projective identification in hysteria and the borderline syndrome, a major diagnostic difference is in the analyst’sexperience of the transference and the counter-transference.This is a subject in itself and is beyond this chapter, but suffice it to say the difference is marked. The characteristic counter-transference in the analysis of the borderline patient I described in The Missing Link (Britton, 1989) and is one of feeling constrained or tyrannized. In contrast, until the hysterical defensive organization breaks down, the analyst’s feeling is of being especially important and idealized: the risk is of an unconscious collusive partnership of mutual admiration. Freud wrote of the erotic transference in hysteria in his paper ‘Observations on Transference-Love’(1915) in his series on ‘technique’.He had already written about ordinary transference desire as a recapitulation of oedipal wishes in his earlier paper ‘TheDynamics of Transference’(1 912), so why did he write this second, more dramatic paper specifically on ‘erotic transference’?When he reaches for a metaphor for such an analysis he takes us to the theatre. He writes: There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality - as when, for instance, a cry of fire is raised during a theatrical performance. No doctor who experiences this for the first time will find it easy to retain his grasp on the analytic situation and to keep clear of the illusion that the treatment is really at an end. (1915, p. 162)

The oscillation between the reality of the theatre and theatrical reality, between the reality of transference and transference reality, in this metaphor I find absolutely dizzying. It also places the scene of action at the theatre which I have suggested, following Melanie Klein, is symbolic, a phantasy of witnessing the primal scene. If this is so, the proper place for drama is on the stage and our proper place is in the audience. In the theatre of ‘hysteria’, however, events in the audience are likely to overtake those on the stage. I have an idea that one thing which prompted this paper was Freud’s knowledge of what took place in Jung’s analysis of Sabina Spielrein. The


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transference-counter-transference erotic entanglement in that case must have reminded him of Breuer and Bertha Pappenheim. Once again Freud felt unable to disclose publicly something that profoundly influenced his convictions. There are many parallels between Anna 0 and Sabina Spielrein; not least the interplay of love and death. It was Sabina Spielrein who first wrote of a primary destructive urge in 1912 (Spielrein, 1912). The analytic material of Anna 0 frequently combined sex and death. The part played by the ‘death instinct’ in the neuroses is a subject beyond this paper which I have tried to limit to sexuality in hysteria. Nevertheless it frnds its way into the discussion because, in hysteria, sex and death are characteristically conjoined in what I would see as a ‘pathological organization’(Steiner, 1987);one which expresses the sexual and destructive drives in the form of a phantasy in which the subject becomes one of the primal couple by projective identification. Such a dramatized scene can represent sexual union in the form of an eroticized phantasy of mutual death. I suggest that such enacted phantasies defend the individual from the pain of perceiving the reality of the oedipal situation or the guilt of annihilating it.

Note 1. My account is based on ‘Studies in Hysteria’; Freud’s subsequent comments in a number of papers; Ernest Jones, and Peter Gay’s biographies of Freud; the biography of Anna Freud; the Abraham-Freud correspondence; Didieur Anzieu’s account of Freud’s Self-Analysis. It is also based on ‘The Story of “Anna 0.”: A Critical Review with New Data’ by Henri Ellenberger, which includes a case report by Breuer written in 1882 for the hospital to which he referred her, together with that hospital’s subsequent case report.

References Abraham HC, Freud EL (1965) A Psycho-AnalyticDialogue. London: Hogarth. Anzieu D (1986) Freud’s Self-Analysis. London: Hogarth. Balint M (1968) The Basic Fault. London: Tavistock Publications. Breuer J (1895) Studies in Hysteria. SE 2. Britton R (1989) The missing link: parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. In J Steiner (ed.), The Oedipus Complex Today. London: Karnac Books, 83-101. Britton R (1995) Reality and unreality in phantasy and fiction. In ES Person, P Fonagy, SA Figueira (eds), On Freud’s Creative Writers and Day-dreaming. New Haven: Yale University Press, 82-107. Ellenberger HF (1993) The story of ‘Anna 0.’:a critical review with new data. In Beyond the Unconscious. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Freud S (1895, 1910) Studies in Hysteria. SE 2. Freud S (1905) Three Essays o n the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7,130-243. Freud S (1912) The Dynamics of Transference. SE 12. Freud S (1914) On the History of the Psycho-AnalyticMovement. SE 14. Freud S (1915) Observations on Transference-Love. SE 12.

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Gay P (1988) Freud: A Life for Our Time. London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent. Green A (1997) Chiasmus: prospective - borderlines viewed after hysteria: retrospective - hysteria viewed after borderlines, Psychoanalysis in Europe, Bulletin 48, Spring. Grubrich-SimitisI (1997) Early Freud and Late Freud. London: Routledge. Jones E (1953) Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol I. London: Hogarth. Klein M (1923) Early analysis. In RMoney-Kyrle,B Joseph, E O’Shaughnessyet al. (eds), The Writings ofMelanie Klein, vol.1. London: Hogarth Press (1975). Klein M (1924) An obsessional neurosis in a six-year-old girl. In R Money-Kyrle, B Joseph, E O’Shaughnessyet al. (eds), The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 2. London: Hogarth. Spielrein S (1912) Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens, Jahrbuch fiir psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, W.465-503. Steiner J (1987) The interplay between pathological organizations and the paranoidschizoid and depressive positions, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 68: 69-80. Young-Bruehl E (1988) Anna Freud. London: Macmillan.

PART 11

The Second Phase: The Birth of Psychoanalysis

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2

‘Dora. Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria’ MONIQUE COURNUT-JANIN There’sno smoke without fire. [...I Let’s call a spade a spade. (Sigmund Freud)

It was in 1905 that Freud published this first long account of a case of analysis, though it had been written in 1901, quite soon after the appearance of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in 1900. Freud initially chose the title ‘Dream and Hysteria’ for his text, as he told Fliess in a letter of 1 January 1901. Then, in a letter on the 30th, he elaborated: ‘the principal issue in the conflicting thought processes is the contrast between an inclination between men and an inclination toward women’ (Masson, 1985, p. 434). And that is just what the present analysis is going to be about ... It was while working with hysterical women in 1895-96, that Freud discovered the psychogenesis of the neuroses, along with the importance of infantile sexuality. In publishing the ‘Dora’ observation, Freud intended to corroborate his assertions of 1905 and 1896 about the pathogenesis of hysterical disturbances and the psychical processes of hysteria. Meanwhile, Freud the man was busy with the work of self-analysis. Indeed, it was with a story of a man that it all began: Dora’s father had come to see Freud some years previously and had felt comfortable. On two occasions, he had attempted to place Dora in Freud’s care. She eventually agreed. Freud began analysis, which lasted for three months before Dora broke off the process. Thus, we can at present read Dora in the perspectives of a dream and hysteria, and then of transference and finally her male analyst’s countertransference response. A key text on the feminine, it is possible for us to work on Dora in multiple ways, for it remains always open and different readings are possible.

Dora and her story Dora was eighteen when she began the analysis. Freud described a family structure dominated by a father whom he knew, having treated him 47


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successfully several years previously. In contrast, the slightly older brother and the mother, whom he had not met, were described as rather less interesting. Concerning the mother - about whom Dora’s father had said, ‘she is no longer anything to me’ - the rather unflattering term ‘housewife’s psychosis’ (p. 20) would issue from Freud’s pen. It was thus Dora’s father who came to see Freud and who placed her in Freud’s care. Freud was quick to see what was at stake for this father in the treatment. Certainly, he loved his daughter and was concerned about a recent suicide threat she had made, but he was eager to let Freud cope with a child who was attempting to separate him from the mistress to whom he was strongly attached. Thus, at first Freud became involved as a third party in what was a father-daughter problem. Dora accepted this treatment with ill grace; she was in conflict with her father about their relationship with the K. family, whom father and daughter had seen much of for several years; abruptly, Dora refused to continue the relationship. At the most superficial level, what we have here is a ‘thetre de boulevard’: Frau K., the mistress of Dora’s father, turns a blind eye to the attention Herr K. is paying to her lover’sdaughter. Despite this awkward beginning, Freud made use of Dora’s symptoms and also analysed the two dreams that will be discussed below, and thus discovered the depths of the conflict the adolescent was mired in; this was accomplished in several steps. In his prefatory remarks, Freud, conscious of the resistance he had already provoked in the scientific milieu, stated: ‘the presentation of my case histories remains a problem that is hard for me to resolve’ (Freud, 1905a[19011,p. 7). Freud refused to countenance ill-intentionedpeople who wilfully misunderstood him.It was a duty owed to the sick, but also duty to science that Freud invoked. He further explained that he had waited for four years, to avoid doing any harm to his patient. (I will examine below what we can garner, nearly a century later, from the passage about the accusation he fears will be levelled at him because of the theme of sexuality - referred to at length during the cure - between him and Dora.) ‘It would be the mark of singular and perverse prurience to suppose that conversations of this kind are a good means of exciting or gratrfying sexual desires’(ibid., p. 9). Freud specified what he was looking for: ‘to demonstrate the intimate structure of a neurotic disorder and the determination of its symptoms’ (ibid.,p. 13). He ended by describing the analytical method: I now let the patient himself choose the subject of the day’s work, and in that way I start out from whatever surface his unconscious happens to be presenting to his notice at the moment. But on this plan everything that has to do with the clearing-

up of a particular symptom emerges piecemeal,woven into various contexts, and distributed over widely separated periods of time. (ibid., p. 12)

* * *

‘Dora.Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria’

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After noting the continuity of this text with ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, Freud stated his idea: dreams ... after the work of interpretation has been completed ... can be replaced by perfectly correctly constructed thoughts which can be assigned a recognizable position in the chain of mental events. I wish to give an example in the following pages of the only practical application of which the art of interpreting dreams seems to admit. (ibid., p. 15)

He insists on the importance of the dream as ‘one of the detours by which repression can be evaded’ (ibid., p. 15) and that, in consequence, make it possible to find again the undesirable psychical material whose content suffered the repression, through interpretation. Now, the content of the patient’s story - here, Dora’s story - contains gaps; the chronological order is modified, there are numerous instances of conscious and unconscious insincerity and there are also those ‘[errors] in memory ... formed secondarily so as to fill in those gaps’ (ibid., p. 17). The 1899 text ‘Screen Memories’ had shown this chronological overlapping of memories. Freud’s article did not reconstitute the history of the symptoms, dyspnoea, coughing and aphonia, appearing precociously from the age of twelve, concentratinginstead on laying bare their multiple meanings and also their intricate connections with other psychical or somatic manifestations, appearing either on their own or at the same time. These could be migraine, but also depression or character disorders ... Dora, on the other hand, had one day left out a ‘letterin which she took leave of them because, as she said, she could no longer endure her life’ (1905a, p. 23). It was through Dora’s father that Freud became aware of the friendship with the Ks, of her father’s gratitude to Frau K., who had cared for Dora during her illness, of Herr K.’s solicitude for Dora, who had, for the couple’s children, replaced their mother. Just before this, Dora had refused to remain with the Ks, later telling her mother that Herr K. had dared, after an excursion to the lake, to make a declaration to her. Herr K. had denied this, throwing the suspicion onto Dora, who, according to Frau K., was only interested in sexual matters, and had probably ‘merely “fancied”the whole scene she had described’ (ibid., p. 26). And so it fell to Dora’s father to request of Freud: ‘Pleasetry to bring her to her senses’(ibid., p. 26). We certainly have here, Freud said, the ‘psychical trauma which Breuer and I declared long ago [in their ‘Preliminary Communication’] to be the indispensable prerequisite for the production of a hysterical disorder’ (ibid., pp. 26-7). But Freud now took into account - along with how longstanding a symptom was - need: ‘If ... the trauma theory is not to be abandoned, we must go back to her childhood’ (ibid., p. 27). When Dora was fourteen Herr K. had pressed her to him and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Thiswas surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of

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fourteen who had never before been approached’(ibid., p. 28) In fact, what Dora had felt was disgust, which, for Freud, is a sign of hysteria. There is displacement of the sensation. The labial zone was, for Dora, ‘spoiled’by the sucking, thus the locus of a fixation. Dora had kept secret the sexual excitement and the disgust she had felt. Freud believed that the girl had then become aware of the sexual organ, from Herr K.’s erection. ‘Thisperception was revolting to her; it was dismissed from her memory, repressed, and replaced by the innocent sensation of pressure upon her thorax ...’I (ibid., p. 30; emphasis added). Freud affirmed that we have here three symptoms - the disgust, the sensation of pressure on the upper part of the body, and the avoidance of men engaged in affectionate conversation - all of them derived from a single experience, and that it is only by taking into account the interrelation of these three phenomena that we can understand the way in which the formation of the symptoms came about. (ibid., p. 30)

As regards disgust, if Freud did remind us of the importance of the mouth, here a matter of Dora’s infant-like sucking, he also noted the proximity of the genital zone with the excretory one, which attempts at idealization do not manage to separate ... He insisted on the over-determination of the symptoms: knowledge of paths of association ‘doesnot render less necessary a knowledge of the forces that travel along them’ (ibid., p. 32). The notion of quantity, of instinctual force, is certainly taken into account here. Identification, the essential mechanism in hysteria, is present throughout the text. Freud finds it, for example, in Dora’scough, identified as much with the father, panting in the conjugal chamber, as with the sick father, with laboured breathing. Dora also identified with her mother, the governess or Frau K., depending on the flow of unconscious thoughts that engaged her attention. What distinguishes hysteria from the other psychoneuroses is somatic compliance, ‘that procures for unconscious psychical processes an outlet in the bodily sphere’ (ibid., p. 40). What does the symptom mean? It enacts a fantasy with a sexual content, even if generally a single unconscious fantasy does not suffice to engender a symptom. The double meaning of words - for examplefortune, signifying at the same time the visible meaning and its opposite - will be present in the analysis of dreams. Here, it is a sexual meaning we are dealing with: the father could be impotent. Freud used words designating the things related to sexuality, and once again defended himself by appealing to the gynaecologist’s privilege. Freud lifted his metaphors from French: ‘I will call a cat a cat,’ or ‘To make an omelette, one must break eggs’ (ibid., pp. 48-9). Was French the language of sexuality for Freud?But that is another story ... Psychoneurosesare, so to speak, the negative of perversions ... [The] unconscious fantasies [of neurotics] show precisely the same content as the documentarily recorded actions of perverts. (ibid., p. 165)

‘Dora. Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria’

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Their double origin resides in the child’s polymorphic perversion that Freud described, also in 1905,in ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’(1905b). Here, before Freud’s work on equivalents - penis, faeces, child - it is the transition between nipple and penis that occupies him: this excessively repulsive and perverted phantasy of sucking at a penis has the most innocent origin. It is a new version of what may be described as a prehistoric impression of sucking at the mother’sor nurse’sbreast. (ibid., p. 52)

We are now, apparently, in ‘pre-genital’material, yet oedipal organization, if we wish to take into account both sides of the question, is what makes intelligible the diverse movements of identification and the diverse instinctual motions. Love for the father, with its erotic side, was displaced onto Herr K. - love (and its opposite, hate); even so, for Dora, apparently, the most secret part of the course the cure took, the most precious part, was her love for Frau K. and her pain at its betrayal.

The two dreams The first dream A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewelcase; but Father said ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewelcase.’ We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up. (Freud,

1905a[1901],p. 64)

Freud was to conduct the analysis of the dream with the same precision that he brought to analysing the symptoms, gathering Dora’s associations and presenting to the reader, as the text unfolds, the theoretical and technical considerations he deemed necessary. In addition, each of the dream’s words was to find a place in a chain of associations that became richer the more Dora proved capable of producing additions to it. The lifting of repression, but also the sudden interest directed at this or that past or recent event, accented the session, with a lighting that changed from moment to moment, according to the dynamics of cathexes.* Polysemy again appeared there in the fire, relating to the sexual excitement Dora may have felt because of Herr K., but also, as the hypotheses Freud presented to the young girl unfolded, connected to the memory of Dora’s childhood enuresis; and it was her father who got her up at night to urinate ... The jewel-case, which appeared twice in the dream, also exemplifies the work of analysis and the de-condensationit implies: it is at once the maternal ‘jewelcase’,whose evocation leads to the ‘drops’,a word that is not present in the dream but intervenes in the associations as an associative bridge:


52

Dora’s mother apparently liked her husband to give her earrings in the form of drops, which led to Dora’s wish to receive such paternal gifts, but the drops also evoke a more directly sexual material: the mother’s sexually transmitted disease, the father’s sperm and Dora’s ‘white flowers’, which represent equally her fear and her wish to take the place of her mother and her father’s mistress, and certainly also reveai her masturbation. The jewelcase is yet another gift Herr K. made to her; when Freud proposed to her the interpretation that it could stand for the female genital organs, Dora answered, ‘I knew that you were going to say that’ (ibid., p. 69). What we have here is the mechanism of projection. Throughout this chapter, Freud intended to demonstrate once again, as he had done previously in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, that ‘the dream expresses a wish fulfilment’(Freud, 1900). Desire, also implying transferenceY3 as Freud explained in a note; after proposing several constructionsto Dora, he fmally told her: ‘The dream confirms once more what I had already told you before you dreamt it - that you are summoning up your old love for your father in order to protect

yourself against your love for Herr K. But what d o all these efforts show? Not only that you are afraid of Herr K., but that you are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to yield to him. In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved him Naturally, Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation. (Freud, 1905a[1901], p. 70; emphasis added) ...I

Freud added: Moreover, the re-appearance of the dream in the last few days forces me to the conclusion that you consider that the same situation has arisen once again, and that you have decided to give up the treatment - to which, after all, it is only your father who makes you come. (ibid., p. 70)

This proved to be the case, as we shall see. Even so, Freud had warned that in this text, it was not about transference that he wished to speak ... About the desire which creates the dream, Freud again specified its function: ‘For the wish which creates the dream always springs from the period of childhood; and it is continually trying to summon childhood back into reality and to correct the present day by the measure of childhood’ (ibid., p. 71).* In this chapter, too, in connection with masturbation, mentioned a few sessions previously, Freud was to speak of the symptomatic act, explaining it to Dora, who, ‘as she lay on the sofa and talked ... kept playing with [a small reticule] - opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again’ (ibid., p. 76).5 Childhood masturbation held Freud’s attention for a long time; he discussed how repressing it was part and parcel of the aetiology of hysteria; he added that if ‘in this case the occurrence of masturbation in childhood is


53

established ... its occurrence cannot be an accidental element nor an immaterial one in the conformation of the clinical picture’ (ibid., p. 82). One word would serve as a bridge: ‘catarrh’, which was how Dora called her affect: Freud spoke of ‘theword “catarrh”[which] acted once again as a “switch-word’’and enabled the whole set of thoughts upon her father’s responsibility for her illness to manifest themselves in the symptom of the cough’ (ibid., p. 82). She coughed like her father, which for Freud was a way of proclaiming to the entire world: ‘I am my father’s daughter. I have catarrh, just as he has. He has made me ill, just as he made Mother ill. It is from him that I have got my evil passions, which are punished by illness’ (ibid., p. 82). Freud specified in passing the notion of fixation: if there had been an organic irritation from the beginning, it was susceptible to fixation: ‘because it concerned a part of the body which in Dora had to a high degree retained its significance as an erotogenic zone’ (ibid., p. 83). The cough has one further meaning: identification with Frau K., who was the father’smistress. Then came a Freudian affirmation that one does not encounter subsequently in his work: ‘The pride taken by women in the appearance of their genitals ... [but] disorders of the genitals which they think calculated to inspire feelings of repugnance or even disgust have an incredible power of ... lowering their self-esteem ...’ (ibid., p. 84). The disgust Dora felt after Herr K.’s kiss was apparently accompanied by the thought that “‘all men were frivolous and untrustworthy” (my father, Herr K.)’ (ibid., p. 84). In the dream, Dora summoned up an infantile affection for her father so that it might protect her against her present affection for a stranger ... ‘The infantile, and now unconscious, wish to p u t her father in the strange man’splace bad thepotency necessaryfor theformation of a dream’ (ibid., p. 86, emphasis added). Freud returned to the definitions of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’: if a daytime thought plays the role of entrepreneur, it is a desire emanating from the unconscious that acts as the capitalist paying the expenses.

The second dream I was walking about in a town which I did not know. I saw streets and squares which were strange to me. Then I came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and found a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I had left home without my parents’ knowledge she had not wished to write to me to say that Father was ill. ‘Now he is dead, and if you like you can come.’ I then went to the station [‘Bahnhof] and asked about a hundred times: ‘Where is the station?’ I always got the answer: ‘Five minutes.’ I then saw a thick wood ahead of me which I went into, and there I asked a man whom I met. He said to me: ‘Twoand a half hours more.’ He offered to accompany me. But I refused and went alone. I saw the station in front of me and could not reach it. At the same time I had the usual

54

Freud: A Modern Reader feeling of anxiety that one has in dreams when one cannot move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in the meantime, but I know nothing about that. I walked into the porter’s lodge, and enquired for our flat. The maidservant opened the door to me and replied that Mother and the others were already at the cemetery [‘Friedhof1. (ibid., p. 94)

Here Freud offers a new example of the analysis of a dream’s material. Many associative elements intervene, reconstituted either by Freud alone or through questioning Dora. It is a matter of a young man who has left and gone to a strange city, with the intention of becoming independent and being able to marry Dora; but even there one finds overdetermination: the associationslead to Dresden, where she went alone, for two hours, to see the Sistine Madonna. Freud then noted the identification with the young man who was in love, whose aim was to seduce Dora; she then seeks the goal of seducing a woman, Frau K.; the station, a woman ... a place of transports (of love).‘ A hundred times: here we are recalling a scene where the father asked for cognac, Dora became impatient with her mother: ‘I have asked you a hundred times already where the key is’ (ibid., p. 97) the key, and the case from the first dream: for Freud, this certainly refers to genital organs. Freud then reminded Dora of the farewell letter, written by her to her parents, in connection with the letter in the dream: ‘This letter had been intended to give her father a fright, so that he should give up Frau K.; or at any rate to take revenge on him if he could not be induced to do that’ (ibid., pp. 37-81. Freud kept in mind this desire for vengeance. Without fully going into the rest of the analysis of the dream, let us cite, as a central element, the lakeside scene where Herr K. declared his love for Dora. Freud reconstituted it meticulously; he thus learned that, if the phrase uttered by Herr K. - ‘You know I get nothing out of my wife’ (ibid., p. 98) - had brought about Dora’s slap and her flight, it was because Herr K. had used this same phrase to seduce the governess. The wound to her self-esteem which Dora suffered ‘to be treated like a servant’ (ibid., p. 106) - is certainly at the root of the vengeance, which, as we shall see, she also directed at Freud, to whom she would give notice as if to a servant, a fortnight, as she quit analysis. The wood, by association, leads to nymphs, to the vestibule, to an entire anatomically sexual vocabulary. It was a chance for Freud to confirm a hypothesis proposed in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’: ‘those pieces of a dream which are at first forgotten and are only subsequently remembered are invariably the most important from the point of view of understanding the dream’ (ibid., p. 100). It had been in a second version of the dream that ‘she ... began reading a big book’ (ibid., p. 100) which had led to the dictionary. She had also added: ‘she saw herself particularly distinctly going up the stairs’ (ibid., p. 101). Freud was then able to confirm his intuition: the alleged appendicitis that Dora had after her aunt’s death had left an unusual sequel: she dragged her right foot. Freud reconstituted the chronology: this alleged


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appendicitis had appeared nine months after the lakeside scene; it was thus a matter of a fantasy of giving birth, after a misstep: here the hysterical symptom is confirmed. I am convinced [Freud wrote] that a symptom of this kind can only arise where it has an infantile prototype. All my experience hitherto has led me to hold firmly to the view that recollections derived from the impressions of later years do not possess sufficient force to enable them to establish themselves as symptoms. (ibid., p. 103)

The infantile memory has been found again: she had sprained that same right foot when she was eight, and had had to stay in bed for some weeks. Treatment was thus interrupted after Freud communicated to Dora everything he had been able to understand from her symptoms and dreams: I am beginning to suspect that you took the affair with Herr K. much more seriously

than you have been willing to admit so far ... May you not have thought that he wanted to get divorced from his wife so as to marry you?You have not even got the right to assert that it was out of the question for Herr K. to have had any such intention ... Your father’srelations with Frau K. - and it was probably only for this reason that you lent them your support for so long - made it certain that her consent to a divorce could be obtained; and you can get anything you like out of your father. Indeed, if your temptation at L- had had a different upshot, this would have been the only possible solution for all the parties concerned. And I think that is why you regretted the actual event so deeply and emended it in the phantasy which made its appearance in the shape of an appendicitis. (ibid., pp. 107-8)

Freud ended this recapitulative construction, which I have quoted only in part, with this remark: ‘Dora had listened to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, and - came no more’ (ibid., pp. 108-9). Freud returned to the premises of the treatment: He [Dora’sfather] had given his support to the treatment so long as he could hope that I should ‘talk’Dora out of her belief that there was something more than a friendship between him and Frau K. His interest faded when he observed that it was not my intention to bring about that result. (ibid., p. 109)

Freud was disappointed, and pondered: ‘I knew Dora would not come back again ... this was an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part’ (ibid., p. 109). He took into account Dora’s masochism, but also envisaged the transference dimension involved in terminating the treatment: No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those halftamed demons that

inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed. Might Iperhaps have kept the girl under my treatment if I myself had acted a part, if I had exaggerated the importance to me of her staying on, and had shown a warm personal interest in her ...?‘ (ibid., p. 109;emphasis added)

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Freud then addressed his critics: The decidedness of my attitude on the subject of the unconscious is perhaps especially likely to cause offence, for I handle unconscious ideas ... trains of thought ... and unconscious impulses as though they were no less valid and unimpeachable psychological data than conscious ones. (ibid., p. 113; emphasis added).

It was to the philosophers who deny the existence of the unconscious that he was responding. Next to somatic complaints, Freud revealed the importance of infantile sources of perversions, erogenous zones and the bisexual predisposition. It was around the problem of transference that Freud ended his text; first, he gave a plural definition of transferences: They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person with the person of the physician. (ibid., p. 116)

Freud added that the psychoanalytical cure does not create the transference and becomes the most powerful auxiliary of the cure.’ Freud understood that he had not obtained mastery of Dora’s transference; he believed that she had transferred onto him a father image, and understood that it could also represent Herr K., explaining her vengeance against her father as reiterating vengeance against Herr K. This was an important point: ‘she acted out an essential part of her recollections and phantasies instead of reproducing it in the treatment’ (ibid., p. 119).8 In 1923, Freud added a note, believing that his mistake had been to underestimate Dora’s love for Frau K.: ‘BeforeI had learnt the importance of the homosexual current of feeling in psychoneurotics, I was often brought to a standstill in the treatment of my cases or found myself in complete perplexity’(ibid., p. 120).

* * * This great clinical text allows us to observe Freud at work with Dora during sessions, and Freud as he elaborated his theory. He considered and defined many concepts anew: the mechanisms of repression, regression, furation, identifications. Regarding these, the mobility of identifications, both feminine and masculine, clearly demonstrates the bisexual valence. To picture the path Freud took, let us reconsider the significant stages of his interest in hysteria.

* * * In 1888 in ‘Hysteria’,though at the time convinced of a hereditary aetiology, he remarked that ‘the development of hysterical disorders often calls for a


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sort of incubation, or rather for a period of latency, during which the provoking cause continues to operate in the unconscious’ (Freud, 1888, p. 52). In 1895, in the ‘Project for a Scientific Pathology’, the entire psychopathological section was devoted to hysteria. From 1893 to 1895, after Breuer published the case of Anna 0,Freud produced four clinical cases where the theory of seduction by the father was in the foreground; the theory was abandoned in 1897, as he then discovered the importance of fantasy. In 1896, Freud wrote ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, from which certain notations can be retained: ‘all my cases of hysteria reveal a sub-stratum of hysterical symptoms’ (Freud, 1896, p. 219) and also at that date, ‘no hysterical symptom can arise from a real experience alone, but ... in every case the memory of earlier experiences awakened in association to it, plays apart in causing the symptom’ (ibid., p. 197, emphasis added). And I would like to call attention to a Freudian text of 1908, ‘Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality’, where Freud dealt with daydreams, stating: ‘Every hysterical attack which I have been able to investigate up to the present has proved to be an involuntary irruption of day-dreams of this kind’ (Freud, 1908, p. 160) and he then refers back to the unconscious fantasy: a person who is masturbating tries, in his conscious phantasies, to have the feelings both of the man and of the woman in the situation which he is picturing ... in certain hysterical attacks the patient simultaneously plays both parts in the underlying sexual phantasy ... [she] pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman), while she tried to tear it off with the other (as the man). (ibid., p. 166)

* * * ‘Dora’ is an instructive text, as a moment of the Freudian elaboration of female p~ychosexuality.~ The female sex apparatus, so clearly present in the jewel-case and ‘an object of pride for women’ (Freud, 1905a[1901],p. 84) as Freud told us, is certainly a hollow one: Dora explored mechanically with her finger the inside of the reticule. In 1905, Freud appeared to envisage a precocious knowledge of the vagina as a hollow organ, in a small girl who would be primarily a girl, and not first a ‘smallman’, as she was subsequently featured for a long time in his theory. The entire Freudian construct of female sexuality was presented here in a way that would not be encountered later: in Dora, analysis again finds an infantile sexuality receptively oriented to a father equipped with a penetrating sex organ, in an identiftcation with the women with whom he has sexual commerce. Hysteria, of which the adolescent girl presents so many signs, mobilizes the labial erogenous zone, including the throat, displacing it from below upwards, from the hollow sex organ to the hollow mouth, in a centripetal

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instinctual movement. In the episode where Dora tells about two hours spent before the Sistine Madonna, there is an underlying fantasy of maternity. Then there is the love for Frau K., a love kept secret whose importance Freud then recognized retrospectively. Dora - still an adolescent - also loves the woman she herself will be in the person of the lovely Frau K., who is desirable, as her father has clearly indicated to her. Much later in his work, Freud reconsidered the theoretical elaboration of female sexuality in two successive texts, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) and ‘Femininity’(1933). At the time, he was interested in the pre-oedipal phase, the attachment to the mother marking for him all future relations, and in the penis that triggers envy - which he then believed to be more fundamental than desire... With Dora, it was only in displacement onto Frau K. that primary cathexis could be inferred; by opposition, cathexis of the father, of his penis and his gender, was clearly noted by Freud. Later in the text, penis envy represented for Freud, along with the refusal of the feminine in both genders, the feared abutment, the ‘bedrock,’the cause of interminable analyses. This text also instructs us as to Freud’s identifications, which quickly helped him to understand that he was Herr K. in the transference, and assuredly also the father of childhood, but perhaps not to feel the seductive impact which was, in the transference, his. As to Dora’s love for Frau K., Freud perceived its importance in the analysis only in 1923:a secret love, kept veiled, a faithfullove despite Frau K.’sbetrayal. Indeed, Freud accused himself of having allowed the analysis to break up over this love - he had failed to analyse it in good time. We might, today, propose still more clues for the sought-afterexplanation for this break-up. Unwittingly, Freud proceeded with Dora to revelations about her infantile and present sexuality which she, being an adolescent,was probably unable to understand, possibly even unconsciously, as anything but a repetition of the seductions, real or imaginary, that she had experienced.l0As a result, she fled. Having said this, when she returned to see Freud fifteen months after the treatment, she explained to him that she had taken her revenge on the K. couple, telling Frau K. that she was aware of her liaison with her father, and forcing Herr K. to own up to the lakeside scene. Taking her vengeance on them just as she had on Freud, by directing her revenge on real objects, she implicitly owned up to her debt to Freud: their work had not lacked its effect. As to Dora’s somatic complaints and her propensity to hysterical identification, it was verified in the course of her last visit to her analyst, making it possible for him to provide her with a transference interpretation: Dora required his assistance with a facial neuralgia, which had appeared a fortnight previously. Freud was able to point out to her that she had read, exactly a fortnight previously, a piece of news concerning him. Young Dora certainly did identify with her father as the possessor of Frau K.; moreover, as one having possessed her mother. Her penis envy did not


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appear there in the foreground. If it becomes manifest at some point in the analysis of any woman, barring cases of severe fixation, it responds to a defensive movement in the rivalry with the mother: ‘Rest assured, I envy nothing in you...’. But penis envy also responds to the desire to have whatever would be necessary for possessing the mother, in an inverted oedipal movement. With Dora, it is her identification with her father that is evident, in the dimension of her bisexuality. In the case of Dora, Freud did not place the accent on masochism, either. It would be the subject of a quite elaborate study in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’in 1924, and also in the clinical and theoretical text ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ (1919). Freud’s description of these female fantasies in men invites consideration of the feminine not as the exclusive mark of the sexuality of women, but rather as an essential aspect of the sexuality of every person of both genders.” The feminine, if it is not reduced to being a castrated version of the phallic state, a foil then for both men and women, does appear to be, as certain analysts have proposed, an essential dimension of psychoanalytical ‘listening’,inasmuch as it is receptive, thus enabling an integration of the feminine in analysands of both genders. And it is not appropriate to reduce such listening to a maternal quality only, for that is only one dimension of feminine receptivity. If the feminine, in females, consists of ‘being proud of their gender, finding joy in coitus and giving birth with pride’” it is a matter of an ideal, which the partner, but also neurosis, do not always make it possible to achieve: the phallickastrated offset remains present in the unconscious of both genders, too often eclipsing sexuality. A concluding remark might be that recognizing the differences between generations and genders is assuredly what, in any analysis, remains so difficult: to accept having just one of the genders, and one place in the succession of generations. The constraint of the castration complex, which manifests in a different way depending on the patient’s gender, is the strong point of this process: his or her analysis passes through theories about infantile sexuality and originating fantasies. Erogenous zones, symbolic equivalents, the anal crossroads then make up the territory that any analysis proposes to cover.l5

This chapter was translated by Peter Shaio.

Notes 1. Here we see clearly defined the production of a hysterical symptom. 2. We are reminded of the three metapsychological points of view: topical,

dynamic and energetic. 3. In this text, it is first a question of transference as a displacement of Dora’sfather onto Herr K., but there is also transference onto Freud, who

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is subjected to the same refusal as Herr K. 4 . A defdtion which, as we know, would have to be modified after 1920, in ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’. 5. We will return to this intervention of Freud’s, noting that it was a short time after the story of the reticule that Dora reported the dream of the jewel-case ... 6 . The words from the dream are printed in italics. 7 . Cf. also ‘TheDynamics of Transference’,1912. 8. Cf. ‘Remembering,Repeating and Working-through’,1914. 9. It was perhaps in his commentary to Jensen’s ‘Gravida’that Freud made it most possible to perceive an image of a woman who is graciously feminine, and not desperately disappointed with her gender. 10. Let us remember that Freud abandoned the seduction theory in 1897. In France,J. Laplanche proposed a theory giving the inevitable seduction of the infant by the adult an essential role in psychosexuality. 1 1 . This is the thesis of J. Andre’s book, Aux origines fe‘minines de la sexualite‘,Paris: PUF, 1995. 12. This is Andre Green’sformulation. 13. M. and J. Cournut, La castration et le fe‘minin dans les d e w sexes, Paris: PUF, 1993.

References Andre J (1995) Aux origines feminines de la sexualid. Paris: PUF. Cournut M, Cournut J (1993) La castration et le feminin dans les deux sexes. Paris: PUF. Freud S (1888) Hysteria. SE 1,37-59. Freud S (1893-95) Studies on Hysteria. SE 2. Freud S (1896) The Aetiologyof Hysteria. SE 3,187-221. Freud S (1899) Screen Memories. SE 3,187-221. Freud S (1900-1) The Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4-5. Freud S (1905a[19011) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. SE 7,130-243. Freud S (1905b) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7,130-243. Freud S (1907[1906]) Jensen’s Gradiva. SE 9,l-95. Freud S (1908) Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality. SE 9, 155-66. Freud S (1912) The Dynamics of Transference. SE 12,97-108. Freud S (1914) Remembering, Repeating and Working-through. SE 12,147-56. Freud S (1919) A Child Is Being Beaten: a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE 17, 179-204. Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18, 1-64. Freud S (1924) The Economic Problem of Masochism. SE 19,155-70. Freud S (1931) Female Sexuality. SE 21,221-43. Freud S (1933[1932]). Femininity. SE 22,112-35. Freud S (1937) Analysis Terminable and Interminable. SE 23,216-53. Freud S (1950[1895]) Project for a Scientific Psychology. SE 1,295-391. Green A (1993) Le travail du negatif. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Masson JM (ed.) (1985) The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Belknap Press.

3 ‘The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ JANE TEMPERLN This paper, commonly known as ‘LittleHans’,was published in 1910 (Freud, 1910). It offers a lively account of the imaginative life of an engaging child and of his father’s attempts, under Freud’s guidance, to investigate and resolve a phobia of horses. It is the only child analysis described by Freud he believed that no one but a parent could undertake the analysis of one so young. The richness of what emerged in this analysis makes it an undisputed foundation stone of child analysis and the discipline of child psychotherapy. For Freud this case history served two main purposes. It illustrates the existence and psychological importance of infantile sexuality, not by inference from adult neurosis, but by direct observation of a child. Furthermore it provides a description of how, with the repression of infantile sexuality, a neurotic compromise, a symptom, is formed. By the time he wrote the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’(1905) Freud had an eager group of followers and he encouraged them to make observations of their young children which might be illustrative of his theories. Hans’sfather, a keen apprentice-researcher,made notes on his young son’sdevelopment,in the course of which Hans, who had been particularly interested in horses, became so phobic of them that he was terrified to leave the house. The father’s reports gave Freud the opportunity to study a neurosis as it formed and as it altered in response to exchanges with the parent under Freud’s guidance. The observation of Hans’sdevelopment and of his neurosis took place in a complex interpersonal context. Hans’smother had been a patient of Freud’s. Freud himself had brought the boy a rocking horse for his third birthday (Graf, 1942, pp. 459-76) though he does not mention this in the text. Hans’s father’s wish to please and g r a t e the ‘Professor’by his work with the boy must have been evident to the child. On one occasion father and son consulted him together. The child’s interest in sexual matters, though sometimes repulsed in a conventional way (‘that’s piggish’), was, he must have realized, a source of great interest to his father. 61

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Infantile sexuality In 1905 Freud published his seminal ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’in which he described how infantile sexuality consists of various auto-erotic and pregenital strands. These may, in the development towards genital primacy, miscarry causing either a perverse sexuality or neurosis. He had superseded his earlier theory that seduction in childhood was the cause of neurosis. In the ‘Three Essays’ he traces the roots of neurosis to the vicissitudes of libidinal drives operating in all of us in early childhood. The various pregenital drives may eventually coalesce under the primacy of heterosexual genitality. They may, however, assert their independence in perverse sexual behaviour or, as a result of unsuccessful repression, demonstrate their continuing existence and power through neurotic symptoms. The early reports of Hans prior to his phobic illness illustrate his pleasurable interest in his own genitals. He masturbates and invites his mother to touch his penis. The pleasure is both auto-erotic and directed towards an object, his mother. Curiosity draws him to pleasurable interest in looking at the genitals of animals, especially horses and giraffes. His curiosity is fuelled, especially after the birth of his sister Hanna when he was three and a half, by the question of whether others, especially his mother, have genitals different from his (‘as big as a horse’s’) or whether they might not have a ‘widdler’at all. Freud sees Hans’s uncertainty about this as corresponding to an anxiety that he might lose his genital, an anxiety that the boy dismisses when his mother threatens to get his penis cut off but which later, Freud contends, leads to his fear that a horse might bite him. When Hans laughs at his naked baby sister and asserts that he does so because she has such a lovely widdler, Freud sees this as defensive against what the child sees as her castrated state. Also contributing to his interest in genitals are Hans’s voyeuristic and exhibitionist drives. Play with his peers involves pleasure in watching and being watched urinating. These impulses during the early part of the observation are succumbing to repression. Hans becomes shy about the risk of being seen urinating. Defecation is also a process of great libidinal meaning to Hans. He had suffered from constipation which Freud saw as possibly resulting from the auto-eroticpleasure in retaining the faecal column in the anus. In the course of the analysis the child reveals, to his father’s surprise, that his interest in ‘lumf’ derives from his fantasies about his mother’s pregnancy and his apprehension about the process of childbirth. This he represented in his phobic dread of encountering again the collapse he had witnessed of a horse with a heavily loaded wagon. In his identification with his mother he even called one of his ‘children’Lodi, a name derived from the ‘lumf‘with which he was so preoccupied. Freud was so impressed by the intensity of children’ssexual curiosity that he considered giving this epistemophilic urge the status of a separate drive.

‘TheAnalysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-OldBoy’

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Hans’s curiosity is engaged by the issue of genital difference, but in the ‘Three Essays’ Freud had stated that the first question to arouse this instinct for knowledge is that of where babies come from. He describes Hanna’sbirth as ‘the most important influence on his psychesexual development’. Hans is doubly displaced; from being the only child and from his former place in his parents’ bedroom. His father, while giving him the story of the stork, reports Hans’s evident scepticism and his remarking on seeing blood in a bedpan in his mother’s room, when he visited after the birth, that blood doesn’t come out of his widdler. In one of the most charming and convincing passages in the paper Hans teasingly reveals to his father that he knew the baby had been with them ‘inside the stork box’ during the summer before her birth. He is immensely impressed by the joys of parenthood and surrounds himself with his toy children. When his father informs him that only women can give birth to babies he protests that this is not so, denying this sexual difference as fiercely as some little girls deny their ‘castration’.

The formation and dynamics of the phobia Hans’s zestful exploration of his infantile sexual impulses did, as Freud had described in the ‘Three Essays’, succumb to repression. In the period immediately before the onset of the phobia, Hans’s father reported that his joyful pleasure in being watched and assisted by his playmates when he urinated had been replaced by shyness. Reaction formation had set in, erecting a defence of shame against the impulse to exhibit himself. Disgust replaced his earlier pleasurable interest in faeces. Freud points to a change in his dreams too. No longer are the impulses given straightforward wishfulfilment as in his dream about being made by ‘someone’to widdle. The dream which immediately precedes his phobia was, according to Freud, a punishment dream - he is being punished for his wish to ‘coax’ with his mummy by her going away. In the ‘Three Essays’ Freud saw repression as operating through endogenous waves, occurring at chronologically determined stages. In Little Hans he suggests a number of other factors. In his loneliness without his summer companions the child became over-stimulatedin his sexual longings for his mother and the intensity of the impulses led to their being repressed. Whereas he had earlier dismissed his mother’s castration threat, now it has a deferred effect making him fearful of the impulses located in his widdler. At a conscious level the boy was struggling to overcome the genital masturbation with which he comforted himself at night. At this time Freud accounted for the prevalence of irrational anxiety in neurotic patients as being due to a transformation of repressed libido into anxiety. As he explained to Hans’s parents, the child would not be suffering from neurotic anxiety because he indulged in masturbation but because of his having unsuccessfully repressed it. Moreover, once the libido was transformed by repression into anxiety, it could not be re-transformed. Even

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in the libidinally comforting company of his mother, Hans remained frightened of horses in the street. In hysterical conversion the repressed libido finds expression in physical symptoms: the conversion may be so complete that the patient is strikingly devoid of anxiety, a state described as ‘belle indiffkrence’. Where the conversion is less successful or does not occur, there is instead an outbreak of anxiety. Freud is at pains in this paper to establish that Hans’s original outbreak of anxiety was not, until subsequently, organized around a phobia. The phobia is a secondary defence against the anxiety hysteria - by organizing the anxiety around a phobic object it helps the patient keep it circumscribed. Freud maintained that the content of the phobia enabled a distorted return of the repressed - a fear that his father, the horse with the black moustache harness, would bite him or that his horse father would collapse. The collapsing wagon horse represented both his phantasies of attacking his father and frightening ideas about childbirth. Freud further suggests that the primary impulses against which the repression acted had in fact ‘neverbeen able to find uninhibited expression’. These were the jealous and hostile wishes against his father which Freud had interpreted in the consultation and sadistic penetrative impulses towards his mother. The wave of repression to which these impulses succumbed swept away with them the more consciously enjoyed libidinal pleasures such as his anal, exhibitionist and voyeuristic activities. The repression was directed at fierce impulses to be rid of his father and to possess and penetrate his mother, constituents of what Freud would later describe as the positive Oedipus complex. The phobia served, as symptoms do, both aspects of an unconscious conflict. It restricted Hans’s mobility and his psychic exploration of the world of sexuality represented by the horses and wagons in the street, but it kept him in the house near his beloved mother. Repression and the neurotic symptoms that may ensue arise out of conflict. Hans was in conflict because he wished to possess himself of his mother and be rid of his father, a situation which might result in his father’s retaliation (by means of castration) or in his losing the father he also loved. ‘Why did you tell me I’mfond of Mummy and that’s why I am frightened, when I am fond of you?’ Central to psychoanalytic theory is the contention that it is the repression of infantile sexual drives and phantasies that underlies neurotic illness. Freud does, however, feel the need to consider and rebut the idea that it might be the aggression in Hans’s oedipal wishes that resulted in repression. At this stage he rejects the idea of a separate aggressive drive. He always conceptualized drives as conflicting pairs. At this stage he saw them as the sexual drives and the more reality-oriented self-preservativedrives, each with its own necessary share of aggression. By 1915 (Freud, 1915, pp. 109-40) he was postulating hatred as an expression of the self-preservativedrives and in


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1920 (Freud, 1920, pp. 7-64) he reorganized his instinct theory radically in order to give human aggression and destructiveness as an expression of the death instinct a prime place as one of the two instinctual constituents of mental life and conflict. This paper is an account of the development of a phobia but it is also an account of its alleviation by means of psychoanalytic intervention. Of major importance in this treatment is the way Freud and Hans’s father identify the boy’s rivalry with his father as crucial to his neurosis. The child is helped, by the very father whose retaliation he fears, to see that his rivalry is to be expected, not punished. The nature of his wish to supplant his father in sexual possession of his mother is interpreted to him.It becomes conscious and subject to conscious judgement rather than fuelling a phobia from its repressed position in the unconscious. Hans’s father, supported by Freud in the consultation, enables Hans to reality test his unconscious fears. When his phantasies of a castrating or castrated father are interpreted by father figures who understand his conflict, he is relieved. From that point on in the treatment he becomes psychically freer and able to resume his playful explorations, if not at first outside the house, nevertheless within his relationship with his father, teasing him and taking an active lead in his investigations of sexual matters. Implicitly Freud seems to believe that enlightenment about sexual reality will relieve Hans’s symptoms. He is told, in view of his puzzlement about whether everyone has a widdler, that women do not. This enlightenment might well, Freud subsequently concedes, increase the boy’s anxiety that he might lose his. No attempt is made to distinguish a confusion between urinary and genital functions that Hans’s mother has set up by telling the boy that of course she has a widdler. He is later told that only women can give birth to babies. Freud would have preferred that Hans’s father tell him of the role of the man in sexual intercourse and procreation, a role that the child was already intuiting in his play. It is unclear whether sexual enlightenment is given to counter unreal expectations, such as Hans’swish to produce babies as his mother had, or whether it is to relieve the frustrated wish for knowledge that Freud believed could lead children to mistrust and resent adults for keeping such knowledge from them. Freud had an educational agenda. He thought that parents were too inclined to suppress and control their children’senquiries and behaviour. By dismissing what was inconvenient in a child, such as a phobia, they might miss an opportunity to forestall an adult neurosis arising from the disregarded problem. He is at pains once more to stress that taking the underlying drives seriously does not mean licensing their discharge. Conscious awareness and judgement would be less stressful than the neurotic compromises often entailed by repression. It was to reassure his audience as to the effects of childhood analysis and openness in child rearing that he records Hans return to visit him as an un-neurotic adult.

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Freud’s clinical technique at this time had considerable elements of instruction and interrogation. He believed that the patient needed explanationsof what was happening and he did not have full confidence that he could wait and watch how the patient’s communications developed. Hans’s father observes but he does a lot of often fruitless and rather coercive interrogation of him. In fact Hans is a very imaginative child and during the course of the analysis his father learns to let his son lead him into areas that he, the parent, had not anticipated.

Later developments in Freud’s theories In ‘Inhibitions,Symptoms and Anxiety’ in 1926 Freud altered his theory of anxiety and in so doing reviewed his understanding of children’s animal phobias. He rejected his former view that repressed libido is the source of neurotic anxiety. On the contrary it is anxiety felt by the ego which prompts repression. He now made no mention of the disorganized anxiety which in Hans’s case preceded its becoming concentrated upon horses. His contention is instead that Hans’s anxiety arose directly from oedipal fear of castration and that this was repressed along with his murderous and erotic wishes toward his parents. A further defence consisted in the displacement of the child’sfear of the castrating father onto the horse. Freud’s views on the Oedipus complex were crystallized in papers he wrote in the 1920s. In 1919, in ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ he writes of the Oedipus complex without reference to castration anxiety or to penis envy in girls. In 1923, however, in ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’ these latter factors assume a cardinal position in the theory of phallic monism which underlies his subsequent papers. When the boy realizes, as Hans is doing, that girls and women do not have a penis as he does, he assumes they are castrated. His fear that his father may castrate him for his libidinal rivalry for his mother causes him to repress his infantile sexuality and to enter the latency phase. Conversely, girls at this stage realize that they are castrated they believe they have no genital and envy what men have. Freud’s contention was that children know only one genital, the penis, and do not become aware of the vagina until puberty. Similarly he now held ‘it is easy to see that the child never guesses the actual facts of sexual intercourse’(Freud, 1927, p. 213). These views are oddly at variance with Freud’sobservations in Little Hans. There he had interpreted the child’s imaginings as ‘on the road to postulating the vagina’ and saw in his play a recognition of the nature of coitus and reproduction. Chasseguet-Smirgell(l976,pp. 275-86) has asked why if a boy can anticipate from his body the possibility of a vaginal orifice, a girl, who actually has one, cannot know of it. Freud (1933, p. 118) dismissed the importance of the findings of colleagues who reported memories of childhood vaginal excitement. Etchegoyen (1988, pp. 37-43) suggests that


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perhaps Hans was not defensively disingenuous but admiring when he laughed at Hanna’s widdler and then explained that he did so because he thought it so lovely. The issue of phallic monism was to divide Vienna and London in the 1920s and 1930s. Jones’s (1932, pp. 452-84) position was closer to Freud’s 1909 recognition that children are quick to apprehend sexual reality, whether or not their parents tell them about it and whether or not they are witnesses of the primal scene. In Jones’sview the theory of phallic monism is a phantasy defensive against what is disturbing about sexual difference and the primal scene. This position was shared by Klein (1945, pp. 370-419), basing her observations on the play of pre-latency children - the source Freud had used when he wrote about what Little Hans knew.

The negative Oedipus complex In the early accounts of Hans, before the onset of repression and the phobia, his father described the boy’s loving feelings towards boy companions, such as Fritzl, as on a par with his loving responses to girls. Freud referred to these ‘accesses of homosexuality’ in Hans as one of the many polymorphous libidinal strands that flourished before the effects of repression became evident. He also refers theoretically to the place of homosexuality midway between auto-eroticism and object relations. He does not in this text trace Hans’s homosexual feelings as playing a part in the development of his neurosis. It is in ‘Inhibitions,Symptoms and Anxiety’ (1926[19251) that Freud later linked Hans with the Wolf Man and stated in one paragraph that in both cases the animal phobia derives from tender, passive, homosexual desires towards the father which have been distorted by regression to the oral phase, as well as by repression. ‘The process of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus complex - both his hostile and his tender impulses toward his father and his tender impulses toward his mother.’ In the next paragraph, however, he writes: A tender feeling for his father was undoubtedly there too and played a part in

repressing the opposite feeling: but we can prove neither that it was strong enough to draw repression on itself nor that it disappeared afterwards. Hans seems in fact to have been a normal boy with what is called a ‘positive’Oedipus complex.

It is unclear whether it was only with the analysis of the Wolf Man that Freud realized the homosexual implications of an animal phobia or whether, out of consideration for the probable reactions of Hans’s father and of his own readers at that time, he refrained in 1910 from exploring that aspect of the neurosis. Hans was clearly very taken with the satisfactions of being a mother and resisted the information that these were only for females. Even after much

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enlightenment, one of his last recorded fantasies is of being surrounded by his children and attending to their excretory functions. Though he says he is now their daddy, not any longer their mummy, the scene seems to derive more from what he would have observed between his mother and his baby sister than from an identification with his father. Freud does not explore in this text the possibility that this identification with his mother extended to fantasies of taking her place in coitus with his father. The analysis concentrates on Hans’s oedipal hostility to his father. There are, however, many indications of his hostility to his mother. The dream that ushers in the phobia is of her going away. Freud interprets it as a punishment dream but Frankiel (1992, pp. 323-3) suggests that a wish to be rid of her may have prompted it. Hans’s father is critical of her for over-stimulatingthe boy by indulging his wishes to get into bed with her and to accompany her to the toilet. This indulgence alternates with brusque and harsh threats to leave him or to have his penis cut off. Hans’sfantasy of beating her may have been retaliatory rather than erotic. His fear of drowning in the bath derives from murderous imaginings of what she might do to his sister - imaginings that could spring from a valid perception of her as well as from his own murderousness towards his sister. Attachment theorists (Bowlby, 1973, pp. 283-7) have pointed out that the ‘anxiousattachment’ that characterized Hans’s phobia is a common response to the confusing mixture of seductiveness and punitiveness offered by his mother. At one point Hans’sfather reports that his motive for at the most just venturing outside the house but not going away from it and for turning round at the fmt attack of anxiety when he is halfway is his fear of not finding his parents at home because they have gone away. (p. 45,SE 10)

When he learns that Hans’s mother had threatened to leave the child he dismisses the threat as a natural response to his being naughty. Frankiel remarked that he offers his son no reassurance on this score. The fear of being abandoned does not, it seems, rank in the same order of terror as the fear of castration. Silverman (2001, pp. 325-58) has suggested that Hans’s sexual researches may have been defensively augmented by his insecurity and ‘have developed a special power probably as part of his attempts to regulate his chronically anxious state’. Freud is respectful and approving of Hans’s parents’ child-rearing. They were influenced by his theories and he sees the case as a positive illustration of the beneficial effect of psychoanalytic knowledge on the upbringing of children. When criticisms of the parents were voiced in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn, 1967) he allowed one reservation - that the mother should not have allowed Hans to accompany her when she went to the toilet. ‘The rest’, he said, ‘is constitution’. In the paper itself he defends her: ‘she had a predestined part to play and her position was a hard one’.


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A factor that both attachment theorists and psychoanalysts would now take much more seriously than Freud did in 1909 was that during the course of Hans’sphobia he had his tonsils ‘cut’.He developed the phobia in January 1908 and his father’s reports resume after ‘morethan a month’ at the start of March. In this interval Hans had the operation on his tonsils and had to spend a week indoors, after which his phobia was ‘very much worse’. It is interesting that Freud passes over this event which might well have amplified the child’s castration fears. His mother, when much earlier, she had threatened him with castration, had told him that she would call the doctor to do this. That Freud was a doctor would have compounded his anxiety.

Transference The dimension of transference is not considered in this text. Freud seems to have assumed that a child would not form a transference relationship while still primarily attached to his first objects, his parents. Transference may have operated at an adult level, however, in Hans’s father’srelation to Freud. The rivalry Hans felt towards Hanna may well have operated between Hans’s father and his wife who had had the privilege of being Freud’spatient. It would have been present in the circle around Freud who had asked them to bring him child observations. It could have contributed to the picture Hans’sfather gives of his wife - he emerges for us and for Freud as the more kindly parent. Hinshelwood (1989, pp. 63-78) looks closely at the process of the sessions reported by Hans’s father. His paper addresses how Hans experienced the excited interest that his father showed in his sexual fantasies and explorations. When Hans observed his father writing down their exchange about the giraffe story he asked him why and was told it was in order to tell the Professor. Hans’simmediate response is that his father should tell the Professor of his dream about his mother in her chemise too. Hinshelwood suggests that this association indicates that Hans felt exposed by his father’s use of his confidences. Later he tells his father that he had resisted his mother’s inquiries about the giraffe fantasy because he was ‘so ashamed’. Hinselwood notes the references to nakedness. ‘A street boy was riding on a truck and the guard came and undressed the boy quite naked and made him stand there till next morning.’ He contends that the boy felt exposed by his father’sinvestigations. He suggests that the father’spersistent questioning, though kindly and well intentioned, was experienced as intrusive. The plumber with the big borer which he stuck on Hans’s stomach represents, Hinshelwood suggests, Hans’s experience of his father’s persistent penetration of his internal world. What Hans enacted with the rubber doll could indicate how violated he felt himself. The final fantasy of the plumber replacing his bottom and his widdler conveys the child’s capitulation to his father’s version of what is going on

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within him.Freud does not consider that Hans might have felt the privacy of his imaginative life violated or that he might have felt ambivalent about its being used for such gratifying exchanges between his father figures. The need for a degree of privacy in exploring the patient’s intimate psychic life underlies the stress that is usually put on confidentiality and is a prime reason why the parent is now considered a completely unsuitable person to act as his child’stherapist. That there may have been unresolved masochistic homosexual elements in Hans gains some confirmatory support from his own later autobiography which he entitled A n Invisible Man (Graf, 1972, pp. 25-9). He was an opera director at the Metropolitan Opera House who worked with Zefferelli and Rudolph Bing, often being overruled by the latter. It has been suggested (Frankiel, 1992, pp. 323-3) that it was his fate to subserve the productions of senior and more famous men.

Conclusion This paper was written at the dawn of Freud’s major theoretical discoveries about the unconscious and about the relation of infantile sexuality to neurosis. He himself continually altered and refined his findings during the next thirty years. Factors such as the full implications of early separation and loss and the full importance of the transference were not recognized until later. Studying the paper now highlights what we have subsequently come to understand but it also focuses attention on what is of revolutionary and abiding importance in Freud’s insight. His stress upon the profusion and intensity of the child’s libidinal life has remained the dimension of psychoanalytical understanding that has always aroused the most resistance and which still tends to be overlooked or underestimated. It is true, as Freud himself remarks, that ‘it was Hans’s parents who extracted from the pathogenic material operating in him the particular theme of his interest in widdlers’. The abundance of his libidinal phantasies is, however, evident in his play and often at a level that his father had not expected. He is exercised about genital difference and its meaning; he is curious and very observant about pregnancy and he imagines himself displacing his father. He seeks to discover what is the specific role of the father in the procreative act and to come to terms with the limitations of belonging to a specific gender. In these investigations and in the conflicts they produce he is assisted by his father, a sexually differentiated adult with whom he can identlfy in becoming a man and in distancing himself from the confusions of his in some ways over-close relationship with his mother. Early childhood is the crucible in which the nature of our adult relationships is largely determined, but these attachments are importantly concerned with our sexual imaginings and aspirations in relation to our parents and what we make of their sexual life. Psychoanalysis differs from


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attachment theory in seeing the fate of these infantile sexual drives and their continuing operation in the unconscious as of central importance to understanding adult psychic life and its pathology.

References Bowlby J (1973) Separation Anxiety and Anger. New York: Basic Books, 283-7. Chasseguet-Smirgell J (1976) Freud and female sexuality. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 57: 275-86. Etchegoyen RH (1988) The analysis of Little Hans and the theory of sexuality. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 37-43. Frankiel RV (1992) Analysed and unanalysed themes in the treatment of Little Hans. International Review of Psychoanalysis 19: 323-33. Freud S (1905) Three Essays on Sexuality. SE 7,125-279. Freud S (1910) The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. SE 10, 1-149. Freud S (1915) Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. SE 14. Freud S (1919) ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’. SE 17, 179-204. Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18. Freud S (1923) The Infantile Genital Organization. SE 19, 141-5. Freud S (1926[19251) Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. SE 20. Freud S (1927) The Question of Lay Analysis. SE 20. Freud S (1933) New Introductory Lectures. SE 22. GrafH (1972) Memoirs of an invisible man. Opera News 36(1-4): 25-9. GrafM (1942) Reminiscences of Professor Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11: 459-76. Hinshelwood RD (1989) Little Hans’s transference. Journal of Child Psychotherapy 15(1): 63-78. Jones E (1932) The phallic phase. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 14 and in Papers on Psychoanalysis; Maresfield Reprints: 452-84. Klein M (1945) The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties. Love, Hate and Reparation (1975) Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 370-419. Nunberg H, Federn E (1967) Minutes of the Vienna Psycho-analytical Society. Vol I1 1908-1910. New York; International University Press. Silverman DK (2001) Sexuality and attachment: a passionate relationship or a marriage of convenience?Psychoanalytic Quarterly 70: 325-58.

4 ‘On Narcissism’

ROSINE JOZEF PERELBERG ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) constitutes a turning point in psychoanalysis. Although narcissism is a concept which was not explicitly referred to by many important thinkers for many decades, one could suggest that every paper written on psychoanalysis since Freud implicitly takes into account the modifications in thinking that it brought about. ‘On Narcissism’ radically changed the concept of the ego. From then on, the ego was no longer just a place for mastering the drives, but became an ‘object’,an image, a vestige of past identifications. The ego is no longer seen as independent of any relationship, but is rather the result of the internalization of relationships (Iaplanche and Pontalis, 1988; Segal and Bell, 1991; Sandler et al., 1997b). This idea was to be more fully developed in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917[1915]) where Freud gave a full account of an internal object relationship that involved projection and identification. In this paper, it is the loss of the object which makes the subject aware of it. This opened the way for the theory, more fully presented in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), of an ego built from and modified by ‘abandoned object cathexes’. The concept of narcissism was little discussed in the British literature until the 1970s, although it was crucial in France, in the works of Lacan (1966[1949]), Grunberger (1957), Pasche (1965) and Green (1966-67). It was central to Lacanian thinking and his emphases on the structuring function of the mirror stage. In America Kohut (1971) and Kernberg (1975) gave it prominence in the 1970s, when it was also covered in Rosenfeld’s work (197 1, 1987). The object choice is narcissistic when the object represents the subject himself, or that which he was, or that which he would like to be, or a part of himself (a child). While the idea of primary narcissism was formulated when working on the Schreber case, and was concerned with dementia praecox (labelled schizophrenia in 191l), as well as homosexuality,it acquired a fuller meaning with ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920).’ Primary narcissism was inextricably linked with megalomania and the prototype was sleep, a state of perfect bliss, absolute sovereignty or omnipotence, or, as Rosolato 72

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has suggested, the myth of return to the maternal womb (1976, p. 20). Freud suggested that narcissism was a stage in sexual development, between autoerotism and object love (191 1). Rosolato has suggested some characteristics of narcissism that have a parallel with the ingredients of the myth of Narcissus.*I will indicate four of them: (1) Narcissus rejects Echo or Ameinias; (2) he discovers his own image, or in the Pausanias version, that of his dead twin sister; (3) this idealized image of himself fascinates him; (4) he remains stuck in his sterility, his impotence, between life and death. These elements, according to Rosolato, parallel the variables that are present in narcissism: (a) libidinal withdrawal; (b) idealization; (c) an emphasis on the relationship with an ideal twin; and (d) the double bind in that an impossible dilemma is created in the mind. Libidinal withdrawal is the most common idea concerning narcissism. This is the economic and dynamic perspective exposed initially by Freud, which includes rejection, disavowal, repression and splitting, which Freud was later to explore further in his paper on negation. The second notion is idealization, and the differentiation between whether it is idealization of the ego or the object. Green here alludes to Freud’s own scopophilic instinct. By taking the activity of looking as his starting point, Freud tied narcissism to the domain of the visible (Green, 2001, p. 6): For Narcissus, according to the Greek legend,was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else, and who was changed into the lovely flower of that name. (Freud, 1910, p. 100)

However, narcissism itself is merely appearance as behind it ‘the shadow of the invisible object is always to be found’ (Green, 2001, p. 6). The third aspect is the abolition of any division and separation, which is expressed in the relationship with an ideal twin. Rosolato points out how, in the mirror stage, it is crucial to recognize the other before one can recognize oneself. The encounter with the other is a precondition for the formation of the self. Green suggests, however, that the enemy of narcissism is ‘the reality of the object’ (2001, p. 17). The narcissistic organization attacks difference, between inside and outside, ego and object, masculine and feminine. ‘The narcissistic sense of plenitude comes both from the ego’s fusion with the object as well as from the disappearance of the object and the ego into the neuter, ne-uter’(ibid., p. 23). The fourth element of narcissism is the impossible impasse imposed by the existence of the object, which leads to solutions involving rupture and violence or, as I shall indicate, withdrawal. Rosolato characterizes this as a double bind that creates enclosures. Splitting allows two different sets of beliefs to coexist in the mind. Thus, for instance, for the narcissist there is an equation between life and death.

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The treatment of narcissistic personalities has allowed the understanding of a modality of depression. ‘Far from being a hidden attack on an other which is thought of as hostile because it is frustrating, sadness would point to a primitive ego, wounded, incomplete and empty’ (Kristeva, 1987, p. 12). The sadness is the most archaic expression of an unnamed, narcissistic wound which cannot be symbolized and which is so precocious that no external agent (subject or object) can relate to it.

Freud’s text The term narcissism in the paper ‘On Narcissism’ (Freud, 1914) is used to describe the relationship in which a person takes his own body as his sexual object. The ego thus can also be cathected as an object. Until then it was regarded only as a repressing force. This is seen to represent a furation of the libido at an earlier stage of development. Narcissism is a state of object relations in which parts of the self are felt to be in the object. Three concepts are central in the paper: object choice, identification and ego ideal. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first Freud reasserts his views on the duality of the drives. In the second, Freud discusses types of object choices. It is in the third part that Freud puts forward for the first time his idea of an ego ideal. Freud looks for evidence of this primary state in three sources: written reports of a psychotic man (Schreber), the observation of children and accounts of primitive people. Freud postulates ‘an original cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexis much as the body of the amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out’ (Freud, 1914, p. 75). This formulation is incorporated into Freud’sfirst formulation of the conflict between the drives as being between ego-libidoand object-libido.’ The earliest sexual objects are the persons concerned with the child’s bodily care. Side by side with this type of object choice Freud suggests the ‘anaclitic’or ‘attachment’type of object choice (this latter term indicating the attachment of the sexual instincts to the ego instincts) (ibid., p. 87). Freud establishes a distinction between normal narcissism (His Majesty the baby, falling in love) and pathological narcissism (schizophrenia, paranoia, physical pain, hypochondriasis and sexual deviation). Both kinds of object choice are possible for each individual. Freud also suggests that each human being originally had two sexual objects - himself and the woman who looked after him - and in this way Freud suggests a primary narcissism in every person (ibid., p. 88). In Schreber Freud identifies two characteristics: the turning away from the external world and megalomania (for a further discussion, see Chapter 11 in this book).

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Freud goes on to discuss the way in which each individual sets up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego (ibid., p. 93). This formation of an ideal is for Freud the conditioning factor of repression. This ideal ego is the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the ego. This ideal ‘is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal’ (ibid., p. 94). It is a ‘special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal’ (ibid., p. 95). Freud suggests that the formation of the ego ideal arises from the parents’ critical influence. The development of the ego stems from primary narcissism, and implies an attempt to recover that state. The paper demonstrates Freud’s growing interest in the question of an internal world. It is important to note that although the Wolf Man paper was only published in 1918, the clinical work was carried out from 1910 to 1914. In this paper, Freud is centrally concerned with the relationship between narcissism and identification. After being rebuffed by his Nanya, the Wolf Man developed a passive sexual aim towards his father. This passive attitude was central to his repressed homosexuality and a narcissistic identification. The Wolf Man shares many of Schreber’sfeatures, and the interplay between masculine and feminine identificationsare a core issue discussed by Freud in both cases (see Introduction and Chapters 11 and 12 of this book). In the Schreber case, Freud suggests that the libido is withdrawn from the external world and is turned towards the ego. He sees the psychosis as an actual attempt at recovery. The theme of identifications will be pursued in Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917[ 19151) where the concepts of projection and identification are further developed. The melancholic is back to a narcissistic identification with the object. A narcissistic object relationship implies idealization. The ego treats itself as an object, and splits into two, one of which rages against the other. In this paper, a monumental step in terms of shifting attention to the ego is taken. In melancholia there is thus an introjection of the object, and identification with it. The melancholic blames the object with whom the ego is identified - it looks as if it is blaming itself. In ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921) Freud further develops the concept of identification and types of identifications. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) Freud formulates the concept of an ego built from ‘abandonedobject cathexes’.He states: In persecutory paranoia the patient fends off excessively strong homosexual attachment to some particular person in a special way: and as a result this person whom he loved most becomes a persecutor, against whom the patient directs an often dangerous aggressiveness.(ibid., p. 43)

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Green has pointed out two major issues that were opened up for discussion with the paper on narcissism: the conceptualization of narcissism in general, and primary narcissism in particular, and the relationship between object choice and narcissism. Freud suggests that the ego does not exist from the start, and ‘a new psychical action’ has to take place to bring about narcissism. Laplanche has suggested that this is a moment of unification, which implies ‘the subject’s acquisition of an image of himself founded on the model furnished by the other person - this image being the ego himself’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, p. 256). ‘Narcissism then appears as the amorous captivation of the subject by this image.’ Laplanche links this idea to the ‘mirror stage’ in Lacan, thus suggesting that narcissism becomes the ‘internalizationof a relationship’, similar to what Freud was to term in ‘Mourningand Melancholia’a ‘narcissistic identification’with the object’. Laplanche and Pontalis quote from Freud’s 1923 paper: ‘Thelibido which flows into the ego owing to the identifications [...I brings about its secondary narcissism’ (Freud, 1923, p. 30). ‘The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one which hss been withdrawn from objects’ (ibid., p. 46).

Further discussions of the paper Baranger identifies nine different uses of the term narcissism, which can be divided into three groups. The first group relates narcissism to the vicissitudes of the libido. In the second group, the emphasis falls on the object in the narcissistic states, and it refers to the type of identification in its introjective form. The third group consists of extensions of the term to refer to attitudes, feelings and character traits indicative of the valuation, devaluation or overvaluation of some aspect of the person (1991, pp. 109-10). In France, Grunberger suggested the concept of a pure narcissism devoid of any instinctual element (1957[1989], p. 185). At the beginning, mother and child form a monad, constituted by narcissism; the mother confirms the child’snarcissism, which is sheltered from conflict. The child’s narcissism is initially that of the mother - and this emphasizes the importance of the mother’s gaze and of reflection. Grunberger also suggests the prenatal origins of narcissism as a state of perfect bliss, absolute sovereignty or omnipotence, a state to which the child wishes to return (ibid., p. 187). In America, Kernberg has worked with the concept of narcissistic personalities, and suggested that the narcissistic personality has an integrated self-concept,which is pathological and grandiose, and lacks integration with significant others. Primitive defences are in operation, especially omnipotence and devaluation. The structural characteristics tend to appear slowly; strange superficiality or unavailability of descriptions in depth of significant others.

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Green has suggested that narcissism is one of the fiercest forms of resistance to analysis. ‘Is it not true that defending the One involves, ips0 facto, rejecting the unconscious; since the latter implies that a part of the psyche exists which is acting in its own interests, thwarting the empire of the ego?’(2001, p. 9). In discussing the fate of the concept of narcissism in Freud’s work, Green also notes the possible articulation between narcissism and the death instinct: ‘The transformation of object libido ... into narcissistic libido which thus takes place [the ego assuming the features of the object in order to replace it after the id’s loss] obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation,therefore’ (Freud, 1923, p. 30, quoted in Green, 2001). What Green stresses by quoting the above passage is that the desexualization Freud observed in such sublimation is a process that follows the same lines as the death instinct, suggesting that at least some aspects of narcissism may follow the same lines of anti-eroticism involved in the destructive instinct. ‘SinceFreud concluded that sublimation regularly takes place in the ego, we can deduce that the desexualization of sublimation and the contrary process of unbinding also take place, at least partly, in the ego.’ Freud (1923) wrote quite explicitly: ‘The ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual impulses’(p. 46). According to Green, Freud suggested that the narcissism of the ego is a secondary type of narcissism that has been withdrawn from the object, ‘but he did not explicitly return to the issue of sublimated energy as linked to narcissism and serving the purpose of the opposite aims to Eros. I suppose we have to interpret his last statement about narcissism as a global statement which include components that need to be more completely analysed’ (Green, 2002, p. 636). To quote Green: I have made the assumption that, since the time of Freud’slast theory of drives, we have had to consider the possibility of a dual narcissism: a positive narcissism, whose aim is to reach unity,a narcissism aiming at oneness - the cathexis of the self being fed, at least partly, at the expense of object cathexis; and a negative narcissism, which strives toward the zero level, aiming at nothingness and moving toward psychic death. This distinction cannot be simplistically absorbed by the usual distinctions between healthy and pathological narcissism. An imbalance in favour of narcissism may be positive and yet nevertheless pathological, because it impoverishes relationships with objects. It is less destructive than negative narcis sism, however, which aims at the subject’s self-impoverishment nearly to the point of annihilation.(Green, 2002, pp. 636-7)

I would agree with Green that instead of a fruitless debate that involves evolutionary issues around the concept of narcissism, rather than falling into the traps of geneticism, it is much more helpful to determine ‘how the different clinical configurations are organized; to recognize the nature of

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their internal coherence’ (2002, p. 637). One needs to distinguish the narcissistic aspect in any analytic relationship, and to identify the narcissistic transference in different types of psychopathologies. In a previous paper (Perelberg, 1999) I contrasted two types of narcissistic configurations,which I would like to explore further in the present chapter. In the first one, the intolerance of the other is dealt with by expulsion and violence. In the second, by withdrawal. In this paper I will contrast patients who express manifest violent behaviour with patients for whom the violent behaviour is absent but who, nevertheless, present similar background histories, which might have led to a prediction of violence. They are also profoundly different in terms of what they provoke in the counter-transference. On the one hand, there are patients whofill the consulting room. They fffl it not only through their emotions and their actions, but also with their words, dreams and associations. Fundamentally the feeling one has is as ifan excess of representations dominates the consulting room. The experience is that the analyst is over-included in the patient’sworld. They have dreams that directly refer to the analyst and one feels consistently over-involved in the patient’s analysis. On the other hand, there are patients who create an empty space in the consulting room. The response they provoke is a lack of a chain of associations in the analyst, a kind of depressive feeling that remains after they leave. The patient may bring dreams and associations, but these do not reverberate in the analyst’s mind. The experience is of dryness, a dearth of memory which may - at times - leave the analyst with a sense of exclusion from the patient’s internal world. In Jean Cournut’s words (1975), Eros is not speaking and even Thanatos is more muted than usual. I would suggest that the first category of patients expresses a conviction of intrusion in the primal scene; the second indicates an inability to imagine it. In different ways they both negate the primal scene and their exclusion from it. Both these types of patients communicate through words as well as actions. In spite of the differences between them, they share an experience of something ‘unrepresentable’in their internal world and both occupy a space that may be seen as either beyond or before the traditional analytical space of representations. The pathway through which the analyst can understand both these types of patients is via the counter-transference or, to put it differently, the analyst’s passion. Bion has indeed suggested that a psychoanalytic interpretation should illuminate an object in the domains of sense, myth andpassion (1984, p. 11). Many patients dternate between these two types of experience. We are all familiar with patients who fffl a session in order to empty it, or those who fffl a session with their sense of emptiness. However, the two types I have indicated may serve as models for thinking about the impact of these patients in the consulting room.

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Robert Robert’s first contact with me was via a letter, telling me the story of his life. He enclosed with this letter a self-portrait,painted many years earlier. Being a painter, he had felt unable to paint during the previous ten years. He came from an artistic, upper-middle-classItalian family, with eight children, from which he had taken flight. His father and sister were both successful artists, and his mother had also been successful, prior to a series of psychotic breakdowns which had caused her to be hospitalized several times. She had been violent towards her children in their childhood; the father had been absent and ineffectual. In reading his well-written and engrossing letter, I had an inkling of a position Robert wanted to keep me in. It was not a story that he told in my presence, which might have allowed some exchanges between us. I was to read what he had written, outside an actual interaction between us. In this letter, Robert also began to let me know about some of his violent encounters. His relationship with his girlfriend broke down after an escalation of his violence towards her. He had also made two serious suicide attempts. What engaged me most about his long and detailed letter was his contact with his experience of despair and a profound battle against feelings of hopelessness. Robert then phoned me and we arranged an initial consultation. A handsome man in his early thirties, Robert entered the room full of seductive sexual vitality, but also barely able to disguise his fear of me. I had the immediate thought that he felt confused about this encounter and that he might experience it as a scene of seduction. Indeed, for the first half of the session Robert proceeded to tell me about various intense affairs with older women that he had only managed to sustain for brief periods of time. I thought that it was important to address his confusion at the outset, and immediately let him know that I thought that he was confused about what I expected from him.He calmed down visibly, relaxing back in the chair, and was then able to tell me about his great pain at not being able to paint for such a long time, and the life full of violent encounters that he had led since he had stopped painting. He expressed his anxiety and uncertainty about the future and his experience that he might one day kill himself in order to put an end to his torment. The following account of a violent episode emerged at that consultation. On a recent visit to Italy, he had been waiting for a woman to finish a telephone conversation in a phone box. She took longer than he could wait. He suddenly saw himself attacking and destroying the telephone box, hurting the woman in the process. The woman had fled in terror and he had himself been utterly terrified by the extent of his violence. A dilemma was thus present at the outset of our work together. Would he be able to tolerate the spaces, separations and different paces inherent in the analytic process? Robert could relate and elaborate on these questions, and

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my experience of him being alive to his own despair allowed me to decide to offer him a vacancy. We began treatment the following week. At his first session, Robert brought me the following dream: There was a beautiful house, the most beautiful house one could imagine, surrounded ty lush gardens and filled with works of art and famous paintings. It was very spacious, one room leading to anothel: Howevec it was surrounded by impenetrable glass and one could only admire it from the outside. This dream and the associations which preceded and followed it became paradigmatic of the many layers of Robert’s analysis. My experience of his letter immediately came to mind, his wish to be admired like this beautiful house filled with works of art, which left himself as well as the other on the outside. His narcissistic self-idealizationimplied a withdrawal from external reality towards an idealized internal object. It is striking to note in this example the indication of the four characteristics outlined by Rosolato: the libidinai withdrawal from the world of life objects, the self-idealization, already indicated in the self-portraits that Robert had sent me, the emphasis on the relationship with an ideal twin (he had indeed sent me two portraits), and the impossible dilemma created in the mind, the impossible impasse imposed by the existence of the object, which leads to solutions of ruptures and violence (as in the episode of the telephone box). For Robert, as expressed in his dream, there was no live communication between inside and outside, and between his inner world and external reality. Everything was either locked in or out. This was a dream we repeatedly came back to during our work together. The house also represented the body of a mother whom he experienced as ungiving and impenetrable. Any contact had to be the result of a violent penetration (the episode of the telephone box); in the same way he had experienced her as intruding into him both psychically (with her psychotic episodes) and physically (the many episodes of physical violence). Finally, the dream represented his fear that whatever he produced would be trapped inside her. It was his terror of what the body and the mind of his psychotic mother contained that constituted the core of what we were to explore in his analysis. Robert’s first dream provided a map to which we turned in order to understand a great deal about the unfolding of the analytic relationship. Robert’s implicit demand was that I should admire him, without attempting to enter into too much contact with him. He came to the sessions full of vivid dreams and thoughts, associations and interpretations about them. He worked very hard himself both in the sessions and outside them on his many thoughts, experiences and impressions. His fundamental requirement was that I should simply admire him and his work, without intervening. I was left outside the house. The interesting point of technique for me in my work with Robert was that this is what I fundamentally did for quite some time, aware

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that I was doing so. My interpretations and comments, especially at the beginning, were indeed sparse although I felt intensely present with him in the sessions. I was aware that interaction was unbearable to him and that unbearable interactions had led to violence. Slowly, very slowly, Robert’s fear of relating to me shifted and it was possible to have a different way of interacting with him in the sessions, a sense of a dialogue that could more easily be put into words that he could tolerate. Until recently he had had a promiscuous sexual life, consistently being involved with several - older - women at the same time. These represented his attempts to experience himself as constantly participating in an uninterrupted primal scene that he could control (enter and leave), and at the same time - excluding himself from any intimate relationship. Some eighteen months into analysis Robert entered a relationship with a girlfriend, and two years after the beginning of his analysis Robert started painting again. The conflict he had been struggling with was given vivid expression when he wanted to give me the first painting he was able to paint after such a long time. My refusal to accept it and his utter surprise allowed him to believe fully, perhaps for the first time, that our work together was fundamentally for his benefit. He started to participate in exhibitions and competitions, and won a prestigious prize in Italy. The quality of his dreams progressively changed. In one of the last dreams he brought, Robert was in the kitchen cooking with his girlfriend, and they went for a long walk in a beautiful garden, full of rare and exoticflowers. At that time, Robert had been offered work teaching art in a small town in Italy, which was going to give him time to develop his own painting. His girlfriend went with him. Some aspect of the relationship with me was still idealized, but as he left there was a sense that he would be able to carry on the work we had started.

Michael Michael was a young German who came to analysis after a serious suicide attempt that led to hospitalization. He was born blind and remained blind for the frst couple of years of his life. A series of operations then allowed him to gain sight. He had spent his childhood in close physical contact with his mother, protected by his parents who were very concerned about his clinical situation. He grew up to be a shy boy, clinging to his mother, frightened of the world in general. He felt that intellectual stimulation came mainly from his father, who used to read to him a great deal and later insisted on Michael’s reading to him. From early on Michael’sformidable intellect was apparent, and he excelled at school. Michael grew up to have a distinguished career in the profession of his choice. He was initially shy with girls and then women, but in early adulthood became progressively more violent in his relationships with

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women. He could flip from violence towards girlfriends to suicidal impulses. In the last long-term relationship with a woman prior to starting his analysis there had been serious violence, as a result of which she ended the relationship. Michael’ssuicide attempt led him to be hospitalized and he was an inmate in a psychiatric hospital outside London for several months. This experience frightened him and he decided to seek help. My experience of Michael at our first consultation was paradoxical: on the one hand, I had the measure of the intellectual strength that had allowed him to succeed in his career, his direct, challenging, almost aggressive way of addressing me. This contrasted with a sense of vulnerability and confusion about himself and his relationship with others. What touched me most, however, and led me to offer him a vacancy, was my experience of his sense of his own damage, and his lack of trust that anyone would dare to embark with him on an exploration of the pain and darkness of his inner world, A tall, dark man in his early thirties, Michael had had a recurrent dream since childhood: There was a big white screen in front of him. Suddenly a black animal appeared and rushed through the bottom of the screen, or some kind of black spot ran through and corroded the screen. This dream used to terrtfy him. He remembered having it while in hospital after an eye operation. It made him feel sick then and he still felt ill when he had the dream, although it was now rare. In the course of the analysis we were able to understand some of the meaning of this dream, although the greatest insight was reached after an event in a session that brought this dream dramatically into the transference. The white screen symbolized the idealized breast, the world without obstacles or the blemishes which we were bound to encounter in the vicissitudes of his treatment. Michael brought another dream to his first session - a dream that he felt was one of the most disturbing he had ever had: He was in a room, and in this room he was God. There had been a car accident and there was a baby’s cot. As God he had the power to decide whether this baby was going to live or die. He decided that the baby should live. Then the whole thing repeated itselfin a circle like a loop and he was at the top looking at evetything happening and again he was in a position to decide whether the child wasgoing to live or die. In the end he decided that the child would die. He woke up in the middle of the dream and felt really frightened and wanted to go back to the dream in order to make the child live. In that session I talked to him about the two impossible positions contained in the dream. In one he was God, which indicated an omnipotent part of himself, with power of life and death over another part of him that he experienced as a helpless baby. In the other he was a helpless baby, a libidinal infantile self, whose fate was in the hands of somebody all-powerful. I thought that he feared that this was all he could expect from analysis. I, too, could only be in one of these positions: God, or a helpless baby who would meet my fate at his hand. Michael was terrified of what we might do to each

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other. I could not fail to notice that the inevitability of death was there at the outset of this narrative. During the initial months, the right amount of contact was essential in our sessions: if I said too little Michael would become quiet and withdrawn, almost lifeless; if I said too much he felt intruded upon and disorganized. The dance between us required a certain rhythm whereby we were intensely involved with each other, and this evoked in me thoughts about a rhythm that should have been present in his interactions with his mother as a small child. This was a relationship where mother and baby could not hold each other with their eyes and where bodily and sound contact appeared to me to have been intense. Other temporal dimensions slowly emerged in Michael’s material. In adolescence his mind was fded with conscious fantasies of violence and in young adulthood he engaged in violent relationships with his girlfriends and peers. Through violence he attempted to exercise mastery over a world that was experienced as frightening and senseless. Some months into the analysis I began to realize that for Michael, in the transference, there was also an enormous confusion between intimacy and sexuality. He alternated between omnipotent phantasies of having seduced me into being his analyst on the one hand, and the terror of abandonment on the other. The following session took place a few weeks before the first summer break. I felt that Michael was terrified of the forthcoming holiday break, and said so to him.He responded with a quotation: ‘Yeteach man kills the thing he loves.’*This was accompanied by a chilling feeling I had in the countertransference. I briefly felt invaded by an intense, inexplicable fear. There was a long, heavy silence, which Michael finally interrupted by saying that he had had a strange feeling that his jaws were dry. This was the feeling that tended to accompany the dream of the white screen which was being corroded and damaged. He had not had the feeling for quite some time and had even forgotten that the dream was accompanied by such a feeling. The experience of the real potential for damage, murder and suicide had come fully into the transference. This session had taken place before a holiday break and at a different level we were confronting the experience of impending blackness on the eve of a separation that left him in the dark. I put this interpretation to him. Michael brought the following dream to the next session: He went into a building, where there was a library with books. It was inside a Victorian museum about murdelr There was a man, a doctol; who was going to perform an operation on a woman with a broken leg. The operation lasted fig minutes, during which time he killed helr He then replaced her with another woman, also with a broken leg, so that no one would suspect what had happened. There were, howevel; enough clues for someone using modern methods of investigation to find out the truth. M y patient was watching the scene and tried to escape. He ran to another floor He kept trying to escape by running away Then he woke up.

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I cannot, within the limits of this chapter, give a full account of this session. But as Michael told me the dream, I immediately remembered the fear that had invaded me at the previous session, and thought that he was about to stop the analysis out of his fear of concrete destruction by either him or me. However, what struck me most during his account of the dream was the slow, monotonous, almost hypnotic quality of his narrative, which contrasted both with the frightening content of the dream, and with the usual intense quality of our interaction in the sessions. I waited, and after a while Michael carried on giving more and more details, describing the glass windows, and the bookcases in the library, peripheral to the central events of the dream. I commented on my sense of his detachment from the dream during the session, and he agreed, although he had woken up terrified. This detached quality had also been underlined in the content of the dream itself (for example, he had been an observer of the events, and they had taken place in a museum). I told Michael that I felt that this dream had been too frightening for him, and that he could not relate to it. He seemed to understand both this and the idea that his terror of the damage he felt that we could do to each other was now also present in the session. The dream narrated a primal scene between a castrated, damaged woman, who was also ultimately a fake, because she was just a replacement for another dead woman, and a murderer. Michael experienced this encounter as what took place in the sessions, between us. In the dream the patient ran away, although a positive aspect of the dream could be found in the idea that there were enough clues for a modern investigator to find out what had really happened, i.e. to discover that murder and castration had taken place. As Michael started to become more attached to me and to his analysis, to gain knowledge about himself, he was threatened by and himself threatened to commit murder in his dream. As he started to love his analyst he had to kill her (‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves’) because if she loved him, it would be because his analyst was in alliance with the murderous part of him; her help wouid therefore be fake. Over some of the sessions that followed this dream Michael’s dilemma became apparent: he was frightened that the only way of avoiding damage might be to run away; he should kill off the analysis rather than be killed by it. The work we did on this dream and its underlying anxieties did not prevent Michael from leaving the analysis. He did not come to his sessions in the following week, the last before the summer break. I wrote to him, saying that I understood his reasons for feeling he needed to stay away, but that I was keeping his sessions open to him until a week after the end of the summer break. Michael did come back after the summer, and we were able to carry on working for another few years. As the analysis progressed life became a bit more ordinary. In the first few years, therefore, analysis was marked by the possibility of

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damage between us in terms of violence, psychotic breakdown or accidents, especially at weekends and holiday breaks. Progressively this was understood and inserted into the language of the transference, and words gradually became mediators for actions. In a session nearly a year after the dream about ‘the museum of murder’, Michael dreamt that he was going to be fired because he belonged to an anarchist organization called ‘Chateaubriand’.The associations with Chateaubriand led to thoughts about luxury and abundance, a delicious meal that he could now associate with analysis and coming to see me. He thought I was French, because of my accent, my French car and also a French book he had seen in my consulting room. He experienced me as introducing anarchy, desire into a world that had previously been experienced as fundamentally bureaucratic and dictatorial. Michael did not attempt suicide again after the beginning of his analysis. By the time we reached the end of his treatment he was in a stable relationship with a woman and had plans for his future. I would like to contrast these two patients, Robert and Michael, for whom the existence of the object led to solutions of rupture and violence, as discussed by Rosolato, with Simon. Simon

Simon was in his late twenties when he first came to see me and was in analysis with me for many years. At the first consultation I already experienced him as immature and emotionally limited. He told me many things about himself but seemed to be emotionally out of touch with what he was saying. I was moved by his account of his psychological struggles throughout his life and I felt that he might be presenting a delayed mourning reaction to his father’s death some two years earlier. What struck me about Simon from the beginning was not the content of the many dreams he flooded me with which repeatedly depicted his sense of rejection, abandonment, regression and depression. What progressively impressed me most profoundly was my experience of a sense of absence in him, of a desolate being, and a semi-alive state that would also envelop me during my sessions with him, preventing any associative work from taking place in my mind. Simon presented himself as dramatically detached from himself, and seemed to have no interest in his own thoughts and or indeed his dreams. He could easily interrupt and abandon his own train of thoughts, without any sense that I might have been following him with interest. He might indeed, at that point, have no conception that there was anybody there listening to him. Simon was born in Greece, the youngest of six boys. His mother was alive and still lived in Greece, where Simon spent the first twenty years of his life. His father died two years prior to his starting his analysis. Simon had memories of parental rows and horrendous physical violence. His mother

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seems to have suffered from severe depression, with psychotic episodes throughout Simon’s childhood in which she locked herself in the bathroom and threatened to set herself on fire. The father would leave the children helplessly knocking on the bathroom door, pleading with her to come out. He was experienced as indifferent and absent, preoccupied with his career (‘He treated me like a bastard!’). In the same way, the father became a bastard, an illegitimate part of Simon’smind. In the first dream Simon brought to analysis he was in the sea and he felt a movement whereby he was being swallowed by deep waters and then expelled upwards. This dream and the associations that followed provided vivid images of the way in which Simon plunged into a primitive transference, marked by a fear of psychotic breakdown. Another image present in this first dream seemed to be his experience of his whole body as a penis. Simon depicted his experience of losing himself and feeling dissociated. Simon’s presentation as a passive, gentle man was disturbed in the counter-transferenceby my progressive irritation with him.Gradually I came to understand my experience of being immobilized and of feeling controlled by the pace he set, as the first three years of his analysis were marked by a sense of immobility and lack of reciprocity. He seemed to have a strange capacity to respond to me in a way that immobilized me. I also felt watched. My attempts to verbalize these experiences and formulate them into interpretations led Simon to reveal that he had, on several occasions, parked his car in front of my house to watch me and my family, although he had consistently fallen asleep before he saw any of us. He secretly attempted to control his objects just by being there, perhaps related to his experience that he could not have an impact on his mother. Once he had a dream about a man dressed in white standing against a white wall. He was so still that be could not be seen. The familiar theme of Simon disappearing re-emerged, as in the first dream in which he felt he was being swallowed up by the sea. This dream followed a session where I felt we had made some contact. The invisibility and stillness was a reversal of the violence he feared in any contact, reverberations of the violent primal scene he felt he witnessed between his parents when they hit each other. Simon consistently expressed this conflict between the wish to be seen and not to be seen, between wanting to know and not to know, a reminder of the Wolf Man’s wish to know nothing, to foreclose (see Green, 1986, p. 230). When Simon had parked his car in front of my house, the aim was to observe in order to eliminate the object, the third (negative hallucination) - in this case, knowledge of the existence of my family and my life independent from him. It is this aspect of his analysis, this consistent elimination of himself and his objects so that they cease to exist, that is so difficult to understand and interpret. One is left with emptiness, vacant spaces. Although the theme of damage to both self and object is consistently on the threshold of being

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present in Simon’sanalysis, persecutory anxiety is avoided. I think that one of the risks in such an analysis is for the analysis itself to become a substitute for life. It becomes an enclave (O’Shaughnessy, 1992) of stillness and immobility: white against white. This can potentially happen as a result of either too much interpretation or too little. If the analyst interprets too much - which I think I tended to do in the early years of Simon’s analysis - the patient lives through the analyst. If she interprets too little, the sessions are invaded by the silence of death.

Discussion Freud and Abraham have suggested that mourning masks aggression towards the lost object, and thus reveals the ambivalence of the depressed person towards the object of mourning. This process implies a harsh superego, a dialectic of idealization and denigration of self and other, all based on the mechanism of identification. The treatment of narcissistic individuals, however, has also pointed to a primitive self who is incomplete and empty (Kristeva, 1987,pp. 11-12). Their emptiness refers to an archaic experience that has not attained representation. Green has pointed out that ‘before narcissism, there were the drives of self preservation; after, there were the death drives’ (2001, p. 10). The death drive, being muted, is expressed through the repetition compulsion and opened the way to the understanding of that which has not yet reached symbolization. Green has suggested the possibility of a dual narcissism: a positive narcissism, whose aim is to reach unity, a narcissism aiming at oneness; and a negative narcissism, which strives towards the zero level, aiming at nothingness and moving towards psychic death, as the psyche yearns for its own annihilation. For Green, negative narcissism is the form narcissism takes when combined with self-destructive drives. This way of understanding is not limited to the patients’ manifestations of destructiveness, but also includes states of mind where objects are deprived of their quality of being unique or irreplaceable for the subject (Green, 2001). AU three patients discussed in this paper expressed, in different ways, a decathexis of representations. Their relationship with their internal objects seemed to be faintly represented, was impoverished and fragmented and had to be acted out. Need for the object had to be avoided and dealt with either through violence or withdrawal. In all three patients it is crucial to distinguish between the positive and the destructive parts of the personality. Desire is created by an awareness of separation from the object, created by the necessary delay in obtaining satisfaction. Desire can never be fulfiied. Freud asserted that the perception of the object is linked to its absence. It is against the backcloth of this absence that signs have to be created which will be inscribed where there is a lack. But this perception of absence goes hand

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in hand with an awareness of loss. The narcissistic patient displays his incapacity to elaborate or represent psychically a situation of absence or lack. When the separation occurs between mother and baby, the mother’s representation in the mind of the infant is progressively replaced by many substitutes. As Aulagnier (2001) has so movingly discussed, it is not just a way of thinking that is left by the mother, but she leaves imprinted in the child bodily images, affects and sensations. I would also add at this point that in all human beings the incest taboo needs to have suffered a good enough repression so that the desire to give a child to the mother, common to both sexes, becomes part of the fabric of the imaginary. If repression is not facilitated by the relationshipwith the mother’s desire, I think that there is no freedom for sexuality to be experienced in a safe way. This is what Aulagnier refers to as the mother’s ‘excess’,which is ultimately related to the mother’s narcissism, a wish that the child will carry on needing what she has to give. I think that for all the patients discussed in this chapter, achieving both trust in the object and separation from the object might, perhaps, be the most unattainable task. For each of these patients the body of the mother was not experienced as a home, a safe place that allowed for exploration and creativity. Each analysis contained a search for a mental space where they could explore, think about and transform their relationships with their internal objects.

Notes 1. In ‘Leonardoda Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’ (1910) Freud gives his first theoretical statement on narcissism, as he tries to explain the mechanism of a libidinal cathexis that leads to narcissistic choice. ‘The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses new objects of his love ... He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism’ (1910, p. 100). Narcissistic object choices is a theme that can be comprehended in Freud’s papers on Leonardo (1910), The Rat Man (1909), Schreber (191 1) and The Wolf Man (1914). 2. Ovid tells the version that is better known. Narcissus is the son of the river-god Cephissus and a nymph, Liriope. Tiresias utters an oracle at his birth: Narcissus would live to old age provided that he did not know himself. Numerous maidens fall in love with him, but their love is met with indifference. Echo does not give up hope. She withdraws from the world, stops eating, until she is no more than a voice. One day Narcissus is thirsty after hunting. The spring in the river reflects an image he falls in love with. Leaning forward towards his image he lets himself die. In the Pausanias version, Narcissus is given a twin sister who dies, and it is her reflection he thinks he recognizes in the spring. 3. In Freud’smodels of the mind the notion of conflict between the drives is

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a fundamental requirement. Until the paper on narcissism, the conflict was seen as between the libidinal drives and the self-preservative drives (on the side of the ego), which corresponded to the distinction between love and hunger. Freud suggests that the separation of the sexual drives from the ego drives reflect the twofold function of the individual: to serve his own purposes, and a member of a species. The paper on narcissism introduces a contradiction, as the libidinal drives can now address themselves to the ego. When Freud speaks of the libidinal cathexis of the ego, the distinction between ego libido and sexual libido is threatened, because both drives now share the same origin. Moreover a dynamic conflict between them is now not possible. The conflict would be between object libido and narcissistic libido, but then everything is reduced to sexuality, the conflict would be between two forms of the sexual instinct. Freud is aware of this and reaffrrms the need to maintain the distinction between sexual libido and the non-sexual energy of the ego instincts. 4. Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898,pt. I, vii.

References Aulagnier P (2001) The Violence of Interpretation. New Library of Psychoanalysis 41. London: Routledge. Baranger W (1991) Narcissism in Freud. In J Sandler et al. (eds), Freud’s On Narcissism: An Introduction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bion W (1984) Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Karnac Books,1963. Britton R (1998). Belief and Imagination. New Library of Psychoanalysis 31. London: Routledge. Cournut J (1975) Nevrose du vide. In Figures du vide. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 11:79-89. Freud S (1909) Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. SE 10. Freud S (1910) Leonard0 da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. SE 11. Freud S (1911) Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia. SE 12. Freud S (1914) On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE 14. Freud S (1917[ 19151) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14. Freud S (1918[19141) From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. SE 17. Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18. Freud S (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19. Freud S (1925) Negation. SE 19. Green A (1966-67) Primary narcissism: structure or state. In Green (2001). Green A (1986) On Private Madness. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis. Green A (2000) The central phobic position: a new formulation of the free association method. Intern. J. Psycho-Anal. 81: 429-51. Green A (2001) Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. A. Weller. London and New York: Free Association Books.

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Green A (2002) Dual conception of narcissism: positive and negative organisations. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 71: 63149. Grunberger B (1957) Le Narcissisme. Paris: Payot. [New Essays on Narcissism. London: Free Association Books, 1989.) Kernberg 0 (1975) Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson. Kernberg 0 (1984) Severe Personality Disorders. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kohut H (197 1) The Analysis of the Self. New York: International University Press. Kristeva J (1987) Soleil noir. Paris: Gallimard. [(1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.] Lacan J (1966[ 19491) Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la function du je. In Bcrits. Paris: SeuiI. Laplanche J, Pontalis J-B (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. O’ShaughnessyE (1992) Enclaves and excursions. Int. J. Psychoanal. 73: 603-11. Pasche F (1965) L’Anti-narcissisme.Rev franG. Psychanal. 29: 503. Perelberg RJ (1999). Full and empty spaces in the analytic process. Int. J. Psychoanal. 2003 ;84: 579-92. Pontalis,J-B (1974) Bornes ou confins? In Aux limites de I’analysable. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse No. 10 Paris: Gallimard, pp. 5-16. Rosenfeld H (1971) A clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of life and death instincts. Int. J. Psychoanal. 52: 169-78. Rosenfeld H (1987) Impasse and Interpretation. London: Routledge. Rosolato G (1976) Le narcissisme. In: Narcisses. Paris: Gallimard. SandlerJ, Holder A, Dare C et al. (1997a) Freud’s Models of the Mind. London: Karnac. SandlerJ, Person E, Fonagy P (eds) (1997b) Freud’s ‘Narcissism:An introduction’. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Segal H, Bell D (1991) The theory of narcissism in the work of Freud and Klein. In J Sandler et al. (ed.), Freud’s On Narcissism: An Introduction. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Winnicott DW (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications.

PART 111

Metapsychology

5 Clinical observation, theoretical construction, metapsychological thought JEAN-CLAUDE ROLLAND The chapter Ernest Jones devoted to metapsychology in his biography of Freud makes quite moving reading. Moving, in the sense that the author clearly allows his feeling of strangeness to show when faced with this intellectual production, so different, in fact, from the other clinical or conventionally theoretical developments of the Freudian oeuvre. Metapsychological speculation does in fact owe much to a different kind of thinking, compared to the clinical reports or theoretical constructs used to explain the phenomena observed in analytical work. It even stands apart in a double sense from those activities that are immediate and in practice arise out of necessity: standing apart in time because metapsychological thought arises in afterwardsness or beforeness with regard to the experience itself; and standing apart, conversely, in what could be called a spatial sense though it’s not quite the right word - inasmuch as it is above the immediate facts, outlining a working model that guarantees the universality of the phenomena presented and providing a coherent ontological basis for them. Metapsychological speculation is an ambitious way of thinking, tending, for example, to re-inscribe the pathological accident in the logical continuity of human psychical functioning; an audacious thinking that aspires to reestablish the prevalence of the idea over the event. It is hard to deny that, while differing from philosophical thought (and it is even harder to decide just where it differs), it still remains in epistemologicalproximity with it and, unsurprisingly,whenever Freud entered its field he evoked the figures of the philosophers, either to establish a difference, or to find support. Thus in ‘The Unconscious’ (1915b) he poked fun at philosophical thought,’ and to establish the legitimacy of the duality of the life and death instincts he selected a sort of spiritual filiation as support, in ‘one of the grandest and most remarkable figures in the history of Greek civilization, Empedocles of Acragas’ (Freud, 1931, p. 245). It must not be ruled out, either, that this metapsychological speculation could have more or less unconfessable links 93

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with poetic expression: in the sense that, here as there, it is demanded of the creator to trust to the magic of discourse to provide form and existence to a fully efficient reality which does not contain in itself any sense-based manifestations.2‘Meta’-psychologyaspires to be the science of the ‘infra’-real. Thus Jones, the loyal disciple, affirmed that he adhered to Freudian metapsychology, However, from our standpoint as readers, it is quite evident that ‘the conviction was not there’. One understands then why, instead of commenting on its scientific scope, Jones devoted this chapter to reconstituting the train of thought that led Freud to adopt this strange intellectual position. And by means of this detour, a clear sign of the man’s intellectual honesty and his rigour, Jones indicated the only possible way to access an authentic in-depth understanding of this metapsychological tool: it would not, like some ordinary knowledge, be directly transmissible; its construction could not be dissociated from a unique intellectual trajectory, it would even be the sui generis expression of this subjectivity; its enunciation would manifest the indirect trace left in its author’s mind (esprit) by a particular effort of thought. And for another to appropriate it, he must in some manner repeat the invention, recast the model in the crucible of his own psychic substance. I have spoken of a tool, thinking of the efficiency a rigorous metapsychologybrings to understanding psychical life. Even so, it is not the right word: it is not knowledge in itself, it is a transformation of the mind that carries and makes operative a particular sort of knowledge. It is to knowledge what the hand is to the tool. In addition, Jones, in this reconstitution of the pathway of Freudian thought, proved very informative: ‘The word “metapsychology”,’he wrote, ‘came forth for the first time from Freud’s pen in 1896, in the Project for a scientific psychology.’ This detail sheds new light on the meaning of this seminal text, little read because difficult and hermetic but that would reveal itself, in this light, as the first metapsychological speculation Freud engaged in, and as the model of a ‘beforeness’metapsychology resembling at the time - when beginning his search - a bundle of disparate hypotheses and intuitions borrowed from contiguous sciences but in any case foreign to neurology, physiology and old psychology, displacing these towards the new field his clinical observation opened up, and making of it all an operating speculation enabling him to invent - or discover - psychoanalysis and its method. I refer to the metapsychology of beforeness when it anticipates and authorizes the rigorous observation of clinical facts. Then, still according to Jones, the idea disappeared from the writing, to reappear in 1915. That year, Freud wrote in great haste (and one can infer from the febrile nature of the writing an instinctual source) a series of articles destined, he wrote, ‘to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded’ (Freud, 1917[ 19151, p. 222). Of these articles, he destroyed certain ones (an unwonted act, from where one can infer the unique, passionate relationship the author had with

Clinical observation,theoretical construction, metapsychological thought 95 this type of work) and published only five, grouped under the title ‘Metapsychology’, in his Gesammelte Geschnren. These articles deal with the instincts, the unconscious, repression, the dream and the mourning and melancholy pair. They go a long way, then, to sweeping out the workshop Freud had opened about twenty years before, a time of intense work when he developed to the utmost the resources inherent in his analytical method, fine-tuned the technique of the cure and made decisive theoretical advances in wish-fuifilment, hallucination, phantasy, psychical defence mechanisms. Freud paused there, like an architect taking a distance, standing back from the building he is constructing to evaluate, in light of perspective, its coherence and solidity. Now taking into account the reserve this metapsychological ‘gaze’ aroused in Jones - as in most of Freud’s first disciples - one may well wonder if it really provided the ‘analytical system’ with any added coherence. Freud certainly liked to believe and affirm so. Let us listen to him evoking the metapsychological institution par excelzence, represented by the ‘points of view’ from where the complexity of psychic systems becomes discernible: By accepting the existence of these two (or three) psychical systems, psychoanalysis has departed a step further from the descriptive ‘psychology of consciousness’ and has raised new problems and acquired a new content. U p till now, it has differed from that psychology mainly by reason of its dynamic view of mental processes; now in addition it seems to take account of psychical topogrupby as well, and to indicate in respect of any given mental act within what system or between what systems it takes place. On account of this attempt, too, it has been given the name of ‘depth psychology’. (Freud, 1915b, p. 173)

And later: We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our account of psychical phenomena. Besides the dynamic and the topographical points of view, we have adopted the economic one. This endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude. It will not be unreasonable to give a special name to this whole way of regarding our subject-matter, for it is the consummation of psycho-analytical research. I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metupsycbologiculpresentation. (Freud, 1915b, p. 181)

However, let us note that Freud immediately added to this passage an expression of doubt: ‘We must say at once that in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in this’ (Freud, 1915b, p. 181). The critical cathexis Freud himself brought to his metapsychology joins the reserve Jones and his early interlocutors felt. It is probable that they did not see the use of this ‘culmination’,that they held it to be a complication in every sense of the word, a supernumeraryadd-on, far

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too abstract, which came to darken or trouble the clinical and theoretical substance of a pragmatic psychoanalysis to which they adhered with enthusiasm and which they deemed largely sufficient. Even so, in a contemporary reading, for example, the clarity the concept of instinct brings to understanding the work and development of the psychical apparatus, is luminous. Likewise, the concept of identification which, beyond the resolution of the enigmas involved in melancholic collapse and the work of mourning, introduces a new understanding of the movements of fantasy and the genesis of the ego (see Chabert, 2000). These metapsychological papers, as Freud was right to believe, imparted assured coherence to analytical theory. But that is not all. They also came to destabilize it, or at least make it problematic: whoever reads with sustained attention any one of these papers soon discovers to what extent this speculation distances him from the clinical sphere, to the point of making him lose sight of it; but he also discovers how, behind the impeccable figuration Freud gives to this or that concept (instinct, for example, with its fourfold definition according to its scope, end, source and instinct), thought comes to life in extravagance and luxury, a thought that I would say engages with its object more than just explaining it, a thought which, to be enfranchised of its mystery and strangeness and be provided with formal representation receivable by the logos, must identrfy with its object and submit to its demands. The writing in these papers is choppy, in turn advancing and retreating, sometimes abrupt, as if it were not possible, for example, to elucidate the instinct it speaks of except by submitting to its fits and starts and its violence. Here, in my view, we touch on a point that is essential in metapsychological writing, that justifies the abovementioned analogy with poetical writing; this is writing that espouses and outlines the soul’s very movements, an ‘iconic’writing that would be like the concrete trace of the psychical transformation the author inflicted on himself to bring to conscious awareness and impose on his ego this reality of the psychical depths that even the most penetrating clinical experience does not spontaneously bestow on the observer.. . Unique writing, invocative more than evocative, calling for, demanding an equally unique reading founded on empathy, on the reader’s unconscious participation in the author’s unconscious. We do not read the metapsychological texts in the way we read the ‘FivePsychoanalyses’ or ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, not because they are more difficult because more abstract, would resist comprehension or committing to memory more vigorously, but because they compel the reader to confront the strangeness of what they bear witness to more than actually formulating it: strangeness of the melancholy colouring any identificatory movement of the ego, strangeness of the unconscious movements which shy away just as they show themselves, strangeness of the affect that, arising, makes the ego oscillate between pain and pleasure. The particular status conferred on metapsychology at the heart of the Freudian oeuvre is mainly

Clinical observation,theoretical construction,metapsychological thought 97 owed to that fact that this production of the esprit is saturated with strangeness, a strangenesswe must guard against assimilating if we want it to remain operative, a strangeness, fmally, that prizes the dizzying proximity it entertains with what Freud liked to call the ‘psychologyof the depths’.

* * * That is why when Freud, in the previous quote, limits the status of metapsychology to the fact of being capable of ‘describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects’ (Freud, 1915b, p. lSl), we can only subscribe to the qualification, though with reserve at its overly rational, overly intellectual character which eludes what such thought contains, as foundation, of creative and transformative vitality. In fact, in that year, as Jones recalled it, ‘When Freud wrote his important metapsychological essays in the spring of 1915 he felt he had completed his life work, and that any further contributions he might make would be of subordinate and merely complementary order’ (Jones, 1983, p. 286). For him,these metapsychological papers really had the value of afterwardsness, represented ‘the’ultimate speculation, ordering the premises of observation and analysis and providing the definitive foundation for the theoreticalclinical edifice of psychoanalysis. However, what Freud did not know was the degree of independence this science, once set in motion, would have with regard to immediate experience. What he did not measure was to what extent, energized by a sort of transference of motions of instinct and representation activated in the researcher by the experience or the activity of writing, metapsychological thought gained the status of being an actual reflection of the structure of the unconscious and acquired an autonomy that would keep its inspiration alive, becoming, after founding the existing edifice, a beforeness metapsychology that would immediately demand a refounding. Certainly, metapsychology has no more decisive definition than to be, like instinct is for psychical activity, the call to work imposed on the theoretician by the concern to make clinical experience ever more coherent. ‘During the three or four years that followed [that year of 19151 - the war’s darkest years - Freud’s mind remained relatively unproductive,’Jones wrote, adding: ‘The miserable day-to-day life was full occupation’ (Jones, 1983, p. 286). It is true that those years were, for Freud, ‘black years’. They were marked by testing periods of mourning for close relations, by concern for the lives of his sons, mobilized to the Front, by gossip, the loss of the best part of his patients, the separation of his dearest disciples and correspondents from abroad and more generally by the indignation that flared up in him at the return of barbarism, organized in concert by ‘the two most civilized nations in Europe’. But one can, it seems to me, have sufficient trust in Freud’s intellectual rigour and tenacity to believe that these ‘external’ events, however terrible, did not by themselves account for the theoretician’ssilence.

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For my part, I believe that these unproductive years were a period of latency demanded by the further elaboration of what, in the metapsychology of 1915, remained unresolved or inchoate. As if that metapsychology, impeccable to his eyes, now revealed that it had not so much founded analytical theory as provided new depth for it, as if that speculation,far from having resolved the enigmas of psychical life (think, for example, of identification and instinct), had deepened them and thus opened Freud’s mind to even stranger internal events, which found, why not, just as the dream is nourished for its figurations by the remnants of the day, an equally strange correspondence with the moment’s external events. A workingthrough that found success in 1919-20, with the rapid-fire drafting of a text whose radical strangeness and necessary subjectivity Freud recognized: What follows [he wrote at the beginning of Chapter 41 is speculation, often farfetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity, to see where it will lead. (Freud, 1920, p. 24)

He titled it ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.For certainly it was the appeal to pure speculation - that is, speculation freed from the constraints inherent in immediate perception and likewise from the traditional categories of common sense - that led Freud from the facts of clinical observation (rigorously detailed in this text) to a place ‘beyond’ all psychical manifestation (the world of instincts, for which he details an equally rigorous representation) and that imparts to this text its strangeness. Confronted with this really unexpected advance of Freudian reflection here, confronted with its overly speculative character, confronted also with the unprecedented psychic danger revealed there, like a prophecy, by the institution of the pair life instincts, death instincts (what is dangerous for life also seems dangerous for thought), the disciples’ reserve, before then ‘measured,’exploded into broad daylight.Jones - the fact is amusing - evaluated it systematically: ‘thus, of the fifty or so papers they have since devoted to the topic one observes that in the first decade only half supported Freud’s theory, in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade none at all’ (Jones, 1983, p. 287). Faithful to the red thread that guides us in this understanding of Freud’s metapsychological thought, I propose that we do not mock this reserve of the disciples and do not too hastily impute it to their being faint-hearted or lacking in discernment. First, because it approximates, in caricature, the criticism the author himself made of this particularly scandalous concept, examined at length in this text and the one which most holds the reader’s attention - this instinct of destruction that he thereafter called the death instinct. Let us listen to him: I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of nonerotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in

Clinical observation,theoretical construction, metapsychological thought 99 our interpretation of life ... I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psycheanalytical literature and how long it took before I became receptive to it.3(Freud, 1930[1929],p. 120)

Then, because this reserve compels us to enquire about the place that should be given to this notion in the panoply (with all categories alike - clinical, theoretical, metapsychological) of psychoanalytical concepts and, through that, re-situate the status of metapsychology in the doctrinal corpus of psychoanalysis,let us begin by choosing the term that would most precisely denote the operation used by Freud to set up, in scientific language, this obscure reality. Well, do we mean here a ‘discovery’,in the sense of the term Entdeckung, signifying to disengage something that in itself only escaped notice because it remained buried under other phenomena that first had to be elucidated for it to ‘becomeaccessible’?This was surely Freud’s own point of view, coherent with the temporality of his research method, which he liked to compare with that of archaeology, which advances by gaining depth. Or should we mean, as Jean Guillaumin did, an ‘invention’(Guillaumin et al., 2000), a term sustaining the idea of a particular analogy between metapsychological thought and poetical creation?What German denotes as Dichtung insists, in fact, more on the work demanded by the creator’sego to lift the resistance that would oppose recognizing a concealed reality, not because it was buried but because it was rejected (Freud, 1908). Freud appears to adhere to this idea when noting in the passage in question his ‘own defensive attitude’. Or do we mean an ‘introduction’ in the sense of Einfuhrung, a term Freud chose precisely in 1915 when suddenly understanding the interest of substituting for the opposition sexual instinct-self-preservation instinct the more fruitful one object libidonarcissism. In his commentary to the text ‘Introducingnarcissism’,Jean Laplanche demonstrates in a quite convincing way how one must understand this term introduction: not in the ‘figurative’- and banal - sense of a conceptual addon that would enrich the theoretical panoply with a ‘supplementary’tool, but in the absolutely concrete sense of a forcing of the pre-existing theoretical edifice with a notion aimed at destabilizing it, making it problematic, planting a seed in it. The concept of the death instinct, like that of narcissism, reveals itself, from this angle, less as a positive concept connected to a psychical thing in the way that it is stated in ‘The Unconscious’ that the representation of a thing is connected to the representation of a word, than as tools for placing the theoretical apparatus in a state of tension, tools of thought with no ‘necessary’ nexuses to any thing-ness but which instead establish and find - a different reality, revolutionary in a different way, which is that of the absolute analogy presiding over the relations between psychical reality and the theoretical apparatus that represents it.

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In fact it is undoubtedly unnecessary to choose among these three interpretations because each of them carries a grain of truth; indeed their conjunction, making them relative to one another, reflects more accurately the intangible character of the thing so designated. Of the death instinct, one could just as well say that it was discovered at a historical moment of research4and say that it was invented, if only by the game of interference5and say fmally that it was introduced by a compulsion to think in the direction of complicating the theory, so as to reflect the complication psyche opposes to analytical work. Even so, this does not mean that the death instinct, like narcissism, does not exist. Those would be absurd affirmations calling at once for their disproof. Absurd or merely out of place affrrmations.But it does indicate that these are notions which appeal more to a judgement of attribution than a judgement of existence, that they refer less to things in themselves than to psychical sets or equilibria: they explain certain modes of psychic functioning arising at a certain moment of the evolution of the apparatus, tear it away from a previous state by destabilizing its economy, de-centring its interests and complicating its organization. Let us consider narcissism: like a compass whose needle would be magnetized towards the ‘culmination’pole of the psychical apparatus, this concept measures the state of progression of the apparatus, indicating the orientation of the libidinal courses and the distribution of their cathexes between ego and object: it permits, at the same time, observation of the ‘states of dependency’ to which the ego is assigned, because of its henceforth central position in the psyche, confronted with reality (essentially that of objects), the id, the superego. The concept of narcissism measures both the consolidation of the apparatus in its triple task of constructing subjective identity, maintaining it connected to the unconscious fantasy experience and adapting it to external reality, and also the possible regression that affects this apparatus and that necessarily will appear, in the manifest plane, as psychopathology. And what we call possibly wrongly because it is an obscuring vision - ‘narcissisticpathologies’, in fact conceal the multiplicity of imbalances that could affect the functioning of this particularly sophisticated edifice. Inversely, or even in exact opposition to this progressive movement that culminates in this category of narcissism, the death instinct would come to indicate what, in order to develop, the apparatus had to tear itself away from, the set of primitive, undifferentiated and obscure forces (already manifesting in mineral inertia), perfectly silent (because prior to any language, any sign) and whose origin could remain perfectly unascertainable were the human spirit not constrained, by its very essence, to construct for itself an origin. And this is just what Freud consented to, in this ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ text as in certain others that followed. Freud consented, not without resisting but also not without courage, by attributing this origin indifferently - and so maintaining, in the theoretical field, something of the

Clinical observation, theoretical construction, metapsychological thought 101 unascertainable nature of this enquiry - to the body or soma (which would justlfy the instinct’s quality of activity) and to the primordial inanimate orbit (from where the instinct would derive its tendency to re-establish a previous state) and finally to the phylogenetic foundations of the human institution the primitive horde, the killing of the father (from where the instinct would draw its violence but also its power to sign@). Just as narcissism represents, in analytic theory, more than a psychical reality,Gthe paradigm of the progressive movement to which is subjected, under the effect of the work of civilization and repression, in phylogenesis as in ontogenesis, the apparatus of the soul, the death instinct represents, for its part, the paradigm of its regressive tendency. Metapsychological concepts belong, undoubtedly always belong, to this category of what is ‘paradigmatic’. It is, in any case, the spirit in which they should be held, I should think: their interest is to introduce some ‘play’into theory, providing greater mobility for more technical or clinical concepts, a capacity to move and become complex, thus fitting themselves to the things they want to designate; and also play which, as in the work of poetry, confers a better adjustment on theoretical discourse, between the heavy literal result of too much designation and the cold vacuity of too much abstraction. It is amusing to note, in light of a reading of ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’ which some might find fmicky, that Freud was not altogether closed to this idea that metapsychology - even in this text’s sombre version - belonged to that so subtle and precious order of the spirit that is play. He used, incidentally, speaking of his speculation and speaking of the cotton-reel game, the same figure rhetorical: in the first instance, while aware that he was supported by the thinking of certain illustrious predecessors - among them Fechner and Breuer - he wrote: ‘It is of no concern to us in this connection to enquire how far, with this hypothesis of the pleasure principle, we have approached or adopted any particular, historically established, philosophical system’ (Freud, 1920, p. 7). And in the second instance, aware too that this so subtle game, executed at the age of one and a half, ‘wasrelated to the child’s great cultural achievement’,he wrote: ‘of course it is a matter of indifference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion’(Freud, 1920,p. 15). The game, for child and man, is certainly something as grave and complex as metapsychology is for the theoretical analyst. And metapsychology should always be for the latter as enjoyable and liberating as playing is for the child: something between appropriation and discovery.

* * * Thanks to a reading of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ - one given perspective by a concomitant reading of the remaining metapsychological texts - we now have solid bases to differentiate more clearly a clinical fact, a

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theoretical concept and what for lack of a better word I shall call a metapsychological ‘tool’. A clinical fact is obvious to each of us: a phenomenon that attentive observation presents as an opposition to our immediate understanding because it appears to disturb the normal course of life or upset the logic we spontaneously accord it. A phenomenon which affects either the body (a hysterical symptom, for example), or psychical life (a dream or a state of confusion), or behaviour (a delusion or an obsessive compulsion) or discourse (a mannerism of speech, a Zupsus linguae). The range of these phenomena is thus quite broad and has no unity of its own. What brings them together is that they are reproduced with significant recurrence in a particular individual, identically in different individuals, and that the conditions of their appearance and eventual disappearance, like the particular circumstances favouring their generation, lead one to believe that they obey certain laws that the observer is thereafter called upon to discover. These are then facts of observation: some of them could have been ignored until an observer noticed, named and described them; this is the case of what Freud called ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (Freud, 1923, p. 49), something we will discuss shortly and that explains certain behaviours of patients, in the cure and in a general therapeutic sense, that tend to divert the situation which is offered to them - of searching for a way to get better towards conserving their state of being a sick person. Others may instead have been known for a long time, admitted and named without their strangeness having been, for its part, recognized or the psychical enigma of which they were the bearers discerned. It is thus, to keep here to Freud, that before him, a witticism was perfectly misunderstood with regard to its character of being a compulsive act that established the closest bonds with the functioning of the unconscious and that the dream, held to be either a sub-product of the state of sleep, or a magical operation, had not appeared to anybody as being a sophisticated psychical production likely to throw decisive light on mental functioning. Thus, it is not only a matter of facts that experience imposes on the observer; it is necessary - for them to become knowledge - that he invests them with sufficient attention and curiosity to pierce the censure of conscience condemning them to insignificance. Like any classification, the one I propose here does not escape a certain schematism. For the vigilance that leads an observer to identify a phenomenon, to set it up as a clinical fact by separating it from the flux of psychic events where its specificity tends to dissolve, this vigilance is the same that will lead him to penetrate its mystery. The theoretical work that integrates the observation consists of overriding the uniqueness of the identified fact and revealing its closeness (or opposition) to other analogous facts in order to pick out the psychical principle that these different facts manifest in common. This work of thought that will end by identlfying a psychical force or a tendency or any unconscious formation, describing and naming it, thus producing a theoretical concept, had, then, begun from the

Clinical observation,theoretical construction, metapsychological thought 103 observation phase. It is important to note this point because it sheds light on a particularity of the work of the clinician (and of any clinician, whether an analyst or a medical consultant) who can only attentively observe his patient’s psychic products in sessions by producing, on his side, an outline of theorization of the observed facts. I have used the term ‘inner discourse’ to designate this discursive production proper to the analyst, echoing what the patient manifests and being attentive to a line of confluence between his conscious cognitive representations and the more unconscious contributions of his counter-transferential empathy (see Rolland, 2002). In light of our intention, the inner discourse could be considered as the analyst’s psychical activity thanks to which observation mutates into theory, and the clinical fact (necessarily tainted by anecdote and singularity) is effaced before the theoretical concept, a more efficacious tool for understanding the impersonal level of psychic functioning and one properly used as a generalization for the psychopathological totality of which that fact is a subjective version. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is a rather remarkable illustration of such clinical work, driven by clinical observation and the identification of facts. Let us follow Freud step by step in the unfolding of his thinking: he was struck by a communication written by some of his disciples, about ‘war neuroses’. And in this entity, revealed on the occasion of those tragic circumstances, he became attached, more particularly, to a singularity of the dream life of these neurotics: their dreams, in fact, obey an economy that contradicts the theory of wish-fulfiient, for time after time they bring the dreamer back to the situation of danger that he experienced in reality. This fact imposed on him the idea that the functioning of the psychical apparatus might not be commanded by the pleasure principle, which was quite simply contrary to the dominant metapsychological position, adopted from the time of the Outline. He then examined this clinical entity in light of another one, long known as ‘traumatic neurosis’, which appears after accidents ‘that placed the sick person’slife in danger’. Here we observe the same disturbance of the course of the dream: the dreamer returns repeatedly to the circumstances of the originating accident, circumstances that he realizes are dominated by a particular affect, little known, dread. Then, proof that once it has been initiated by analytical experience and freed from the interdiction of thinking represented by the facts under their guise of being too banal or too personal, observation will nourish itself with everything reality offers it, he placed these facts, belonging to the sphere of the dream and that of the neurosis, side by side with a third fact belonging to the apparently quite different sphere of play: he had observed his grandson, one-and-a-halfyears old, manipulating a cottonreel attached to a string, making the reel appear and disappear, and he guessed that this play activity was not as pleasing as it had the air of being, that it was for that very young child a really traumatic repetition of the departure of his beloved mother.

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Then he thought of the lives that certain beings unknowingly construct for themselves, lives that come up repeatedly against the same disappointments, setbacks, mishaps, so that one must think that they actively reproduce them. Then, finally, he thought about what happens in the experience of the cure with certain patients who, instead of working to dig up the childhood memories that generated their neurosis, tend instead to repeat, in the transference, the violence of the situations that had victimized them as children and manage, unless the analyst succeeds correctly in overriding these events, to make him into a person who, far from being helpful and guiding them to being healed, means them harm ... With this assembly of clinical facts and their progressive articulation, Freud built a theoretical concept that was to have immense reach and for which he coined the term ‘repetition compulsion’ (Freud, 1920, p. 19). Certainly the notion of repetition was familiar to him:he had dealt with it in a graceful, rather finely drafted text titled ‘Remembering,repeating, workingthrough’. That was what he called the tendency animating certain patients to reexperience the events of their past rather than making them conscious in the actuality of their speech. He situated the dynamic of this in the general field of resistance and described a movement opposed to that of remembering. At the time, the notion of repetition referred only to the subject’s attachment to his childhood past and the rejection conscious psychical operation opposes to the sexual motions forming the basis of such attachment. It did not take into account the vital danger repetition represents for anyone caught in acting it out. However, in a more profound reflection, support by a broader set of clinical facts than those used in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud was led to recast this notion. Three new elements drove him to this radicalization: first, discovery of the forced ‘acting-out’that energizes this tendency to repeat the childhood past, whence the term repetition compulsion, used thereafter to designate it and clearly denoting its instinctual nature: its manifestation could no longer be attributed to resistance alone. Then, the discovery of the destructive nature of this psychical movement that applies itself, nearly methodically, to shattering, not only the course of treatment, but also of psychical life, even of life itself, in its multiple activities normally geared to the search for pleasure. The discovery, finally, of a previously unknown and frightening figure of infantile sexuality, inasmuch as it no longer claims attachment to the search for pleasure, as all psychoanalytical research had led him to believe until then, but that remained profoundly determined by the historical circumstances that had awakened it, no matter how violent, to the point of tending obstinately, despite all temporal logical, to acting them out again, as if their origin prevailed over their end; and, constraining Freud to take one more step in his descent towards depth psychology, the discovery of a sexuality that would solder together as much the childhood experiences of

Clinical observation,theoretical construction, metapsychologicalthought 105 frustration, disappointment, loss, as experiences of satisfaction. At this moment of research, the representation analytic theory underwent a sort of splitting: to the ordinary course of Eros, as described in the ‘ThreeEssays on Sexuality’ (Freud, l905), which sustains the psychical apparatus with its connective force and vital energy, a deadly current was opposed, obedient to disjunction,with a masochistic orientation and of which one must ask if it is not, in certain individual lives, preponderant. For when all is said, this double representation - as it were fractured - of sexuality, as it becomes visible through this theoretical concept of repetition compulsion, finally fits, makes more understandable the economy that commands the more regressive psychic states. The bodily or moral suffering on which psychotic patients seem as if furated, which they seem actively to nurture, the vital danger to which psychopathological formations like delusion, hallucination or addiction submit them, seem to substitute for them any other form of love life. Libidinal affect seems, for them, to have been inverted into an appetite for selfdestruction, their love objects seem to have retreated, as if anonymously, into their ego. The discovery that infantile sexuality is not - at least partly, perhaps essentially not - on the side of enjoyment but on the contrary on the side of unpleasure, destruction, subjective sacrifice, opens a fertile approach to these morbid states, reminding us that we are, there too, in the presence of Eros, not the happy Eros that exploits, as in neurosis, all circumstances and any transference for wish-fulfilment,but a profoundly melancholy Eros which requires, to turn back to life and its objects, a particular treatment. The institution, in analytic theory, of the concept of repetition compulsion marks a turning point not only for understanding the deeper levels of psychical functioning, but additionally and I believe especially, for the work of the cure. It opens it to a possible analytic treatment of psychosis: first because it relocates the dynamic of this affectivity on the axis of infantile sexuality, thus bringing it close to neurosis and permitting it benefit from the considerable technical gains that treating it had granted analysts.Then because in the cure it calls for developing a particular form of its action, which operates beyond interpretative technique: working-through. Based on multiple clinical facts, proceeding from places of observation that are diverse but, by analogy, remain centred on the powerfully regressive conduct that certain patients adopt in the cure, Freud postulated a theoretical concept, repetition compulsion, which he defined like this: The compulsion to repeat also recalls the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed (1920, p. 20)

The third moment of his work consisted in giving to this concept a metapsychological basis. It is quite remarkable to me to note that Freud proceeded, there, in two stages. In the first stage, he appealed to the old and

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familiar theory of infantile sexuality that he ‘ishappy’ to describe once again, shedding the worst of lights on its tragic character. That is what one discovers when reading that oft-quoted, long and dense passage of great poetical reach, that is like a musical pause where the first third of ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’ culminates, fully turned towards the clinical. Let us quote it once again, in extenso: The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the most distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion, as well as in Marcinowski’s (1918), contributes more than anything to the ‘sense of inferiority’which is so common in neurotics. The child‘s sexual researches, on which limits are imposed by his physical development, lead to no satisfactory conclusion; hence such later complaints as ‘I can’t accomplish anything; I can’t succeed in anything.’The tie of affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment, to a vain expectation of satisfaction or to jealousy over the birth of a new baby - unmistakable proof of the intidelity of the object of the child’saffections. His own attempt to make a baby of himself, carried out with tragic seriousness, fails shamefully. The lessening amount of affection he receives, the increasing demands of education,hard word and an occasional punishment - these show him at last the full extent to which he has been scorned. (Freud, 1920, pp. 20-1)

Then in the second stage, with a reflection that will be developed over the remaining two-thirds of the text, with a reflection breaking with ordinary clinical considerations and appealing to high speculation, drawing nourishment from particularly audacious physiological and biological hypotheses, he proposed giving to the concept of repetition compulsion a foundation that overturns the metapsychologicalperspective adopted to that point, a foundation no longer tied to infantile sexuality, and which he attached to the set of conservative forces assembled under the name of death instinct. Is it really the case that, apart from the sexual instincts, there are no instincts that do not seek to restore an earlier state of things? That there is none that aims at a state of things which has never yet been attained? I know of no certain example from the organic world that would contradict the characterization I have thus proposed. There is unquestionably no universal instinct towards higher development observable in the animal or plant world, even though it is undeniable that development does in fact occur in that direction. (Freud, 1920, p. 41)

The metapsychological advance thus accomplished is beyond discussion: the inscription of the instinctual movement in a violently conflictive duality between life and death provides a new foundation for the scope of repression (it is only by means of a detour of repression that a development of the psychical apparatus towards a higher direction is possible); it opens to a compound representation of the psychical apparatus (what we call the

Clinical observation, theoretical construction, metapsychological thought 107 second topography, where the structural relations between ego, id and superego are substituted for the conflict between the preconscious and the unconscious states); and finally, it provided inspiration for the enormous theoretical renewal that marked Freud’s work after 1920. However, what remains remarkable in the two-stage development of the metapsychological work elicited by the discovery of the theoretical concept of repetition compulsion, is the radical rupture that came to be between these two stages: while the first attributed the origin of the compulsion to a particular destiny of infantile sexuality, the second transferred it to its principal opposite, the death instinct. It is worth noting that by thus placing the sexual instinct (encompassed in the more general category of the life instincts) and the death instinct in opposition, Freud merely reiterated the opposition between instinct and tendency affirmed in ‘Instinct and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915a); it is even more remarkable to note that between the metapsychological positions pertaining to these two stages there is, in the very development of this apparently disorderly text, a rupture, certainly, but in no case exclusion. Freud denied nothing of the work of sexuality in the repetition compulsion when he invoked the action that falls to the death instinct: the latter merely explains what encumbers the course of the former, fures it to ‘traumatic’ situations from the past, conceals the access to the objects of the present. One often has a tendency to consider that this text, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, is centred on the death instinct. My reading leads me to see this centre in the repetition compulsion. One can in any case understand that the metapsychological notion, being, as the poet has it, a bit ‘boisterous’,tends to displace onto itself the interest awakened in the reader by the theoretical concept, paradoxically more obscure. Likewise, one tends to think, because of the discontinuity that affects the writing of this text, that Freud treated the death instinct as a force distinct from the sexual instinct. My reading leads me to consider this textual discontinuity as an echo of the fracture over which the two currents of Eros explode. The death instinct represents and designates, in sexual life, the originating tendency which forces the libido to remain attached to its incestuous objects, opposes their being renounced and, by the same token, opposes the liaison of this primordial instinct (which pushes toward objects because it cannot do without them) to objects of substitution. The pair sexual instinct - death instinct, incarnates in a ‘paradigmatic’ opposition the duality of libidinal movement oscillating between incestuous attraction commanded by unconscious fantasy and object-libido, submitted,by a lengthy travail of civilization, to repression. This chapter was translated by Peter Shaio.

Notes 1. Freud states: ‘Whenwe think in abstractions there is a danger that we may

neglect the relations of words to unconscious thing-presentations, and it

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3.

4.

5.

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must be confessed that the expression and content of our philosophizing then begins to acquire an unwelcome resemblance to the mode of operation of schizophrenics’(‘The Unconscious’ (191 5b), p. 204). Cf. the entirely explicit reference to the poet Ruckert through which Freud concludes ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud, 1920, p. 64) and his quotation of the famous verses: What we cannot reach by flying We must reach by limping... The Book tells us it is no sin to limp. It was in fact Sabina Spielrein who suggested as of 1912 the idea that ‘destructionwould be at the origin of being’. “kenty-five years of intensive work,’ Freud wrote at the beginnning of Chapter 3 of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, ‘have had as the result that the immediate aims of psychoanalytic technique are quite other today than they were at the outset’ (Freud, 1920, p. 18). ‘... we are driven to conclude that the death instincts are by their nature mute and that the clamour of life proceeds for the most part from Eros’ (Freud, 1923, p. 46). One could even speak of narcissistic cathexis rather than libidinal cathexis in the ego, even though losing sight, through this, of the fundamentally erotic nature of such cathexis, despite sublimation. But can one speak in all rigour of narcissism, when the only psychic instance that is observable through its own qualities, which are opposed to reality and to other unconscious instances, is that of the ego?

References Chabert C (2000) Les surprises du masochisme moral. In L’Esprit de Surivie, libres cahiers pour la psychanalyse, printemps, 2000, no. 1. Freud S (1905) Three Essays on Sexuality. SE 7. Freud S (1908) Creative Writers and Day-dreaming. SE 9. Freud, S (1915a) Instinct and TheirVicissitudes.SE 14. Freud S (1915b) The Unconscious. SE 14. Freud S (1917[19151) A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams. SE 14. Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE 18. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19. Freud S (1930[1929]) Civilization and Its Discontents. SE 21. Freud S (1931) Analysis Terminable and Interminable. SE 23. Guillaumin J et al. (2000) L’Inventionde la Pulsion de Mort, Guinot. Jones E. (1983) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. London: Basic Books. Laplanche J (1976) Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins. Rolland J (2002) Sur le discours indrieur. In C Bottella (ed.), Penser les limites. Ecrits en l’honneur d’Andre Green. Paris: Delachaux-Niestlt.

6 ‘The Unconscious’

LUIZ EDUARDO PRADO DE OLIVEIRA On 1April 1915 Freud wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome: The next numbers of theJournal will contain a kind of psychological synthesis of various ideas of mine under three headings: instinct and their vicissitudes - repression - the unconscious: incomplete, like everything I do but not without some new content. The essay on the unconscious in particular will contain a new definition of the term, which is really tantamount to a restatement. [In the French edition of these letters the phrase reads: ‘L‘article sur l’inconscient, notamment, doit exposer une nouvelle definition de celui-ci, laquelle, en fait, equivaut a m e agnostisation’].(Andreas-Salome, 1912- 13, p. 38)

This neologism, based on the German Agnoszierung, suggests a religious or sacred character, marked by a strong belief, linked to the unconscious beforehand. Freud intends to propose a new definition, agnostic. A keen study of his text allows us to conclude in which sense his definition was a new one, not as much concerning the thesis of his times on the subject, but mainly concerning the Freudian approaches themselves. The Standard Edition editors, for instance, have written in their introduction to Freud’s paper on ‘The Unconscious’: In his early days and in his nearest environment there can have been no great resistance to the idea. His immediate teachers - Meynert, for instance - in so far as they were interested in psychology, were governed chiefly by the views of J. F. Herbart (1776-1841), and it seems that a text-book embodying the Herbartian principles was in use at Freud’s secondary school. (Freud, 1915c,p. 162)

These views, interesting as they are, don’t cover the whole field on the subject of the contributions which may have influenced Freud in two ways: in the sense of the more recent contributions, contemporary to Freud’s writing of his own paper, and also in the sense of the earlier contributions, which were better known and disseminated than Meynert’sor Herbart’s. 109

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Different approaches and sources to the unconscious Edward von Hartmann (1842-1906) published in 1869 Philosophie des Unbewussten, which received wide public acclaim and made him famous overnight. In this book, Hartmann pays homage to his predecessors: Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer.Starting with the analysis of organic phenomena, he establishesan opposition between ‘repulsive’instincts, such as fear of death or disgust, on the one hand, and ‘sympathetic’instincts, such as motherly love or sexual love, on the other. Morality, aesthetics and mysticism are rooted in this opposition, according to sublimation which, if it is not studied as such by Hartmann, is present in German thought from Kant onwards, and casts its shadow over Freud’s concept (Prado de Oliveim, 1998,pp. 1117-26). Whereas for Hartmann the unconscious belongs to metaphysics and has no time representation, Freud keeps this last characteristic, but make it a metapsychologicalconcept. This opposition between two fundamentalgroups of ‘instincts’and its resolution in death seems to have marked psychoanalysis.* Indeed, considering Hartmann’scontribution, it is easy to conceive that Freud could wish for an Agnoszierung of the notion of unconscious, in order to rid it of any religious connotation. As for Freud’s contemporarieswho may have influenced his thinking and stimulated his attempt to theorize his concept of the unconscious, there is, of course, Bleuler who in 1906 published his Unbewusstes und Assoziation as a contribution to Jung’s studies on free associations, which appears in his Assoziationsstudien. Hirschman recalls it in his own contribution, ‘A General Presentation of Freud’sTheories (Propaganda among Physicians)’, to the meeting of the Vienna Psycho-analytical Society on 21 April 1909. He states there: The difficulties in understanding psychoneuroses are rooted in the concept of the unconscious and in infantile sexuality, which must be substantiated in terms of a purely empirical science. One would have to range quite far in enlarging upon the [concept of the] unconscious, and go into some detail about its virulent [illnessprovoking] role. At the same time one could bring forward some things that [it is] necessary [to know] about dreams, jokes and everyday life. Finally, one should touch on analysis briefly, as the only method by which one can learn something about the unconscious. About this [the unconscious], one would then have to mL ke the following statements:first of all, the extent to which it contains repressed material (Hirschmann, quoted in Bleuler: ‘Unbewusstesund Assoziation’ [‘Unconsciousand Association’]); secondly, that we cannot understand the unconscious without [a knowledge] of the phenomena of hypnotism, suggestion and dmble consciousness. (Nunberg and Federn, 1908-10,p. 209)>

Indeed, Freud’s interest in the unconscious is present from the beginning of his psychoanalytical researches. In 1895,when he is thinking about Emmy von N.’scure, Freud writes in a footnote:

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Her astonishment the evening before as its being so long since she had had a neckcramp was thus a premonition of an approaching condition which was already in preparation at the time and was perceived in the unconscious. This curious kind of premonition occurred regularly in the case already mentioned of Frau Cacilie M. If, for instance, while she was in the best of health, she said to me, ‘It’sa long time since I’ve been frightened of witches at night’, or, ‘howglad I am that I’ve not had pains in my eyes for such a long time’, I could feel sure that the following night a severe onset of her fear of witches would be making extra work for her nurse or that her next attack of pains in the eyes was on the point of beginning. On each occasion what was already present as a finished product in the unconscious was beginning to show through indistinctly. This idea, which emerged as a sudden notion, was worked over by the unsuspecting ‘official’consciousness (to use Charcot’s term) into a feeling of satisfaction, which swiftly and invariably turned out to be unjustified. Frau Cacilie, who was a highly intelligent woman, to whom I am indebted for much help in gaining an understanding of hysterical symptoms, herself pointed out to me that events of this kind may have given rise to superstitions about the danger of being boastful or of anticipating evils. (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95, p. 76)

The theory of the unconscious thus has undoutedly clinical grounds. If it is in this note that the term appears for the first time in Freud’s works it is important to appreciate that it occurs following Freud’sown questioning in a previous note, doubtless one of the longest notes in the history of literature. He brings back this questioning in its entirety in his 1915 paper (Freud, 1915c) several times rather than just once, as we shall see, i.e. the question that bears on the double inscription or the double register of representations and of affects or thoughts, as well as on the outcome of these double inscriptions or registers. In this note, Freud underlines the spaltung o f consciousness, the constitution of preconscious representations and their move from one register to another. He doesn’t dispose yet of the repression concept, but he underlines the tfausses associations’, which pursue certain representations of consciousness (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95, pp. 67-8). The Standard Edition editors, it seems to me, do not pay sufficient attention to the essentially clinical, and even auto-analytical grounds of the concept of unconscious, even if they point towards it: It should be made clear at once, however, that Freud’s interest in the assumption was never a philosophical one - though, no doubt, philosophical problems inevitably lay just around the comer. His interest was apructicul one. He found that without making that assumption he was unable to explain or even to describe a large variety of phenomena which he came across. By making it, on the other hand, he found the way open to an immensely fertile region of fresh knowledge. (Freud, 1915c, p. 162)

In fact the Standard Edition editors do not mention a single one of these ‘practical’ occasions where the concept of the unconscious has been so useful. On the contrary, they deal largely with the theoretical aspect that may be necessary for a theoretical understanding of Freud’s use of the concept.

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One may follow them, enriched by the theoretical progress made since then, which means coming back to clinical and auto-analytical considerations, in order to deploy Freud’s richness and complexity. For instance, these editors have written: Indeed, the whole basis of the repression theory of hysteria, and of the cathartic method of treatment, cried out for a psychological explanation, and it was only by the most contorted efforts that they had been accounted for neurologically in Part XI of the ‘Project’.A few years later, in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (Freud, 1900), a strange transformation has occurred: not only had the neurological account of psychology completely disappeared, but much of what Freud had written in the ‘Project’in terms of the nervous system now turned out to be valid and far more intelligible when translated into mental terms.

And they conclude (which I want to underline): The unconscious was established once and for all. (Freud, 1915c, p. 164)

The main theoretical aspect seem well established, but there is some unsatisfactory thinking. To suppose the unconscious was established once and for all seems to foreclose any surprise and, as such, any bewilderment as well as any fear, in the task of rediscovering it. And this is quite a problem. On the other hand, to understand a single path towards this discovery, always to be started anew, seems a way to launch again and again the experience of the unconscious. Thus, it is not in the Entwurf Einer Psychologie, of 1895, to which translators often add a ‘scientific’,that is, an almost geometrical model of the thought apparatus, to which the unconscious belongs, but earlier, in a letter to Fliess, when Freud tries to understand melancholy. He asks himself: ‘How does it come about that anaesthesia plays this role in melancholia?’ (Freud and Fleiss, 1985 [1887-19041, pp. 100-2). And, to answer this question, Freud draws up a first draft of the soul apparatus,where terms such as ego boundaries, external world, sexual object, sexual tension, psychic groups, etc. appear. This diagram, in its general character, is repeated and simplified in order to explain melancholy and mania in particular. Indeed, on 27 April 1895, Freud writes to Fliess that he is deeply involved in his project ‘Psychologyfor Neurologists’ and, the same year, on 25 May, he explains his inability to let go of his work: The main reason, however, was this: a man like me cannot live without a hobbyhorse, without a consuming passion, without - in Schiller’swords - a tyrant. I have found one. In its service I know no limits. It is psychology, which has always been my distant, beckoning goal, and which now, since I have come upon the problem of neuroses, has drawn so much nearer. I am tormented by two aims: to examine what shape the theory of mental functioning takes if one introduces quantitative considerations, a sort of economics of nerve forces; and, second, to peel off from psychopathology a gain for normal psychology. Actually, a satisfactory general conception of neuropsychotic disturbances is impossible if one cannot link it with


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clear assumptions about normal mental processes. (Freud quoted in Masson, 1985, p. 129)

The project for a ‘Psychologyfor Neurologists’ is only partly inspired by the geometric model which appears in the letter to Fliess, even if the unconscious clearly appears once again. It is also truly a psychological project even if neurology functions as a metaphor, any truly neurological preoccupation being far from Freud’s mind at the time. Last, but not least, the unconscious is clearly linked to dreams in this text (Freud, 1950[1895], pp. 341-3). The best example and the conclusion of Freud’s reflections at this time appear in one of his letters to Fliess written at the end of the following year, and are much more explicit than anything he had written before (Freud and Fleiss, 1985 [ 1887- 19041,pp. 207- 15). This letter is indeed a true draft of the well-known Chapter 7 of Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. He states there the whole of his topographical model of the psychic apparatus and his psychological project is much clearer. In ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, Freud once more works on his model, in order to remove any reference to the Fliess periods, which he still acknowledged in his letter. It is in this sense alone that ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ presents a finished version of the topographical aspect of his metapsychology and, thus, of the topographical make-up of the unconscious. Perception appears at one end of the thought apparatus; the accumulation of mnemonic traces at this end will be the source of the unconscious, and from there on some of these traces may become preconscious at the other end of the apparatus, just before the motor discharge, which brings back to the external world which first came from it as perception (Freud, 1953 [ 1900-11, pp. 537-41). Moreover, some elements belonging to perception proper may inscribe themselves directly on the preconscious register. The letters to Fliess, as well as the project for a psychology, were both entangled with transference and clinical preoccupations. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ is mingled with Freud’s mourning of his father, but also with the mourning of the end of a friendship. This book is the most important effort in auto-analysisever to have been accomplished.

The paper on the unconscious 1912 was a year when Freud published several important writings. ‘Totem and Taboo’, certainly, but also ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychology of Love)’, ‘Recommendationsto Physicians Practising PsychoAnalysis’, “Qpes of Onset of Neurosis’, ‘Contributions to a Discussion on Masturbation’ (this last subject being the one most frequently discussed at the Vienna Psycho-analyticalSociety, where nine meetings had been devoted to the question, which looked in a novel way at the subjects of masturbation,

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secrecy and institutional life), and, finally, ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’. In several respects the 1915c paper on the subject is a revised version of this last one. In the same year there was a rupture between Freud and Stekel, just when Freud was terminating his rupture with Adler and starting to split from Jung. Once more, his thoughts on the unconscious were linked to mourning. On 2 January 1912,he wrote to Abraham: ‘For myself1have no great expectations; gloomy times lie ahead, and recognition will probably come only for the next generation’ (Freud and Abraham, 1907-25, p. 145). Just after splitting from his first student, Stekel, Freud created the Internationale Zeitschrvt far arztZiche Psychoanalyse, in the same year. So many writings, so many initiatives, and this is what he called a ‘darkperiod’! This same year, directly in English, responding to a request from the Society for Psychical Research of London, Freud wrote a short text with the title ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’.This text already presented the essentials of what Freud would develop later, in 1915, and mainly proposes an approach to the thinking apparatus and the unconscious which takes into consideration its topological, dynamic and descriptive aspects. The Standard Edition editors wrote: The present account is both more elaborate and clearer than the much shorter one given in Section I1 of the great paper. For there only two uses are differentiated, the ‘descriptive’and the ‘systematic’;and no plain distinction appears to be made between the latter and the ‘dynamic’- the term which in the present paper is applied to the repressed unconscious.(Freud, 1912c,p. 258)

And indeed they are quite right! This short, effectively very clear, text starts with a proposition: Now let us call ‘conscious’the conception which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious’.As for latent conceptions, if we have any reason to suppose that they exist in the mind - as we had in the case of memory - let them be denoted by the term ‘unconscious’.(ibid., p. 260)

What allows him to insist on this difference, besides memory and associations, is post-hypnotic suggestion and mainly the experience of Bernheim in France, which Freud describes (ibid., p. 261). This experience allows him to differentiate a dynamic approach of the unconscious from its sole description. The dynamic approach recognizes the existence of thoughts kept away from the conscious despite their intensity and their activity. Thus, besides conscious and unconscious mental states, Freud reaffirms the existence of preconscious states, the existence of which was already stated in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. He also returns to his 1901 thesis, according to which the psychic activity is unconscious at the beginning and either remains as such or follows its path


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towards consciousness according to the resistances it meets (or not), coming from different psychic representations. Freud even compares the relationship between the unconscious and conscious to the relation that exists between the positive and negative when a photo is developed. It is interesting to spot the several links made by Freud between these two notions, as when he states that neurosis is the ‘negative’ of perversion, conceived as ‘positive’(Freud and Fliess, 1887-1904, p. 22n.jMoreover, not only does the unconscious become conscious, but a reverse movement also often happens, when elements which belong to consciousness return to the realm of the unconscious, for instance the latent thoughts of dreams. At the end of this text, Freud makes two important statements: the frst of them questions the laws of unconscious thought, in as much as they are different from those of conscious thought; the second statement bears on the independent nature of the unconscious system. He proposes to designate it by three letters - ‘Ucs’or, in German, ‘Ubw’.This proposition had already been stated on a letter to Fliess at the end of 1896. The paper in the unconscious under scrutiny is divided into seven chapters, bearing on the justification for such a concept, on the various meanings of the term and the topographical point of view, on unconscious emotions, the topographical and dynamics of repression, on the special characteristics of the Ucs system, on the communication between the two systems, i.e. the unconscious and the conscious, and, finally, on the assessment of the unconscious. These chapters are of unequal importance and present a thesis previously developed in an unequal manner. The enthusiasm showed by Freud in his 1 April letter to Lou Andreas-Salome is highly contentious. Freud had already established an ‘agnostization’of the unconscious before his new text and it is remarkable how Freud manages never to quote any of his predecessors or contemporaries dealing with the same concept, not even to refute them. Nevertheless this text has considerable importance: it represents a great effort to answer a set of questions which appears often enough in Freud’s works: Can a single thing exist simultaneously in several different places and manifest itself in several different ways? And also: can two or more different things occupy simultaneouslya single place and manifest themselves in similar modes? The answer to these questions is always positive. The concept of overdetermination or of multiple determinations is the basis for this answer and brings about all its ramifications.This concept, one of the most revolutionary in Freud’s thought, remains largely unexplored, not only in psychoanalysis, but generally. Thus, the introduction to this 1915 text begins with a comparison between the repressed and the unconscious. At once, it enlarges the realm of the unconscious which is not restricted to the repressed, which raises a new question: ‘How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious?’(Freud, 1915c, p. 166). There are several answers. The first of them: there is a

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translation in progress between the unconscious and the conscious. It would be hard to over emphasize the overwhelming importance of the notion of translation in Freud‘s work. This same first chapter offers a second answer to the question at issue, an answer which itself is divided into two parts: Consciousness makes each of us aware only of his own stares of mind; that other people, too, possess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their observable utterances and actions, in order to make this behaviour of theirs intelligible to us. ... This inference (or this identification) was formerly extended by the ego to other human beings, to animals, plants, inanimate objects and to the world at large ... Psychc-analysis demands nothing more than that we should apply this process of inference to ourselves also ... If we do this, we must say: all the acts and manifestations which I notice in myself and do not know how to link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they belonged to someone else: they are to be explained by a mental life ascribed to this other person. (ibid., p. 169)

And further: In psycho-analysis there is no choice for us but to assert that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and to liken the perception of them by means of consciousness to the perception of the external world by means of the senseorgans. (ibid., p. 171)

These constitute in fact two different answers: the first one states the importance of analogical procedures and the second one states the possibility of applying these procedures to the actual relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. But from the start of the chapter the reader must understand that, concerning psychoanalysis, important facts to be observed are essentiallyparapraxis, dreams, symptoms and compulsions, as well as ‘ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how’ (ibid., pp. 166-7). Thus, the chapter on the justification of the concept of the unconscious, much more than simply presenting a list of facts that allow the establishment of a hypothesis, also introduces a methodology to observe these facts, that is, translations, analogies and the perception of one’s own self as an element of the external world. I want to underline the analogy of the endopsychic perception and the perception of the rest of the world. It also relates to data that are important to the understanding of contemporary psychoanalytical techniques. Freud states: ‘Today, our critical judgment is already in doubt on the question of consciousness in animals; we refuse to admit it in plants and we regard the assumption of its existence in inanimate matter as mysticism’ (ibid., p. 169). But the problem no longer seems pertinent. Such an approach to mysticism seems linked some how to reductionism. Nowadays, based on the psychoanalytical knowledge of psychosis, far from the science characteristic


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of Freud’s times, it appears that those beliefs correspond to initials steps in recognizing oneself as a human being, after a recognition of oneself as belonging to the world and, thus, to inanimate and vegetal realms. The second chapter deals with the several meanings of the concept of unconscious and the topographical approach. This chapter now seems to be quite problematic. As the British editors of the Standard Edition have pointed out, this chapter is poorer than the 1912cpaper, because now ‘only two uses [of the concept] are differentiated, the “descriptive”and the “systematic”; and no plain distinction appears to be made between the latter and the “dynamic”’(ibid., p. 164) but also because the articulation between the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious is well established and has been developed for a long tme. If this chapter is still of interest, it is due to his clinical propositions,which appear in one of its last paragraphs. Freud writes: If we communicate to a patient some idea which he has at one time repressed but which we have discovered in him, our telling him makes at first no change in his mental condition. Above all, it does not remove the repression nor undo its effects, as might perhaps be expected from the fact that the previously unconscious idea has now become conscious. On the contrary, all that we shall achieve at first will be a fresh rejection of the repressed idea. But now the patient has in actual fact the same idea in two forms in different places in his mental apparatus: first, he has the conscious memory of the auditory trace of the idea, conveyed in what we told him; and secondly, he also has - as we know for certain - the unconscious memory of his experience as it was in its earlier form. Actually there is no lifting of the repression until the conscious idea, after the resistances have been overcome, has entered into connection with the unconscious memory-trace. It is only through the making conscious of the latter itself that success is achieved. On superficial consideration this would seem to show that conscious and unconscious ideas are distinct registrations, topographically separated, of the same content. But a moment’s reflection shows that the identity of the information given to the patient with his repressed memory is only apparent. To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things, even thought the content of both is the same. (ibid., pp. 175-6)

The remarks about the difference and on the links between the experience one has gone through and that one has heard about are not new. They first appear in 1897, when these links are even more developed than when they appear again in 1915 . In 1897, Freud mentions them twice: first in a letter of 16 May to Fliess, when he states, ‘The fantasies derive, as in hysteria, from what has been heard and understood subsequently’. In this statement we can read that there is a temporal distance between the source of the nachtraglichkeeit (deferred action) and the nachtraglich itself and, in the M Draft, included in a letter a few days later to his then friend, the following reformulation: ‘Fantasies arise from an unconscious combination of things experienced and heard, according to certain tendencies’ (Freud and Fleiss, 1985 [1887-19041, pp. 243 and 247).

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The link between what has been heard and what has been experienced is weaker in 1915. What has been heard now becomes that which the patient hears from the analyst. Freud does not make it clear that this is added to what he has heard at another time, in his own ‘foreigncountry’ of childhood. This new definition seems to be the basis of a method where the analyst’s sole preoccupation becomes the transference interpretation, excluding any effort of reconstruction based on memories or on new association. Freud’s clinical knowledge leads to the questioning of the existence of unconscious emotions in the third chapter, and facing the complexity of possible answers. It is impossible, indeed, to speak of ‘unconsciousfeelings’, as much as it is impossible to speak of unconscious drives, given that only the drive representations come to be inscribed in the unconscious. Drives themselves belong to the biological realm. Nevertheless, as the psychoanalyst’s usual language puts forward the notion of unconscious feelings, it is as well to try to search for the correspondence between their way of speaking and the reality they thus seek to describe. So, indeed, there is a certain parallelism between drives and emotions, for these have a biological basis (the heart beats faster, sweat, etc.). On the other hand, in the conscious system, feelings have their own representations. Affects themselves may correspond to a large extent to a translation of the drive in something accessible to consciousness: we may say that as long as the system Cs. controls affectivity and motility, the mental condition of the person in question is spoken of as normal ... Whereas the control by the Cs. over voluntary motility is firmly rooted, regularly withstands the onslaught of neurosis and only breaks down in psychosis, control of the Cs. over the development of affects is less secure. (Freud, 1915c,p. 179)

This curious remark is made clear in a footnote: Affectivity manifests itself essentially in motor (secretory and vaso-motor) discharge resulting in an (internal) alteration of the subject’s own body without reference to the external world; motility, in actions designed to effect changes in the external world. (ibid., p. 179)

It remains a matter of argument and research to establish whether affects are linked to external events. This third chapter prepares the ground for the following one, and is quite rich for psychoanalyticalclinical reflection. It bears on repression, a founding concept, and its title is ‘Topography and Dynamics of Repression’. Repression, states Freud, corresponds to a ‘withdrawal of cathexis; but the question is, in which system does the withdrawal take place and to which system does the cathexis that is withdrawn belong?’(ibid., p. 180). When he tackles these questions, Freud quotes extensively from another of his articles which also appears in ‘Papers on Metapsychology’ and whose

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title is ‘Repression’.It is pertinent to ask whether it is really necessary to introduce in a study on the unconscious a section devoted to repression, when the author has just presented a whole study on the question a few pages earlier. To ask it is pertinent as the editors of the Standard Edition seem to overlook two important aspects of the working through of Freudian theory on these issues when they introduce the paper on repression and in their introduction to the papers on the unconscious. Repression, Freud states here, is divided into two distinct moments: first, aprimmy repression, when splitting between the drive occurs in which access to the conscious is forbidden and the representation of this drive. During this phase, afixation (italics in Freud’spaper) occurs. The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. (ibid., p. 148)

In both papers, the one from the fourth chapter on the unconscious and the other one, on repression proper, the same clinical examples are described: the action of repression in anxiety hysteria, in conversion hysteria, and on obsessional neurosis (ibid., pp. 155-7, 182-5). The editors of the Standard Edition, when introducing the paper on repression, reduce its action to the anxiety neurosis, where, according to Freud, repression is akin to defences. And, above all, in their introduction of the paper on the unconscious, they also introduce the confusion between the unconscious and metapsychology (ibid., pp 143-5, 161-5). But the most complete theory of Freud’s on repression from a clinical point of view is presented in his text on Schreber, of 191 1, which follows the author’s working through it and elaborating on it in his exchange of letters with Jung and Ferenczi, whereas the first Freudian metapsychological approaches derive from his correspondence on melancholy with Fliess and Abraham (Prado de Oliveira, 1997). Paranoia and melancholy are subjects that necessitate new methods of thought, namely psychoanalytical theory and the metapsychological approach of the mind, where repression plays a major part. Metapsychology should not be confused with its study subjects, unconscious or conscious, symptomsor fantasy. Freud underlies this in this fourth chapter in almost the same terms that he used in his letters to Abraham: I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychological presentation. (Freud, 1915c, p. 181)

To be precise: ‘it’means here the description of minds of work and not the mind or the work itself. A mind procedure or mind instance alone is never

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‘metapsychological’;only our way of thinking about it or how we describe its existence can be. It is interesting to compare clinical examples which appear in the paper on repression and the way Freud tackles them in this part of his text on the unconscious. After comparing repression with his three major neuroses at that time - anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis - in his paper on the unconscious he simply describes the application of the mode of repression on anxiety neurosis to the two other forms of mental disorder. Freud in his fifth chapter returns to the study of the unconscious proper. There he defines the special characteristics of the system Ucs. This is an extraordinary part of the paper under scrutiny: it presents a very concise reading of several other of his papers on the unconscious. For instance, when he states that ‘the nucleus of the Ucs. consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses’ (ibid., p. l86), or when he summarizes the dream-work,that is, no negation, displacement, condensation, timelessness, submission to the pleasure principle, replacement of external to internal reality, all those statements appear for the first time in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. One can argue that the dream is not the unconscious. Nevertheless, they share many features, according to Freud’s defmitions of them. Still, after defrning the Ucs characteristics, Freud moves on and establishes the main features of the Pcs, in such a way that the former are defined, defmitively, by their opposition to the latter. Freud recognizes this at once, stating: The full significance of the characteristics of the system Ucs. described above could only be appreciated by us if we were to contrast and compare them with those of the system Pcs. (ibid., p. 188).

And he goes on to explain in detail the main features of the Pcs: to institute communication between the content of representations in such a way that they may influence one another, to organize these contents according to time, to introduce censure or even several layers of censorship, to institute reality testing and the reality principle and, finally, to promote the development of memory as opposed to memory-traces, which belong uniquely to the inscription of experiences of the unconscious. This postulate of memory-traces is curious and may question some of Freud’s statements in this fifth chapter as well as many traditional ways to approach metapsychology, psychoanalysis or its techniques. Indeed, during the discussion of the relationship between the two systems of Ucs and Pcs, the subject of the sixth chapter of his paper, when he strives to establish the bridges between them and the conscious, as well as the hypothesis of several layers of censorship, Freud doesn’t hesitate to point out:


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It would nevertheless be wrong to imagine that the Ucs. remains at rest while the whole work of the mind is performed by the Pcs. - that the Ucs. is something finished with, a vestigial organ, a residuum from the process of development. It is wrong also to suppose that communication between the two systems is confined to the act of repression, with the Pcs. casting everything that seems disturbing to it into the abyss of the Ucs. On the contrary, the Ucs. is alive and capable of development and maintains a number of other relations with the Pcs., amongst them that of co-operation. In brief, it must be said that the Ucs. is continued into what are known as derivatives, that it is accessible to the impressions of life, that it constantly influences the Pcs., and is even, for its part, subjected to influences from the Pcs. (ibid., p. 190, emphasis added)

When Freud states that the rule of the pleasure principle or the substitution of external reality by internal reality is characteristics of the unconscious, he seems to forget his own statement according to which, in large measure, it is this same ‘external reality’ which nourishes the ‘internal reality’, and thus the distinction between ‘internal’and ‘external’deserves to be renewed and studied again and again, beginning with the precise evaluation of what has already been done in order to get an idea of who, tried to maintain a very tight and impermeable distinction between these two realms, and how, on the one hand; and who has tried to point the circulation and movements occurring between them, and how. This last Freudian conception is stated again and again: But the Ucs. is a k o affected by experiences originating from external percep tion. Normally all the paths from perception to the Ucs. remain open, and only those leading on from the Ucs. are subject to blocking by repression. (ibid., p. 194, emphasis added)

In the course of these last two parts of his paper, the clinical examples introduced by Freud change in nature. They no longer belong to the realm of neurosis, but to the domain of the unconscious and its derivatives, that is, dreams and fantasies, symptoms and general pathology, besides considerations on the psychoanalytical techniques that render it fully dependent of the conscious. The frfth chapter ends thus: Moreover, in human beings we must be prepared to find possible pathological conditions under which the two systems alter, or even exchange, both their content and their characteristics.’(ibid., p. 189)

Likewise, towards the end of his sixth chapter, Freud writes: A complete divergence of their trends, a total severance of the two systems, is what above all characterizes a condition of illness. (ibid., p. 194)

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Thus, it is no surprise that the seventh and last chapter of this paper, entitled ‘Assessment of the Unconscious’, is entirely devoted to the study and discussion of schizophrenia, based on clinical cases and theories presented by Victor Tausk which Freud makes his own. The revolutionary propositions formulated then can be resumed: schizophrenics deal with words as if they were things; in parallel to this, schizophrenics develop ‘languageof organs’, which is close to hypochondria. The importance of Tausk to the history of the analytical theory should not be overlooked. It is not enough to remember that the projective identification concept derives from his thoughts about his clinical experience and that Bion’s studies on the schizophrenic way of thinking and using words are due to him. Nevertheless, Freud underlines his own and his closest followers’ priority when he thinks he has found in these theses arguments to solve the problem he has formulated about ‘double inscription’.He states: We now seem to know all at once what the difference is between a conscious and

an unconscious presentation.The two are not, as we supposed, different registrations of the same content in different psychical localities, nor yet different functional states of cathexis in the same locality; but the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone.’ (ibid., p. 201)

It is remarkable that Freud first announces his paper on the unconscious to Lou AndreasSalome and then finishes it with a long consideration of Tausk’s thesis and clinical experience. Indeed, this young analyst had received many favours from Andreas-Salome. Freud’s paper thus seems to stem from a double transference towards one or another of these two former lovers, who marked his life, one replacing the other in his own thoughts (Gay, 1991, pp. 220 and 448), just like the unconscious itself, which stems from elements that are excluded from conscious life or are unable to obtain access to it, either because they are too dangerous or because they seem to be useless.

Notes 1. For an examination of Hartmann’s and Freud’s thoughts, see Whyte (1974) and Bres (1985). 2. Brackets in the text added by the editors. 3. For instance, in his letter to Fliess, of 24 January 1897: ‘I am beginning to grasp an idea: it is as though in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative ...’ And again: ‘Thus symptoms are formed in part at the cost of abnormal sexuality; neuroses are, so to say, the negative ofperuersions. (Freud, 1905, p. 165). From what Freud writes about the relationship

‘TheUnconscious’

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between the unconscious and the conscious, we should expect a conception that would go the other way round.

References Andreas-SalomC,L (1912-13) Correspondance avec Sigmund Freud. In Journal d’une annee (1912-1913), trans. L. Jumel. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Bleuler E (1906) Unbewusstes und Assoziation. In CG Jung (ed.), Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien.Leipzig: Barth, 7-145. Bres Y (1985) Hanmann et I’inconscient romantique. In Critique des raisons psychanalytiques. Paris: PUF, 1985. Breuer J, Freud S (1985[1893-95]), Studies on Hysteria. SE 2. Freud S (1900-1) The Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4. Freud S (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7. Freud S (1911) Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides). SE 12. Freud S (1912a) Contributions to a Discussion on Masturbation. SE 12. Freud S (1912b) The Dynamics ofTransference. SE 12. Freud S (1912~)A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis. SE 12. Freud S (1912d) On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychologyof Love). SE 11. Freud S (1912e) Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis. SE 12. Freud S (19120 Types of Onset of Neurosis. SE 12. Freud S (1913[1912-131) Totem and Taboo. SE 13. Freud S (1915a) Papers on Metapsychology. SE 14. Freud S (1915b) Repression. SE 14. Freud S (1915~)The Unconscious. SE 14. Freud S (1950[ 18951) Project for a ScientificPsychology. SE 1. Freud S, Abraham K (1907-25) Correspondence. London: Karnac, 2002. Freud S, Fliess W (1985 [ 1887-19041) The Complete Letters. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. GayP (1991) Freud, une vie. Paris: Hachette. Hartmann E von (1869) Philosophie des Unbewussten. Versuch einer Weltanschauung. Berlin: Carl Duncker, repr. 1904. Hirschmann E (1909) A General Presentation of Freud’s Theories (Propaganda among Physicians).In H Nunberg and E Federn (eds), Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 21 April 1909, International University Press, 1967. Masson JM (1985) The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nunberg H, Federn E (eds) (1908-10) Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vol. 11, trans. by M Nunberg. NewYork: International Universities Press, Inc. Pfeiffer E (ed.) (1972) Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-SalomC Letters. London: Hogarth Press. Prado de Oliveira LE (1998) Sublimation et symbolisation: retrouvaille et fetes. In A Eiguer, C Leprince, F Baruch, La fete de famille, Paris: In Press Editions, 1998. Whyte LL (1974) The unconscious in history. Contemp. Psychoanal. 10: 379-85.

7 The wound, the bow and the shadow of the object: notes on Freud’s ‘Mourning

and Melancholia’ Introduction Consider these quotes from ‘Mourningand Melancholia’: Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. (Freud, 1915[19171,p. 249)

And, The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it. (ibid., pp. 249-50)

And consider this: If the love for the object - a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up - takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. [...I It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting - and so dangerous. So immense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognize as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges as a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruction. [...I The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object - cathexis, it can treat itself as an object - if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world. (ibid., pp. 251-2)

phis has the emotional atmosphere of my second quote above: cannibalistic devouring, ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, as it were, goes with the sadistic abusing and killing of the object.) 124

Notes on Freud’s ‘Mourningand Melancholia’

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And this from ‘The Ego and the Id’: The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved. To the ego, therefore, living means the same as being loved - being loved by the super-ego,which here again appears as the representative of the id. The superego fulfils the same function of protecting and saving that was Willed in earlier days by the father and later by Providence or Destiny. But, when the ego finds itself in an excessive real danger which it believes itself unable to overcome by its own strength, it is bound to draw the same conclusion. It sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die. Here, moreover, is once again the same situation as that which underlay the first great anxiety-state of birth and the infantile anxiety of longing - the anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother. (Freud, 1923, p. 58)

(This has the colouring of the first quote: here we are in a dark, bleak, shadowy world, the ego unloved, like a baby abandoned by its mother, lets itself die.) These two pairs of quotes - with their completely different tones, of red and black, as it were, signwing two very different affects: rage and sorrow communicate the contrast between the mental attitudes of passive suffering and of violently active attack, sadness and fury, despair and murderousness. In my view, together they represent the essence of the problem of melancholia; they will be therefore at the centre of my discussion of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, one of Freud’s most fundamental and most revolutionary works. Although my last quotation comes from a paper written about eight years later, I am using it here because I think this is the view on suicide that would match my first quotation, from ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, about the relationship between the self and the object in melancholia: when the object is felt to be irretrievably lost, its shadow falls on the ego, shaping it to its image; through identification, the ego becomes the object. But this description, and the passive ‘lets itself die’, linked with the longing for a mother which, it is implied, is felt to have gone forever, conveys a feeling that it is the dark shadow of the object’s absence which takes over the ego: its negative, absence as the presence of infinite darkness. We have here an atmosphere of sorrow and bleakness, which I think links with the sense of suicide as ‘admitting only one explanation’ (in this particular scenario, of course): feeling abandoned by the object (the internalized object, the superego) the ego dies of sorrow. (Note that the ‘forsaken’object in the ‘shadow’ quote, corresponds, in the feeling tone of the writing, to the forsaken self of the description in ‘The Ego and the Id’.) Freud didn’t change his mind about the other scenario - the sadistic superego murdering the ego in identification with the abandoning object; but here he is describing something else: a different mental atmosphere. The conceptualization of suicide, and of melancholic suffering, as coming from

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aggression to the object stays central to his theory until the end (see for example his description of the mechanism of melancholia in New Introductory Lectures (1933)); although of course the understanding of this phenomenon became sharper and clearer after the introduction of the theory of the death instinct (Freud, 1920). But the fact that these different scenarios, while existing simultaneously in the mind, have, each, the capacity to dominate the mind entirely, however briefly, I think is illustrated by the emphatic way Freud writes about melancholia and death: the ego can kill itself only ifowing to the return of the object cathexis, it can treat itself as an object - if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object. (Freud, 1915, p 252; emphasis added)

And. The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels hated and persecuted by the object, instead of loved. I...] It sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die’.(Freud, 1923, p 58; emphasis added)

The melancholic patient will be only murderous, and this will seem an absolute state: ‘So immense is the ego’s self-love [...I that we cannot conceive how [it] can consent to its own destruction’ (Freud, 1915);or only despairing and so utterly unlovable that death is the only remedy; these states have, whilst they last - seconds, or long stretches of time - an all-encompassing quality to them. It is up to the analyst to keep them both in mind.

‘Mourning and Melancholia’ In a letter to Fliess probably dated January 1895, in what came to be called ‘Draft G’ (Freud, 1950, p. 200) on ‘Melancholia’,where Freud worked out a neurological explanation for this illness, he was already connecting melancholia to mourning: ‘The affect corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning - that is, longing for something lost. Thus in melancholia it must be a question of a loss - a loss in instinctual life.’ He links melancholia to sexual anaesthesia, shown ‘by the existence of a type of women, very demanding psychically,in whom longing easily changes over into melancholia and who are anaesthetic’. So, although sexuality and its vicissitudes are absolutely at the centre of his conception of mental functioning at this point, the question of the importance of loss is already formulated - here, the loss is of libido rather than of the object; but in the ‘very demanding type of woman’, in whom longing becomes melancholia, I think it is possible to perceive the beginning of the idea of object loss and of what would become later an excessive oral dependence on the object as characteristics of the melancholic.


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In Draft N, from May 1897 (ibid., p. 254), he states: Hostile impulses against the parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integral constituent of the neuroses. They come to light consciously as obsessional ideas. In paranoia what is worst in delusions of persecution [...I corresponds to these impulses. They are repressed at times when compassion for the parents is active - at times of their illness or death. On such occasions it is a manifestation of mourning to reproach oneself for their death (what is known as melancholia) or to punish oneself in a hysterical fashion (through the medium of the idea of retribution) with the same states [of illness] that they have had. The identification which occurs here, as we can see, is nothing other than a mode of thinking and does not relieve us of the necessity of looking for a motive.

Melancholia is therefore a consequence of unconscious hostility and the sense of guilt that accompanies it; and of course unconscious identification with the lost object, which will become central to the understanding of melancholic illness in ‘Mourningand Melancholia’,is also adumbrated in this paragraph (although here only in relation to hysteria); but, as Strachey comments, melancholia is scarcely mentioned again before ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,with the exception of the 1910 discussion on suicide. In 1911, Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s earliest collaborators and a brilliant theoretician and clinician, published his paper ‘Notes on the Psycho-AnalyticalInvestigation and Treatment of Manic-DepressiveInsanity and Allied Conditions’. In it he draws attention to the melancholic’s unconscious ambivalence to the object, with a predominance of hatred over love; and he traces the ‘feelingsof inadequacy’which the melancholic suffers to this ‘discomforting internal perception’ (Abraham, 191 1 , pp. 144-5): the melancholic suffers from an unconscious feeling of being incapable of loving, and feeling unlovable is a consequence of this. If we link this back to my quote from Draft G, we could say that what Freud calls ‘loss in instinctual life’, loss of libido, can be seen here as the loss of the capacity to love. The loved object is hated for its cruel desertion; but the ego perceiving itself as full of hatred for the object is also felt to be unlovable. Ambivalence, and the oral nature of the relation to the object, of course become central points in Freud’sdiscussion of melancholia. The unconscious perception of an inability to love will also connect to Freud’s understanding of narcissism, about which he wrote the great paper (1914) that immediately precedes ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. But one of the most important contributions in this paper is the understanding that the narcissistic withdrawal from the object doesn’t really mean that the attachment to the object is diminished or extinguished; on the contrary, there is in fact a tremendously possessive, intense relationship with the object taking place unconsciously in the internal world. It is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal

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position, not even indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. (Freud, 1915, p. 244)

This important statement about human nature here addresses not only the mourner, but also the melancholic’s unconscious incapacity to give up a possessive attachment to the lost object. The process of mourning, a healthy and necessary response to serious loss, is a striking example of how a person who has ceased to exist in the external world continues to exist in the mind with total reality - the mourner relates intensely, in the present, to the dead person, and often feels that the dead person is actively relating to him. In a similar way, melancholia is ‘related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness’ (ibid., p. 245) and a relationship with the lost object is taking place in the present in the unconscious. But while in mourning the ego slowly and extremely painfully detaches itself ‘bit-by-bit’from the object, thus eventually accepting that the object has ceased to exist, and ends up by returning love to other objects in external reality, what characterizes melancholia is exactly the opposite, the unconscious refusal to let the object go. Freud’s assumption is that in the melancholic the relationship with the object is based originally on a narcissistic object choice, leaving the path open to a regression to narcissistic withdrawal. He states the apparently paradoxical idea that one of the preconditionsfor melancholia is that a strong fixation in the object must be present in conjunctionwith ‘an object cathexis [with] little power of resistance’ (ibid., p. 249). The link with the external object is easily lost, but the withdrawal into an apparently objectless state implies in fact an internal, powerfully possessive relationship with the object which now resides only in the inner world. (In a way, one could say that it is only the object in the mind who can be possessed entirely - any connection in reality, however tyrannical, implies some degree of lack of control, however minimal.) But the most important point in the paper, the one which changed our understanding of the human mind fundamentally, starts with one of Freud’s typical disclaimers: ‘There is one observation, not at all difficult to make ...’ (ibid., p. 248). He goes on to describe the unconscious mechanism which gives rise to melancholia: an object relationship was shattered; the object cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end: but the free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to form an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object loss was transformed into an ego loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (ibid., p. 249)


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The mechanism of replacing an object-cathexis by an identificationvia the introjection of the object had first been described by Freud in ‘Leonardo’ (1910) to explain a particular form of homosexuality (identification with the mother, and taking as a love-object someone representing an aspect of the self). But in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and in the further development of the understanding of the superego, introjections and identifications become part of normal development: ‘The character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and it contains the history of those objectchoices’ (Freud, 1923). The trigger for the onset of melancholia, the loss of the object, becomes in unconscious phantasy the total possession of the object in internal reality; this is achieved by the process of incorporation - which can be described either as an active devouring of the object, or as a more passive being taken over by its shadow - followed by identification: part of the ego becomes the object; this is a hated love object, felt to have been cruel, and now to be subjected to cruelty by ‘the critical activity of the ego’. This critical activity, the function of the ‘special psychic agency’ put forward in the paper on narcissism (Freud, 1914), is the soon to be named superego, which will be seen to be formed also by the introjection of an object in external reality who will now reside in the mind. The superego will not just be a function or an entity (conscience) but will also be like a ‘person’ inhabiting the internal world and having relationships of particular kinds with the different aspects of the self (like a censorious father, or an unloving mother). So: once it becomes clear how the superego is formed - by introjection and identification with parental authority - the unconscious conflict of the melancholic can be re-described; the phrase: ‘In this way an object-losswas transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification’(Freud, 1915, p. 249), could then become: ‘into a cleavage between the critical activity of [a part of the ego altered by identification with an introjected object] and the ego as altered by identification [with another introjected object]’. This is the beginning of the theory of internal object relations: the inner world conceptualized as a real, three-dimensional space where self and object have multifaceted, variously changeable relationshipswith each other: The melancholic’serotic cathexis in regard to his object has thus undergone a double vicissitude: part of it has regressed to identification, but the other part, under the influence of the conflict due to ambivalence, has been carried back to the stage of sadism which is nearer to that conflict (i.e., oral sadism). (ibid., pp. 251-2)

The important point here is that the regression to this mode of relating to the object - to a relationship which is primitive and dominated by hostility - has

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consequences for the kind of relationship that is formed in the inner world with the object - and for the kind of object that is therefore felt to inhabit the inner world. In this world accusations come from bitterness at the offence, but also from sadism and the wish to torment; incorporating through cannibalism causes constant pain to the object and to the self identified with it: biting pain, tearing-apart pain - but also sorrow: ‘the shadow of the object’. But how do these link together, how do they move from one to the other? Is ‘cannibalism’the angry and frightened early response of a baby to unexpected loss (the breast felt to be mine is suddenly not mine, I must catch it, swallow it, make it mine again!) and is the ‘shadow’ - an identification based on the passive receiving of the object, being possessed by it rather than possessing it - more connected to unconscious guilt as well as the sadness of the abandonment?And is the guilt caused by the pain inflicted on the object by the angry possessiveness, and the sadness about not being the only object of love, or not being entirely at one with the loved object? As we saw, from the beginning of his work Freud connected melancholia both to loss of the object and to hostility to the object; in the ‘New Introductory Lectures’ of 1933 he says, when talking about the unconscious sense of guilt: There is no doubt that, when the super-ego was first instituted, in equipping that agency use was made of a piece of the child’s aggressiveness towards his parents for which he was unable to effect a discharge outwards on account of his erotic furation as well as of external difficulties; and for that reason the severity of the super-ego need not simply correspond to the strictness of the upbringing. (Freud, 1933, p. 109)

Sadism causes guilt, and guilt causes sadism. ‘People in whom this unconscious sense of guilt is excessively strong betray themselves in analytic treatment by the negative therapeutic reaction which is so disagreeable from the prognostic point of view’ (ibid, p. 109). What is ‘so disagreeable’ in the counter-transference, when experiencing the melancholic world of the patient, is the tyrannical nature of the immobilization caused by the need to keep the object (the internal one, and also the analyst in the transference) forever imprisoned. The oral phase of the libido, with its particular form of aggression, and its intense dependence on the object and consequent possessiveness, is throughout emphasized in the discussion of melancholia. In this paper Freud mentions anal eroticism en passant: As regards one particular striking feature of melancholia that we have mentioned [ibid., p. 2481, the prominence of the fear of becoming poor, it seems plausible to suppose that it is derived from anal erotism which has been torn out of its context and altered in a regressive sense.


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In his seminal 1924 paper, Abraham makes full use of the understanding of anality in relation to melancholia differentiating between controlling and holding on to the object (which he considers to be the second stage of the anal phase, characteristic of the obsessional neurotic), and expelling, getting rid of it, which is a regression to the first stage of the anal phase, and characteristic of the melancholic. In primitive states of mind, the object is felt to be a possession of the self, and in the unconscious it is treated like faeces. The melancholic expels its object and loses it, and the obsessional neurotic has a constipated relationship to it. This second stage he links with the beginning of the capacity to preserve the object, which in normal development will become concern for the object felt to have a separate existence of its own. But of course one must keep in mind that in melancholia the object who has been lost or got rid of in the outside world, is possessively held on to in the internal world; and that this object, which is constantly being tortured and killed, is not the hated, thoroughly bad object: it is always the hated love object. ‘If the love for the object - a love which cannot be given up although the object itself is given up - takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitute object (ibid., p. 251). The (rather megalomanic) feeling of the melancholic that he is the worst person in the world corresponds therefore both to his identificationwith the hated love object felt indeed to be the worst person in the world - the source of all suffering - but also with the inner perception of being engaged in permanently doing ‘the worst thing in the world’ - being the source of great suffering to your most loved object. ‘In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself’ (ibid., p. 246). And, ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies 1.. .] from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished’(ibid., p, 253). The internal world of the melancholic is impoverished because of the double sense of its lack of a capacity to love the object, and of the object who is the source of love being constantly killed. The sadism against the ego originates both from the hatred of the object with whom the ego is identified, and the hatred of the ego for being so full of hatred. (Klein (1935) calls this ‘the ego’s hatred of the id’for its attacks on the object; we might say, hatred of being hate-full, which is obviously a selfperpetuating state.) The processes described in Freud’s extraordinary discovery of the mechanisms that create melancholia are of course endlessly complicated (after all, it takes years and years of analysis to unravel them); I hope to throw some light on them by looking at different examples and points of view. As ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ has no clinical material, I will, to begin with, illustrate it with what I think is the perfect example, from one of the first pioneers of psychoanalysis,the Viennese psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch.

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Helene Deutsch’s case study of melancholia The oscillation between cruelty to the ego in identification with the object and sorrow and fear for the ego and the object was early on beautifully exemplified by Deutsch in her paper entitled ‘Melancholia’(1930). In her case history of a psychotic patient, Deutsch describes the complex process of different identifications,culminating with the patient’s delusional idea and the different emotional attitudes to self and object in the internal drama. Deutsch’s patient, a single woman in her fifties, had a depressive breakdown following the disappearance of her little dog; it soon became clear that the dog was a substitute for her sister, eight years younger, whom she had looked after devotedly following the premature death of their mother - when the patient was twelve - and for whom she sacrificed her promising career. The sister, who also through identification satisfied her narcissistic wish for success, had suddenly, and ungratefully, left her to get married and moved to another country: For about a year the patient had been in a deep depression, which was periodically interrupted by severe anxiety attacks and almost delirious excitations. All her fears revolved round one single thought, to which she clung obstinately, although she was able to see herself the absurdity of her id6efke. Despite this occasionalinsight, however, she remained attached with varying degrees of affect to the thought: she would be thrown into the street unclothed as she lay in bed, and would there, lonely and deserted, have to suffer a terrible death. Sometimesshe gave expression to this thought with complete apathy, sometimes she would beg that it should happen ‘sooner rather than later’,another time she would scream for help in the intensest delirious anxiety: ‘They are coming, they are coming! Don’t let them take me! Have pity on me!’ From time to time she would insist that she did not deserve anything else and one did well to punish her so cruelly. Oeutsch, 1930, p. 146)

The patient’s history as described by Deutsch is the history of her various identifications, illustrating Freud’s view that ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and it contains the history of those object-choices’ (Freud, 1923). She had been extremely jealous when her sister was born; an identification with the mother worked as a successful defence against it, and later on she transferred to the sister, who became the sole love object in her life, her own wish to be a successful writer. This unconscious narcissistic identification,according to Deutsch, opens the path for the melancholic identification: By pursuing our patient’s psychic development we are able to form a consecutive scheme of what went on within her. First, hatred and aggression against her sister; defense against these impulses through obsessional neurotic mechanisms; afterward successful overcompensation of the hate through love and tenderness; satisfaction for the narcissistic injuries through identification with the sister; and finally, transformation of the aggressions into a masochistically satisfying self-sacrifice for her - a brilliant accomplishment, an excellent piece of management in the psychic household.


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After the disappointment at the hands of the sister this psychic arrangement is not given up; it is only added to by new quantities of aggressive impulses, untiI the patient becomes seriously ill. The identification is maintained, as well as the masochistic turning against the ego. The punishment to which she had doomed her sister, of being ‘thrown out into the street’, in order that she should meet with a miserable end there, we hear the patient demanding with monotonous regularity, no longer, however, as a threat against the sister but against herself, sometimes imploring it to be carried out, and at other times defending herself against it with the most violent anxiety. Now we understand whom this punishment relates to and why the patient declared in her most severe self-accusations,‘I don’t deserve anything else.’The crimes she had attributed to herself were indeed quite trivial, but her sister’sact had ‘not deserved anything else’ than to be visited with the severest punishment’. (Deutsch, 1930, pp. 149-50)

Going back to ‘Mourningand Melancholia’: If the love for the object - a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up - takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation into this substitutive object, abusing, debasing, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. [...] The melancholic’s erotic cathexis in regard to his object has thus undergone a double vicissitude: part of it has regressed to identification, but the other part, under the influence of the conflict due to ambivalence, has been carried back to the stage of sadism which is nearer to that conflict. (ibid., p. 249)

This sadism will be concentrated in the superegowhich will judge the ego ‘as though it were an object, the forsaken object’ (ibid., p. 249). Deutsch’s clinical example makes it possible to explain the subtle differences in the identifications: The patient oscillates between a state of mind in which she says ‘Killme!’ and one in which she says ‘please save me from being killed!’ ‘Kill me!’ could be said to belong to Freud’sfirst version of suicide, in which the ego is unconsciously identified with the cruel, abandoning object, who deserves to die, and who must then be murdered by the superego; but also, of course, ‘throw me in the streets and leave me to die’ can have a different emotional tone: of the ego that feels so unloved that only death will do as a solution: ‘the ego lets itself die’ means also ‘only death could save me from the torture of feeling so unloved’. There is of course an object who deserves nothing else, but also an ego aware of deep ambivalence, who can’t bear what it has done to the object. In the ‘Save me!’ scenario, the murderous superego is felt to be ‘outside’, the child self abandoned by the good object is entirely in terror at the hands of the persecuting cruel object; but also hoping that there is a good object who might show compassion and come to the rescue (so love still exists somewhere). But of course ‘Saveme!’ could also be an identification with the tormented abandoned object. The wound is always double: the wounded self and the wounded object; but always double in tone of feeling too: a raging grievance, full of hatred for the object, and an unbearable sorrow, for being

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unloved and unloving. The self is in part in projective identification with a hostile internal object - the cruel superego - and in part in identification with the screaming damaged object. Understanding a melancholic patient thus means having to unravel all these different relationships and identifications with different aspects of the internal objects, as well as all the variations of tone - from cannibalistic murderous rage to sadness and guilt and horror at the destruction caused by the self - and the consequent experience of the pain of being unloved, justly so, as it were, and therefore unlovable forever: ‘the ego lets itself die’. In Deutsch’s case, it is clear that the extreme appeasement of the superego from this patient’s early history’s onwards has to do with her (mostly unconscious) experience of her own cruelty: in the first instance one imagines in relation to the first abandoning object (originally, if we follow Freud’s idea of oral cannibalism, to the frustrating breast), and later to the newborn baby sister - presumably the point where the initial fantasy (a wishfulfilling one) of somebody ‘lifted from her bed and thrown naked in the gutter’ comes from. When the conscious, active part of the ego turns so savagely against the ego in identification with the object, we have to assume that what is happening to the ‘speaking self’, asking for savage punishment, is that it is unconsciously identified with the aggressor, the murderous superego, which has become, in Freud’s (later) words, ‘a pure culture of the death instinct’ (Freud, 1923, p. 53). We are talking about a superego which at that moment knows no compassion, has no pity or forgiveness - possibly embodying an exaggerated version of an introjected intolerant parent, a parent who was too horrified by the little child’s aggressive impulses (always keeping in mind, of course, what Freud said about the perception of the parent’s harshness being coloured by the child’sunconscious aggression). Or we can imagine that a fragile mother, experienced as too easily damaged by the child’s aggression, provokes such unbearable guilt that it cannot be worked through: the internal damaged object stands as permanent accusation, endlessly used as evidence for the internal prosecutor. From a clinical point of view, the task of the analyst is gradually to unravel all the different versions of the psychic conflict, through understanding the various identifications; the moment-to-moment changes in the unconscious object-relations,frnding out who is relating to whom, and in which particular way, in the transference.

‘The Wound and the Bow’ This title comes from the famous and highly influential essay by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, ‘The Wound and the Bow’ (1941), in which he discusses Sophocles’ play PhiEoctetes. Wilson makes brilliant use of


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Philoctetes’ incurable wound and his invincible bow as a metaphor for the negative and positive aspects of the creative impulse, and he refers to Sophocles’ old age (87 when he wrote this) partly to account for the way in which the conflicts are portrayed: this is a play about conflicts of maturity. Sophocles made a great innovation in drama, by increasing the number of actors to three (Waitling, 1953); according to Waitling, the consequence of this is that ‘character, not predestined event, is now the focus of drama’ (ibid.). It is certainly true that although as always the will of the gods is supreme, the play presents studies of its characters, and their interpersonal as well an their inner conflicts, with great psychological insight. Philoctetes was written just before Oedipus in Colonus - the play which deals with Oedipus’ approaching death, and where, as John Steiner (1993) has so strikingly demonstrated, Oedipus regresses from facing the truth to omnipotence and denial of guilt - the guilt he had been able to accept at the end of Oedipus. The play I am going to discuss has at its centre conflicts involving guilt, responsibility and grievance; and I think is a good illustration of Freud’s statement ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies [...I from all directions, emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished’(p. 253). Philoctetes had inherited from Heracles an invincible bow which the Greeks hoped would help defeat the Trojans. Ten years before the play starts, the Greek warriors, including Philoctetes and Odysseus, are sailing to Troy, and interrupt their journey at an island to visit the temple of the goddess Chryse. Near the temple Philoctetes is bitten by a poisonous serpent. The wound doesn’t heal and produces an unbearable stench. Odysseus, in the first scene of Sophocles’ play, describes what happened next to Neoptolemus, son of the dead Achilles: I left Philoctetes the Malian, Poeas’ son [in the desolate island of Lemnos] lamed by a festering ulcer in his foot, At which he would moan and howl incessantly; / Our camp was never free from his frantic wailing - / Never a moment’s pause for libation or prayer, / But the silence was desecrated by his tortured cries. (Sophocles, 1953)

When the play starts Philoctetes has therefore been on Lemnos for ten years, alone, living in utter misery, and constantly tortured by unbearable pain and by the wound of his immense grievance - he, a great hero, has been abandoned in spite of his suffering; and, from Odysseus’ point of view, because of his suffering. The Greeks have been unable to win the war, and Odysseus wants to trick Philoctetes and steal the magic bow by deceiving him through young Neoptolemus, whom Philoctetes has never met. Neoptolemus is uneasy about being used in this way - he doesn’t want to lie, even for a supposedly good cause. Odysseus tells him that he will be able to convince Philoctetes that he is on his side, if he tells him that he also has a

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grievance: he must lie, and tell him that the Greeks had given Achilles’ armour to Odysseus rather than to him, the rightful heir. He temporarily lures him into his deceitful plan through the double incentive of fulfilling his patriotic duty and winning fame and glory. But in the end Neoptolemus’ honesty and noble feelings win the day - he tells the truth, but also takes Philoctetes to the ship with him, in spite of the howls of pain and the horrible stench - and he promises Philoctetes that after they win with the help of the bow, the sons of Asclepius will cure him.It is clear also that the gods have declared that to win the war the Greeks must take Philoctetes as well as his bow to Troy. I want to use Sophocles’ play to illustrate both melancholic sorrow and melancholic grievance - the wound that never heals, that feeds on itself, compounded as it is by the hatred of the abandoning cruel object. But also to illustrate a particular form of unconscious guilt, described by Klein (1935, 1940) as persecutory guilt: the self frnds it unbearable to tolerate the sight of the object’swound, which is experienced as a terrible attack and as a threat to the survival of the self. This type of guilt needs to be constantly split off and projected in as distant an ‘island’as can be found in the inner world, and ultimately the damaged suffering object needs to be destroyed to do away with the accusations and the terror that its suffering gives rise to (Sodre 2000) (from a Kleinian point of view, this play is a perfect illustration of the painful conflicts at the threshold of the depressive position). The three central characters in the play beautifully illustrate the dynamics of mental conflict: Odysseus represents the wish for a ruthless turning away from the pain caused by aggression and murderousness - the horrible stench, the unbearable screams of the object; Neoptolemus could be said to be in the position of the ego, divided between pain for the wounded object and a sense of responsibility for the wound, and the wish to succumb to the appeal of the manic defences represented by the ruthless Odysseus. Philoctetes is the tormented object for both Neoptolemus and Odysseus, and the evidence of culpability presented by the superego; but he also illustrates the predicament of the melancholic, abandoned by his love object, full of hatred and seif-hatred,and unable to trust or to hold on to any possibility of hope. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud sees mania as a triumph over the melancholic situation: ‘the manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was the cause of his suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hungry man for new object-cathexes’ (Freud, 1915, p. 255). Mania could be seen as a triumph over the superego: the manic Odysseus tries to seduce Neoptolemus into behaving ruthlessly and ignoring his conscience by offering him triumph in war. But Neoptolemus, after painful conflict, realizes that he can’t do that; from his point of view, pain and suffering inevitably have to be borne. The cries and the stench of the damaged object are hard to bear, but are not unbearable as they are for Odysseus. One could argue that, apart from his kinder, more compassionate


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nature, another factor plays a part: he has just met Philoctetes; he is not guilty of having abandoned him in great suffering for ten years, and therefore has no reason for hating him. Whereas in Odysseus’ mind (as well as in reality) every moment of those ten years he has been sadistically tormenting Philoctetes, he has (unconsciously) heard never-ending screams, and this increases, rather then diminishes,his murderousness towards him. The Chorus sees Philoctetes tormented by the poison in his wound wandering around ‘To and fro / on the barren ground / Like a child without nurse’ (Sophocles, 1953, p. 187) - like the abandoned ego described by Freud, who ‘lets itself die’; but in his despair and rage, he asks them for an axe or a sword, to ‘Hack myself to pieces, limb from limb!’ The question of suicide is central to the play; interestingly, Philoctetes hasn’t killed himself yet, although he has been in the same despairing and unbearable situation for ten years; it is as if Sophocles wishes to address this problem in connection not just with the degree of suffering Philoctetes has to bear, but centred in his relation to his objects. Throughout the play, Philoctetes oscillates between murderousness to his persecutors and to himself, and as he gets to know Neoptolemus, between trust and mistrust of his potential good object. His suicidal impulses come in the two versions I examined in Freud’s thinking: murdering himselWhis object, and passively wishing for death. When he asks ‘throw me into the crater of the volcano!’, like Deutsch’s patient’s begging to be thrown in the street to die, he is more passive, more dependent; whereas when asking the Chorus for an axe, to hack off not only his foot, but all of himself to pieces, he is enraged, utterly violent, doing to his own body what he wishes sadistically to do to his object. In Wilson’s (1941, p. 250) translation, the pain attacks Philoctetes like a possession by a female tormentor: But just as they are leaving for the ship, the ulcer on Philoctetes’sfoot sets up an ominous throbbing in preparation for one of its periodical burstings: ‘She returns from time to time’, says the invalid, ‘as of she is sated with her wanderings.’ In a moment he is stretched on the ground, writhing in abject anguish and begging the young man to cut off his foot.

This reinforces our experience that the pain comes from a tormenting internal object which suddenly takes over. The movement between despair and hope connects to the possibility (or not) of being able to trust a good object: He gives Neoptolemus the bow, telling him to take care of it till the seizure is over. A second spasm, worse than the first, reduces him to imploring the bow to throw him into the crater of the Lemnian volcano [...I The pain abates a little; ‘it comes

and goes’ says Philoctetes; and he entreats the young man not to leave him.‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll stay.’ ‘I shan’teven make you swear it, my son.’ ‘It wouldn’t be right to leave you.’ [...I A third paroxysm twists the cripple; now he asks

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Neoptolemus to take him to the cave, but shrinks from his grasp and struggles. At last the abscess bursts, the dark blood begins to flow, Philoctetes, faint and sweating, falls asleep.

When his pain is extreme, all objects become untrustworthy. But holding on to a grievance perpetuates the pain; in Seamus Heaney’s translation: Chorus: Your wound is what you feed on, Philoctetes. I say it again in friendship and say this: Stop eating yourself u p with hate and come with us.

And a few lines later, Philoctetes answers: Never. No. No matter how I’m besieged. I’ll be my own Troy. (Heaney, 1990, pp. 61-3)

‘I’llbe my own Troy’ neatly conveys the degree of selfdestructivenessin the psychic battlefield, and the triumph which accompanies it. Sophocles deals with the question of the self-destructiveness involved in melancholic grievance by having Neoptolemus understand that Philoctetes is stuck in an enraged refusal to allow himself to be helped. This happens after Neoptolemus has been able to understand his own situation and to work through his own conflict, finding therefore the mature solution: to take the wound and the bow with him, which I am using here to symbolize the capacity to accept responsibility for aggression. When Philoctetes refuses to accept Neoptolemus’offer of being taken to the battle, but also to those who will cure him, even though he can now see there is hope and the possibility of trust, Neoptolemus says: ... there is no excuse, nor pity, for those who choose to cling to suffering and hardship of their own making, as you would do. You have shut your heart, and will not listen to advice. Those who attempt to persuade you, in all goodwill, are met with hostility, hatred and suspicion. (Sophocles, 1953,p. 207)

He asks again that Philoctetes agrees to come with him, and Philoctetes answers: Oh why am I condemned to live so long? Can I not die? Ye gods, can I not die? What can I do? I cannot turn deaf ears to my kind counsellor. But can I go from this long wretchedness back to the light of day, back to the sight of men? (ibid., p. 208)

And then, remembering his reasons for feeling so wounded and aggrieved: I know you; you want to lure me to my death.

And we feel that now he is using his paranoia as a defence against both his fear of never getting better and his fear of getting better: Neoptolemus, he now knows, wants to ‘lure him’ to his life, not death; this is Philoctetes’


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negative therapeutic reaction. Here one could say that ‘back to the sight of men’ could mean both the fear of being looked at, his shame at what he has become, and the fear of seeing life (both what he has missed out on, but also of what he could still have, and would have to feel grateful for). This reminds me of one of my patients who once shouted, with furious determination, after spending a weekend with her mother and having to acknowledge that her mother (as well as her analyst) had been trying very hard to help her: ‘I’m DAMNED if I’m going to be happy!’ One could say, in relation to an addiction to grievance, that ‘people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them’ ... The wound has a double aspect, in keeping with my quotes of Freud; from Philoctetes’ point of view, it is both the hurt caused by his attacking and betraying object, and the wound of his grievance which he nurses; and, from Odysseus’ point of view, it stands for the wound of the object, and the unbearable guilt it gives rise to: the screams, the putrid stench. The bow, which represents aggression, but also life, movement, potency, can only be used creatively, in mature terms, if it is to some extent integrated with pain and guilt. The more you turn away from the damaged object, the louder its screams become in the inner world (Klein, 1935); and the more introspection has to be avoided by splitting and by manic defences: Odysseus’ immoral, manic attitude of ‘all that matters is to win, no matter how’ won’t, in fact, lead him to victory. I think this myth, and the particular way in which Sophocles uses it to create his play, can serve therefore as an illustration of both Freud’s image of melancholia as wound and of the defences against it: The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies - which in the transference neuroses we have called ‘anticathexes’- from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. (Freud, 1915, p. 253)

The power of this wound to draw all cathectic energies to itself comes from it encompassing the whole world of this particular relation between ego and object: both are wounded, and irreparably so. The ego is impoverished, and, from the melancholic’s point of view, the world is emptied of meaning and goodness; in such a state of hopelessness, the self would choose to ‘let itself die’. Simultaneously, though, a terrible war rages: hatred of the object who inflicts such pain goes hand in hand with hatred of the self who inflicts such pain on the object. Freud’s brilliant insight on introjection and identification gives us the possibility of seeing an extraordinary process: the self is suffering while being the object. Whose voice laments, who cries so pitifully, who screams in rage? Who is torn to pieces? A very complicated drama takes place in which the characters are constantly changing: the superego, censorious and punitive like a father, but full of id-murderousness,attacks the ego in identificationwith the object - or


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attacks the ego who is being the self - the ego as ‘me’,feeling forsaken, as opposed to the ego as himher disguised as me. It is clear that Odysseus, who is the ‘baddie’in the play, ready to lie and behave dishonourably, has to run away not just from responsibility but also from guilt: the stench from the wound and the screams from Philoctetes are unbearable to him. I think he is a good illustration of persecutory guilt, the guilt which cannot be faced and has to be dealt with by denial, distancing and omnipotence (according to Steiner, Oedipus’ position in Oedipus in Colonus). Odysseus would like to have the bow without the wound: he thinks he can win the war like this, without integrating aggression with guilt and pain. Neoptolemus feels differently, and because of his pity and concern for his object’ssuffering, he achieves integration: he can tolerate the screams and the stench, and he promises hope to Philoctetes. The gods know you can’twin if you have only the bow and not the wound. The play ends with omnipotent intervention from above, in the shape of Heracles, who had originally owned the bow, appearing and directing Philoctetes to the realization of his historic destiny; but the psychological conflict could clearly be resolved between the characters, with Neoptolomeus finding a way of curing Philoctetes from his melancholic illness, as well as keeping the upper hand on Odysseus’ ruthless manic defence.

* * * I have described how ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,and Freud’s subsequent thoughts on the subject of melancholia, implicitly describe an internal situation which is extremely complex, as it involves different introjections and identifications, with the ego and the internalized object(s) changing roles and geographical positions in the mind, but also in which two scenarios with very different emotional tones constantly interweave: the ego darkened by the shadow of the object, and the ego cannibalistically devouring the object; grief and guilt in constant oscillation with hatred and grievance. Depression can only be understood if one keeps in mind the dynamics of these mutually influencing and always, at some level, omnipresent states. Freud’s discovery, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, of the mechanism of introjection leading to the establishment of the object as a separate entity in the inner world, which can then be identified with, and also related to in different ways, is one of the most fundamental ones in psychoanalysis - one that changed the whole understanding of the functioning of the mind.

References Abraham K (1911) Notes on the psycho-analytical investigationand treatment of manic depressive insanity and allied conditions. In Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1949.


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Abraham K (1924) A short study of the development of the libido in the light of mental disorders. In Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1949. Deutsch H (1930) Melancholia. In Psycho-Analysis of the Neuroses. London: Hogarth Press. Freud S (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7, Freud S (1910) Leonard0 Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. SE 11. Freud S (1914) On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE 14. Freud S (1915[ 19171) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14. Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 17. Freud S (192 1) Group Psychologyand the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19. Freud S (1933) New Introductory Lectures. SE 22. Freud S (1950) Draft G (1895?)and Draft N (1897). SE 1. Heaney S (1990) The Cure at Troy. London: Faber & Faber, in association with Field Day. Klein M (1935) A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. In The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 11. London: Hogarth Press. Klein M (1940), Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states. In The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 11. London: Hogarth Press. Sodrk I (2000) Non vixit: a ghost story. In R. Perelberg (ed.), Dreaming and Thinking. London: Karnac, reprinted 2003. Sophocles (1953) Electra and Other Plays. Translated and introduced by EF Watling. London: Penguin Books. Steiner J (1993) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations of the Personality in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. London: Routledge. Waitling EF (1953) Introduction to Sophocles’ Electra and Other Plays. London: Penguin Books. Wilson E (1941) The Wound and the Bow. London: Methuen and Co.

8 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ GILBERT DIATKINE These days the psychoanalytical theory of instincts is often considered rather ‘unfashionable’(Steiner, 1993, p. 45). This falling from grace has happened with sexual instincts, but perhaps most of all with the death instinct. In anglophone psychoanalytic literature, only one of the major currents prominent today still refers to it, that comprising the followers of Melanie Klein. Winnicott, who wrote crucial texts on both hatred in the countertransference and antisocial tendencies, sees ‘the death instinct as a simple reaffirmation of original sin’ (winnicott, 1971, p. 99). The death instinct has no place in the lexicon of Kohut, who also helped to enrich our understanding of aggressiveness as a reaction to the deficiencies of primary objects, in particular when it takes the form of ‘narcissisticrage’ (Kohut, 1984, p. 234). It is just as though most psychoanalysts are coming round to the decision made in 1949 by Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein to retain nothing of the death instinct but the aggressive instinct, even though the current of thought which those authors promoted, the ‘Psychologyof the Ego’, has quite lost its influence. Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein are critical of the notion of the death instinct, finding it neither heuristic nor empirically provable (Hartmann et al., 1949, p. 11). Just reading the works of Melanie Klein’s followers is enough to show the injustice of the first criticism. Quite the contrary is the case - a whole series of major psychological advances have flowed from Melanie Klein’s use of the notion of the death instinct. In France too, other writers have contributed to the process of psychoanalytic thought taking the death instinct as their starting-point.The second criticism seems to be harder to refute, since a first reading of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, the text in which Freud introduces the death instinct, raises a number of considerations which do indeed appear to be dissociated from clinical practice, and thus fall outside the scope of experience of the analyst today. I would like to show that this frrst reading is partly misleading, and that if we look at it in the context of Freud’s work as a whole the death instinct is in factprecisely a clinical concept. Here too the works of contemporary French writers will furnish me with examples. 142

‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’

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‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’ Until 1920 Freud believed that sexual instincts and ego instincts control the psychic apparatus, governed exclusively by the pleasure principle, and by its avatar, the reality principle, which aims at the same goals but through a more lengthy process. In ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’(1920) he comes round to the idea that at least some instincts do not strive towards pleasure but towards death. This introduction of the death instinct is supported by a number of considerations;he is clear that some of these show not so much a death instinct as an aggressive instinct, and that certain others are indeed totally detached from clinical experience. First, the clinical arguments put forward by Freud show that there are a number of phenomena emerging from clinical practice that cannot be explained by resorting to the primacy of the pleasure principle. But Freud explains all of these through a need for mastery, not through the action of the death instinct. Traumatic dreams, unlike dreams of punishment which Freud showed are ultimately governed by the pleasure principle, are limited to reproducing the traumatic event, without making much attempt to modify it (Freud, 1920, p. 13). They seem rather to be seeking displeasure. In an attempt to explain this, Freud puts forward the hypothesis that they are reproducing the event in order to prepare the psychic apparatus for it, since the trauma itself (being unexpected) had taken it by surprise (ibid., p. 32). Likewise repetitive children’s games, like the cotton-reel game (ibid., p. 13), sometimes seem to be seeking to reproduce an unpleasant experience, that of separation from the object (ibid., pp. 14-16); but there too the aim is mastery of the object, rather than its destruction (ibid., p. 16).‘ In treatment, the need for repetition reproduces disagreeable past experiences. Certain of these, of course, are displeasing to the ego while still being sources of pleasure to the id. But there are others too which have never been pleasurable in any sense, like children’sfeelings of physical inferiority in sexual terms - as compared to adults.*Here Freud sees proof that there are instincts that are active even before the pleasure principle has been established. But at this stage they have the function of ‘controllingor linking excitement’(ibid., p. 35). As for the ‘compulsionsof destiny’,’which Freud defrnes in opposition to character neuroses in which misfortune is actively sought, like the occurrence of catastrophesthat ‘the person appears to live through passively without being subject to any influence at all’, one just has to allow for the element of chance, but here the death instinct is not at issue. Secondly, the other arguments put forward by Freud are all based in the realm of philosophy, or alternatively in biology. The very notion of ‘pleasure’contains contradictions (ibid., p. 7). U p to this point Freud had maintained that pleasure corresponded to a lessening of psychical tension. But how could we be persuaded that ultimate pleasure

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would thus be coincident with an absolute absence of excitement?And how could we fail to see that orgasm and feast necessarily imply high levels of excitement?Although he himself denies it, Freud is borrowing his concept of pleasure from the philosophical tradition, and in doing so reviving age-old debates.4In any case, the death instinct doesn’t help to solve the problem. There has been biological research, such as that of Jacques Loeb on reproduction in sea urchins, that has shown that increased excitement - of whatever kind - increases differentiati~n.~ And at the same time the general tendency away from differentiation,the Nirvana principle, is ‘one of the most compelling reasons we have for believing in the existence of the death instinct’ (ibid., p. 56). But biology offers just as much evidence against the existence of the death instinct as for it. Biologists do not even agree on the inevitability of death. According to Weissman, germs and single-celled organisms are immortal (ibid., pp. 45-6), meaning that there is no reason for us to suppose that such a thing as a death instinct necessarily exists (ibid., p. 46). If we say that in general the ultimate aim of any impulse is to re-establish a former state: then ‘the aim of all life is death’. The inevitable consequence of such a postulation is that ‘the action of “ego-instincts”is towards death’ (ibid., p. 44). But instincts of self-preservationare a part of these ego instincts (ibid., p. 44). We must therefore recognize that there are two distinct kinds of ego instinct, some of them (like instincts of self-preservation)libidinal, the others tending towards death. Freud has been criticized for the purely speculative nature of this deduction. But once he has reached this point in his account, he makes reference to a clinical phenomenon which is critically important and which had hitherto been totally mysterious - sadism.’ It is quite impossible to try to understand sadism purely in terms of sexual impulses, or instincts of selfpreservation. Sadism requires that we acknowledge the existence of a destructive impulse within the psyche. Of all the arguments put forward by Freud in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’,this is the only one which does really depend on the death instinct hypothesis. Freud himself is not at all satisfied with this proof, however; he finds it ‘mystical’,and far from obvious. In fact it brings us back to the question of masochism, and whether it is masochism or sadism that is the primary phenomenon.*

The death instinct before ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’ But by 1920 Freud had already been pulling together his arguments for a new theory of instincts for quite some time. First, the theory of civilization which Freud had defended since the very birth of psychoanalysis was struck a terrible blow by the First World War. It was suddenly impossible to believe in a theory of humanity governed by the


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pleasure principle after four years of this war! This bitter assessment is made in ‘Thoughtsfor the Times on War and Death’, an article written a year before ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’. Secondly, ‘Mourningand Melancholia’,written in 1914,contains a striking description of sadism directed towards the internalized ~ b j e c tAs . ~ long as the notion of the death instinct is unclear, Freud is hard put to explain its origins. Yes, the notion of ambivalence which Bleuler proposes describes the phenomenon (Freud, 1914,pp. 250-l), but it does not explain why loverelationships are ambivalent, nor how hatred can be transformed into sadism. One crucial idea behind the concept of the death instinct, that of the fusion of instincts, would be described the following year (1915), in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (Freud, 1915a, p. 139).’’ Thirdly, in treatment, the possibility that the need for repetition does not serve as a recall device but is used to satisfy the need for suffering had been described ever since the publication of the Wolf Man case study. So why did Freud make so little use of these arguments in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’?Perhaps it was because he hated the idea of going back on the conclusion he’d reached with Little Hans, where he came down against Adler’s invention of an aggressive instinct. But above all it was because theoretical evolution just takes time. The concept of the death instinct matured gradually from ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’, and over the course of all the rest of Freud’s work came to cover broader and broader territory.

The death instinct in Freud’swork after 1920 First, the existence of a primary aggressive instinct stands apart from the psychoanalytic study of social phenomena. Following the path opened up by ‘Totem and Taboo’ and then ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921, written just after ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’) states that the hostility concealed in all interpersonal relations reveals a human propensity for hatred, an aggressiveness ‘whose origin is unknown to us and to which we can attribute an elemental nature’ (Freud, 1921, p. 102). ‘Civilizationand its Discontents’ (1929) would take his thinking about this role of aggressiveness in social relations considerably further.” Hostility between people is a primary phenomenon which threatens civilization.This theme resurfaces in ‘WhyWar?’ (1933), and above all in ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939). It should be noted that in ‘Civilizationand its Discontents’ Freud talks only about ‘aggressive instinct’,never of the ‘deathinstinct’. It is as if ‘Civilizationand its Discontents’ had later come to serve as a point of reference for the psychology of the ego. Secondly, from a more directly clinical perspective, these are the phenomena that are the most resistant in analysis - and especially the phenomena of negative therapeutic reaction, described in ‘The Ego and the

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Id’, two years after ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, which led Freud to an explanation of ambivalence as the result of a separation of sexual impulses from the death instinct (Freud, 1923, p. 41). Thirdly, negative therapeutic reaction ultimately comes back to unconscious feelings of guilt and thus to moral masochism. In ‘TheEconomic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), Freud finds the erogenous nature of masochism a better explanation than sexual excitement (Freud, 1924, p. 161). Primary masochism is erogenous because it links the death instinct and the libido. This union links the death instinct to the interior of the organism and diverts it outwards as a kind of aggressiveness.’*It is this formulation that is the jumping-off point for the Kleinian concept of the death instinct.

Francophone psychoanalysts Both Hartmann and - especially - Loewenstein played critical roles in the development of pre-1939 French analysts. So it is hardly surprising that the first French psychoanalysts were uncharacteristically unanimous in their refusal to accept the hypothesis of the death instinct. At the eleventh conference of francophonepsychoanalysts, in 1948, Nacht gave a categorical rebuttal of the t h e ~ r y ,while ’ ~ Lacan believed that it was responsible for causing Freud to reach an impasse.14The thinking of the two founders of French psychoanalysis would subsequently diverge on all other matters, culminating in a total split in 1953, but whatever the nuances they would both continue to stand by this dismissal. At times, of course, Lacan would come to say that he did accept the death instinct,15but more often than not he would deal with death and instincts quite separately. He would say obscure and striking things about death, especially during his Hegelian-Heideggerian phase; and as for instincts he would work to ‘dismantle’them. Instincts do not originate in the body of the subject (hence his insistence on translating Trieb into French as pulslon rather than instinct - see for example Lacan, 1960, p. 803; 1964, p. 834; 1974, p. 4 2 ) but in the Other, the mother. By the time this process of dissection had been finished, there was nothing left of Freud’s original concept. Lacan is clearer in his criticism of the anglophone analysts. He accuses Melanie Klein of treating as psychic fact things which he considers to have value only as ‘imaginary’formations. Meanwhile Hartmann is accused of having betrayed Freud through a return to pre-psychoanalytic psychology, and of transforming psychoanalysis into a kind of pedagogy. At the heart of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, which was dominated by Nacht and which Lacan left, the death instinct was reintroduced bit by bit, beginning with some marginal voices.I6Over a period of twenty years, colloquia and congresses were held to discuss the death instinct.” Today, while there are still eloquent opponents of the death instinct, those in favour seem to be in the majority, supported by a very wide range of clinical

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experiences, but experiences whose interpretation finds the concept of the death instinct indispensable. I shall now go on to present some of the French work in which the death instinct proved to be a valuable clinical tool.

Andre Green: destructiveness in borderline states Andre Green has long been interested in a certain group of borderline patientsi8who present themselves initially as phobic. These patients are often hard to listen to, as they tend to speak only in generalities.” The precise nature of their problem can be understood more easily if you compare what they say in the sessions to other patients’ usual associative functioning. A patient’s associative movement typically travels across various different networks, designed by the play of resistances and displacements. To an attentive analyst, configurations will occasionally be apparent that belong to multiple temporalities and which ‘reverberate’ (Green, Le temps &late’ ‘Shattered Time’, 2000b), following movement which is both progressive (‘anticipatory announcement’) and regressive (‘retroactive reverberation’). These configurations allow us to see the pattern in which the material is arranged, and thus open the way to an interpretation (Green, 2002, p. 159). With patients of this kind, however, this complex temporality disappears, and their discourse becomes much more linear.2oWhen they speak they flee - without knowing what it is they dread, what they suffer, without any feeling of panic - from an anxiety without an object (ibid., p. 151). This phobia ends up as an ‘extensive inhibition of the ego, confiiing them to an isolation which becomes more and more important’ (ibid., p. 150). At first one might be led to believe that these phobic patients are experiencing particularly effective repression, as if they were running away from a persecutory object projected onto the analyst and within which they feel trapped. But this phobia is related to the analytical function itself” it’s a matter of escaping investigation, which threatens to cause a break between subject and object. The only possible solution is the total suppression of intelligibility. The evasions in the session are not the same as those in normal behaviour, but they have the same source - thinking trouble (ibid., p. 151). It is as though the patient were unconsciously anticipating that his sequence of associations might lead to a crucial point where some disaster might take place.**At this point all the most important elements of his psychic life find themselves in contact with each other, linking themselves to a series of serious traumas from his past.*jIt is just a matter of a few themes, linked to traumas, which empower each other, and ‘resonate’with each other (just like in physics where considerable movement can be created in different objects by subjecting them to vibrations of the same wavelength, which might lead to their c o l l a p ~ e )What . ~ ~ makes the conglomeration of these themes so dangerous is that they concern the fundamental organizers of psychic life, whose mutual destruction can lead to It is the linking of

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these themes that makes up the real trauma.z6 The ‘centralphobic position’ is an organization which struggles to prevent this resonance from taking place. In the phrase ‘centralphobic position’, ‘central’refers to the intersection of several force-fields. Why should this convergence have such catastrophic consequences?It’s because it causes ‘the subject to recognize his rage, his envy, and above all his destructiveness’ (ibid., p. 172). This destructiveness is mainly directed against the representation of the object.” It is accompanied by feelings of guilt,Z8 without any representation of the ‘murdered’ which can have nothing to do with either judgements ‘affirming or disaffirming the possession of a particular attribute, nor with judgements asserting or disputing that a presentation has an existence in reality’.30The feeling of unreality which these subjects often experience is a consequence of the murder of the primary object being turned back on the subject himself.” This results in the subject experiencinga negative hallucination of himself - more an unrecognizing than an unperceiving (ibid., p. 171). Green understands this destructiveness as a manifestation of the activity of the death instinct within the organism.’’ The central phobic position is only one of the clinical manifestations of destructiveness. It is also expressed in the ‘desobjectalizingfunction’,which means that aggression can transform the object into a thing, and which accounts for the indifference a criminal feels towards his victim (ibid., p. 179); or in the ‘narcissismof death’, which leads to the self-annihilation of the subject (ibid., p. 181). Conversely, destructiveness makes up part of a much greater group, the ‘negative’,which includes other kinds of negativity, such as repression (ibid., p. 183). This role ascribed by Green to the death instinct in borderline cases has important technical implications, as ‘the death instinct can be linked by the experience of the transference’ (ibid., p. 174) to the use of a particular kind of intervention.j3

Pierre Marty: movements of death in psychosomatic symptoms Pierre Marty was faced with even stranger modes of mental functioning than the borderline states described by Green (Marty et al., 1963).The patients he dealt with had come to hospital because of organic illnesses, but the doctor or surgeon treating them, intrigued by the likely psychological origin of some of their symptoms, had consulted an analyst about them. With no neurotic symptoms, these patients did not complain of any ailment apart from their particular illness, and were surprised to find themselves being asked to see a psychiatrist. In the remarks made once they had begun to feel comfortable with their interlocutor, their thought is perfectly adapted to reality as anyone can perceive it. They describe events and facts, but with nothing in their discourse giving away the presence of their unconscious. Their words never

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have double meanings, they never make slips of the tongue, they don’t dream - or if they do dream they are unable to bring associations to their dreams. While the discourse of those patients whom Green described is linear, but vague and distorted by the evasion of the central phobic position, those seen by Marty show no distortion of any kind. Their thought is as precise and as free from ambiguity as an instruction-book, or a surgeon’s report after an operation: this is ‘operational thinking’ (Marty et al., 1963). Operational thinking is not in evidence in all cases of psychosomatic symptoms, and it can also be found without any corporeal association (McDougall, 1972), but the correlation between operational thought and psychosomatic illness is close enough to have precipitated a certain amount of research into the subject. Alongside operational thought, which is a chronic mode of being, Marty then went on to describe a second distinctive mode of mental functioning, ‘essentialdepression’ consisting of a depressive state with none of the usual signs of depression in the psychiatric sense of the word, but characterized by a certain listlessness, a losing of the feeling that life is worth living, a lack of interest in the future and the past, often preceding the onset of an organic illness (Marty, 1966). Essential depression and operational thought are perceived as two aspects of ‘the same psychic functioning, striking for its ability to adapt to collective reality’, ‘operationalfunctioning’ (Smadja, 2001). Operational thought and essential depression are two of the consequences of the activity of the destructive motor of the ‘death instincts’ in the psychic apparatus. Marty’s discovery had numerous ramifications. His ideas have been developed by students of his work in France and elsewhere, who have made other clinical discoveries, such as the description of the self-tranquillizing processes by Swecz (1993, 1998) and Smadja (1993). Most importantly, they have developed a psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic technique which is adapted for these patients who are often unanalysable using a conventional approach, and one which is capable of leading to a new regime of mental functioning and a transformation in the patient’s physical condition.

Denys Ribas: the defusion of instincts in child autism For some time now, Denys Ribas has run a day hospital for autistic children. According to him it is difficult to understand these children without recourse to the concept of the death instinct (Ribas, 2002, p. 134), and in particular to the idea of ‘the defusion of instincts’ (ibid., p. 143). He considers the coexistence in children of ‘deadlyelements’and ‘dazzlingmanifestationsof life and sexuality’ to be the expression of a ‘very advanced defusion of instincts’ (ibid., pp. 159-62). Most of those who have studied the defusion of instincts were interested in its most spectacular consequence: the liberation of the death instinct. What makes Ribas so original, however, is his focus on the

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liberation of the life instinct. This raises a difficult question, because the life instinct tends towards fusion. How can this be ‘defused’?And yet the hypothesis of a defused life instinct does rather conveniently take account of an important element of autism, described by Esther Bick and Meltzer, among others - that is, adhesive identification. It is precisely this hypothesis of a defused life instinct that best explains the ‘absolute adhesion which allows an experience of existing but makes separation a tearing out of a part of oneself, and causes a loss of the feeling of being’ (ibid., p. 161). (Even though Ribas disagrees with Winnicott on the death instinct, he does attach enormous importance to what Winnicott wrote on being and the pure feminine element, hence that reference to ‘being’, and to the ‘unbeing’ which characterizes sufferers from autism when their autistic object is taken from them.j*) Ribas mentions several hypotheses on the nature of the process which the defusion of instincts normally sets off, most notably those of Bick on the role of the nipple associated with holding, but groups them under the general heading of primary identification with the mother (ibid., p. 180). It is a disordering of the primary mother-child relationship, and thus of this primary identification, that is responsible for the defusion of instincts.

Claude BaLier: defusion of instincts in murderers and rapists Claude Balier is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society who has spent ten years working in a prison where he has used a method adapted from psychoanalysis to treat serious criminals, perpetrators of murder or rape (Balier, 1988, 1996). The accounts of his treatment make quite evident his belief that his patients’ terrible aggressiveness is a result of the defusion of their impulses. This is not always absolute, but in the most extreme cases all psychic tension can be released in the form of aggression towards themselves, towards others or, at best, towards inanimate objects. In such conditions, mental life seems to be almost totally absent, and thought and fantasy are likewise eliminated. The secure conditions in prison make it possible to carry out teamwork at the heart of which a relationship to another person might possibly develop (Balier, 1988, p. 192). Psychic constructions, some of them archaic, others rather more complex, begin to exist alongside those sectors of the personality where free aggression is here more important than libidolinked aggression. A split in the ego and a denial of reality corresponding to this coexistence can often lead to perverse formations (which Balier describes strikingly), but in which the libido begins to link the death instinct to the heart of sadism and masochism (ibid., p. 193). In the case of rape, paradoxically, the link created by the libido to the death instinct is a much weaker one. ‘Rapeis practically equivalent to murder’ (ibid., p. 194; this important point is developed at length in his 1996 book, ch. 4).

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Balier’s work, unlike that of many pioneers in criminal psychoanalysis, was not an isolated experiment. The kind of psychiatric unit which makes it possible, the essential teamwork and the delicate balance of relations between the therapeutic team and the warders, are all elements which can be replicated in other prisons, which has made it possible to continue this work since Balier himself retired.

Patrick Declerck: masochism in tramps The criminals Balier dealt with showed us aggressiveness and the activity of the death instinct outside the organism. Another member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, Patrick Declerck, has written striking descriptions of destructiveness and the activity of the death instinct within the personalities of tramps. He presents clinical material looking at Paris tramps over more than frfeen years, both from an ethnographic point of view, and later, from 1986 to 1997, as a consultant and psychotherapist. As an ethnologist, Declerck shared these tramps’ lives. He slept in night shelters, and had himself picked up by the police and interned in a Nanterre hostel designated exclusively for tramps. He lived with the promiscuity, aggressiveness, insecurity, tiredness and incontinence of his dormitory and shower companions. But Decleck also describes attempts made by psychotherapists whose accounts of their work make the presence of the death instinct quite clear, which explains the insurmountabledifficulty of such work, just like that faced by anyone doing social work: after a deceptive honeymoon period, the therapist finds himself becoming lost in an inconsistent universe, a universe without causality, without temporal-spatial landmarks, where everything happens as though sphincters have lost their significance.A split in the object makes the therapist (and carers in general) idealized in the first instance, just as they idealize their client, while a persecutory object is held at arm’slength outside the relationship. After a few months, the roles are reversed. The tramp fvst proves disappointing,and the idealized relationship is transformed into a persecutory one, which even at best ends up with the patient being excluded from the system of care that had taken him in, at worst with consequencesfar more serious than this. This ‘anal foreclosure’ (Declerck, 2001, p. 31 1) is the characteristic which Declerck most often finds in tramps. It goes in tandem with an extreme form of masochism in which the function of ‘lifesaver’is exercised only on the very brink of death. Taking account of the death instinct in this way results in important practical considerations: instead of wearing themselves out with back-to-work programmes which are doomed to failure (and which can have fatal consequences for the patient, as certain of Declerck’scases demonstrate), carers and social workers alike should, he says, accompany the patient while maintaining the best level of demand that is compatible with their masochism.

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Fanaticism, massacres and the defusion of instincts As Andre Green has observed (1999, pp. 325-7), an analyst does not need to go heroically into prisons or night shelters to find the death instinct. All he has to do is switch on his television set between sessions, as so many of us did on 11 September 2001. What could be a more dreadful illustration of the defused death instinct than the intentional collision of two aeroplanes, piloted by suicides, with the World Trade Center?The defusion of instincts does seem complete in the case of massacres of large numbers of people and in the fanaticism to be found nightly in our television news. But in fact it certainly isn’t complete, as the libido would be needed to hatch a plot as diabolical as the destruction of the Twin Towers. Even someone as sinisterly operational as Eichmann needed a certain amount of libidinal investment in aspects of his organizational work. Although the understanding of these tragedies is essentially a matter of sociology, history and politics, the psychoanalytic notion of the death instinct can contribute to this. Beginning with Freud’s thoughts on the First World War, and with his questions about the narcissism of small differences, I have sought to understand which narcissistic mechanisms usually cause aggression among crowds, and why small differences between two groups can have such destructive potential (Diatkine, 2000). It seemed to me that for the most part the ‘small differences’ bring us back to the child’s first achievements. These achievements should occur following certain ideal modalities, the family’s own modality, which allows the mother to tell her child that he really does belong to this family, that is, he descends from an ancestry which is ideal and supposedly unique, by whom the family was founded. This identification with the ideal ancestry is the seed from which comes the subject’sego-ideal. This narcissistic fantasy, which the mother and child share if the latter accepts the corporeal behaviour she has suggested to him, is indispensable to the subject’s sense of cohesion. And yet he relies on a denial of reality, since in fact the ideals of which the ego-ideal is made up derive from the father’sline and the mother’s line, and are thus multiple and contradictory. Moreover additional multiple ideals will become attached over the course of the subject’s life, as new object-choices and processes of bereavement take place. The ‘small differences’ get their explosive potential from the fact that they can threaten this illusory coherence. Most members of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society use ‘ideal ego’ to describe this illusion by which an ego can maintain that it is identical to its ideal. They distinguish this ideal ego from the ‘ego-ideal’, and from the superego, which punishes the ego when it separates itself from its ideal. Denys Ribas completed this attempted clarification by extending his hypothesis on the defused life instinct to the question of f a n a t i c i ~ mHe .~~ believes that the fanatic’s ideal ego depends on an adhesive identification of


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the ego with its ideal,36and thus on a defused life instinct which imposes this attachment. ‘Any separation, and thus any distance which would allow criticism, is fatal for the archaic identity formed in this way ... the attachment to a leader - to the Fuhrer - or to a faith thus becomes essential’(Ribas, 1999, p. 139). These complementary hypotheses do not explain the origin of the defusion of instincts. Ribas believes that the role of the leader is an essential one here. A leader can persuade his disciples to take their own lives, or to commit mass murder, out of a desire for mother-love, or in order to ‘export the defusion of instincts’ which actually rests in him (ibid., pp. 142-4). His methods will be ‘attacking links, and the destruction of all objects of affection, through narcissistic humiliation and the impossibility of any process of ordering’ (Ribas, 2002, p. 210). However the most alarming characteristic of mass murders is that they are often the result of the exploiting of a spontaneous hatred, which is only secondarily taken advantage of by leaders in order to achieve their aims or personal sadism. As soon as two groups divided by ‘small differences’ are in contact with each other, defusion seems to occur of its own accord. How can this be? Something that Freud proposes, recalled by Ribas (ibid., p. 139), might help us to clarify this. In ‘The Ego and the Id’, Freud does indeed show that identification ‘beginswith a transformation of the sexual-object libido into a narcissistic libido’, and that this transformation must be accompanied by a ‘defusionof different impulses which had previously been blended together’. The identification of members of a group with each other and with their leader must therefore be accompanied by a defusion of instincts and a liberation of the death in~tinct.~’ It will not take place so long as the group’s leader takes on his role as a unlfying ideal without attempting to exploit it (Diatkine, 2002).

Opponents of the death instinct in France The French tradition that denies the existence of the death instinct continues to have eloquent proponents today. At the 62nd Congress of Francophone Psychoanalysts, Paul Denis brought all their arguments together (Denis, 2002), adding some new points to those of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein: the death instinct is a matter of metabiology and not of metapsychology. Freud introduces it from two distinct points of view - clinical and philosophical - which have nothing to do with each other. The new theory considers impulses to be natural forces. It weakens the notion of impulses the death instinct has neither a source, nor an energy, nor an object, merely a The idea of partial impulses is supplanted. Instinctive dualism is really an energetic kind of monism. There are only ‘sexual death instincts’ (Laplanche). The death instinct is a useless concept: in physics we have no

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need for a ‘lifewarmth’ and a ‘death warmth’ in order to understand heating and cooling. The clinical facts which Freud’s death instinct explains are heterogeneous, combining masochism, death instinct, motivity and the disorganization principle. The term has accrued even greater heterogeneity under Freud’ssuccessors. One cannot be sure that the term ‘deathinstinct’will have the same meaning in every case. One would do better, then, according to Denis, to use different, more precise concepts, like ‘madnessof mastery’VoZie d’emprise) relating to extreme cases of violence, or the ‘organizationdisorganizationprinciple’ regarding the tendency away from differentiation. The diversity of French work which makes use of the concept of the death instinct supports this point of Denis’: most likely ‘the death instinct’ does indeed encompass very diverse elements, and it is probable that Green and Marty - for instance - are not really speaking about quite the same thing when they are speaking so differently about such different patients. But the very fact that a single term is used does allow them a dialogue, it allows them to compare and criticize. Could one replace the death instinct with ‘madness of mastery’ in cases of extreme violence? Denis attempted to do just that in his important work Emprise et satisfaction [Masteryand Satisfaction](Denis, 1997, p. 119). In it he offers a convincing development of the different aspects of the ‘mastering’of impulses. But without completely dismissing the notion of an instinct of mastery in the Freudian sense, it is hard to talk about ‘mastery’when the goal of the impulse becomes to destroy the object. Denis also suggests substituting a ‘principleof disorganization-organization’ for the anti-differentiating aspect of the death instinct, as Marty described it in his cases of psychosomatic illness. But a ‘principle’ only has significance in relation to the action of an impulse. It is necessary to name the impulse which ‘disorganizes’the psychic life, but it would be absurd to decide to name it ‘the instinct of mastery’ rather than ‘the death instinct’.

A frnal word Maybe it’s actually all down to biology! Freud certainly wasn’t aware of researches which he could have cited as early as 1920 in support of the death instinct, and which deal with the spontaneous death of cells regardless of any external aggression. Since 1855 (Ameisen, 1999,p. 63) embryologists and histologists have been interested in this phenomenon which is critical to the structuring of the e m b r y ~ ,which ’~ they have called a p o p t o ~ i sNowadays .~~ we understand that cell death can be activated from a distance by hormones (ibid., p. 33), that it plays an important role in the selection of ‘killer’lymphocytes which are capable of recognizing and destroying viruses and bacteria alien to the organism, and in the construction of the brain (ibid., chapter 2). It is not a result of the activity of any external agent, but of a number of proteins produced by the cell


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itself.41The genes whose information allows cells to produce the proteins which activate cell death (ibid., p. 75) have been isolated, as have those that inhibit this activation (ibid., p. 76).42These discoveries have totally overturned whole areas of medical pathology, and have transformed our understanding of what life and death are: ‘wesee a strange vision of life now: living, for each cell ... is constantly managing, at least for a time, to restrain the activating of suicide’ (ibid., p. 77).What these researchers are looking for is not a death instinct in a psychoanalytic sense, but we can certainly accept that describing the activity of the death instinct within the organism is not merely speculation with no grounding in concrete reality.

This chapter was translated by Daniel Hahn.

Notes ‘The child repeats his lived experience, even when it is unpleasant, because through this activity he is able to achieve mastery of a much more radical kind ...’ (Freud, 1920, p. 35). 2. Freud (1920, p. 18). ‘On the other hand, as far as the analysand is concerned it seems quite clear that the need to repeat the events of childhood in the transference is in any case above and beyond the pleasure principle’ (p. 34). 3. ‘Schikzalszwang’,as distinct from neuroses of destiny (Freud, 1920, pp. 21-2). The philosophical debate on the nature of pleasure goes back at least as far 4. as Plato’sPhilebus and book seven of Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics. The idea that pleasure corresponds to a return to the zempoint of excitement certainly comes from Plato. Plato believes that displeasure (and ‘pain’) comes from the dissolution of the ‘harmony’of ‘nature’,and that pleasure is brought about by that harmony being reestablished; pleasure is the return to the natural state. Plato criticizes the model which considers eating ‘a repletion and a pleasure’, and hunger ‘a dissolution and a pain’ (Plato,Philebus, XVII, 31d, p. 306). Aristotle likewise criticizes the idea of pleasure as a kind of repletion and pain as a lack in our natural state: the pleasures of study or that from a pleasing scent have nothing to do with repletion (Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 486-7). 5. Today’s experiments in cloning have brought Loeb’s experiments back into currency. 6. ‘An instinct is an impulse inherent within a living organism pushing towards the reestablishment of a former state’ (Freud, 1920, p. 36). 7. ‘How is one to deduce from Eros (which preserves life) a sadistic impulse whose aim is to harm the object? Should one not presume that this impulse should more properly be termed a “death instinct”?’;‘It could in fact be shown that the sadism given off by the ego showed the 1.

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way for the libidinal components of the sexual impulse’ (Freud, 1920, p. 54). 8. In ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’, Freud also conceived (in passing) of ‘the ego’senigmatic masochistic tendencies to take account of traumatic dreams’ (Freud, 1920, p. 14). 9. ‘If the love for the object, which cannot be abandoned as long as the object itself is abandoned, is hidden away in narcissistic identification, then hatred begins to go to work on this substituting object, hurting it, belittling it, making it suffer, and taking sadistic pleasure in the suffering ... The torture which the melancholic subject inflicts on himself, and which certainly does prevent him from experiencing pleasure, represents (just like the phenomenon corresponding to obsessional neurosis) the satisfaction of sadistic and hateful tendencies which have been turned round upon the subject’s own self in the way we have been discussed’(Freud, 1914, p. 251). 10. But here Freud considers the instinctual defusion as progress - it occurs at the oedipal stage and makes it possible clearly to distinguish love from hate. 11. One’s feuow-man ‘isnot just an aid and a potential sexual object, but also an object of temptation. Man is effectively tempted to satisfy his need for aggression at the expense of his fellow-man,to exploit his work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to appropriate his belongings, to humiliate him,to inflict suffering upon him, to martyr and kill him’(Freud, 1929, p. 11 1). 12. ‘The libido finds in living (multi-cellular) beings the death- or destruction-impulse which governs it and which seeks to break this cellular being into pieces and bring each organism to a state of organic stability (even if this is really only stability in relative terms). The libido is charged with making this destructive impulse inoffensive, which it manages to do by diverting much of it outwards, with the help of a particular organic system (ie. the musculature) and directing it towards objects in the outside world. It is thus termed the destructive impulse, the impulse of mastery, the wish for power’ (Freud, 1924, p. 161). 13. ‘Neither Freud nor those partisan to this theory (Federn, Nunberg, Weiss) have brought any worthwhile or objectively discernable argument in favour of the existence of an autonomous instinct towards destruction or death’ (Nacht, 1948, p. 313). 14. These gaps seem to come together in the enigmatic significance that Freud gave as the death instinct: testament (like the figure of the Sphinx) to the aporia which this great thought has crashed against in the most profound attempt to date of formulating a human experience within the realm of biology’ (Lacan, 1948, p. 367). 15. For example, ‘the instincts which I do believe in, of which the death instinct is one’ (Lacan, 1956-57, p. 371).


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16. At the 15th Conference of Francophone Psychoanalysts, in 1953, just after the split, Maurice Benassy presented Freud’s ideas on the death instinct in his paper on ‘The Theory of Instincts’.Benassy found himself facing either hostility or indifference on the part of most members of the PPS, with the notable exception of Francis Pasche. It wasn’t until Serge Viderman’s 1960 conference that the death instinct would be defended at the PPS. Nacht objected to it primarily on practical grounds - because the death instinct doesn’t broaden the therapeutic perspective. Ten years later, at the 25th Congress of Romance-Language Psychoanalysts, Rene Diatkine found his audience far more split on the matter when he came to assign aggressiveness to the death instinct, rather than seeing it as a result of frustration (the theory proposed by Nacht in 1948). 17. The most important key moments are the PPS’s 1969 Colloquium on Repetition and the Death Instinct, the Marseilles symposium organized by the European Psychoanalytic Federation, at which Andre Green and Jean Laplanche set their views against those of the other European psychoanalysts; the second volume of the Revue FranGaise de Psychanalyse (1989) on The Death Instinct; the congress organized in 1999 by Jean Guillaumain in Lyons on Invention and the Death Instinct, where Denys Ribas presented his study Chronique de l’intrication et de la dksintrication pulsionelle. A detailed exposition of the positions taken by the main PPS writers up to 1989 can be found in Bokanowski (1989). 18. ‘I take the central phobic position to be a basic psychic disposition often found in the treatment of certain borderline states’ (Green, 2002, p. 152). 19. The discourse of his patient Gabriel seemed to be ‘kept at a distance, developed at length through generalities, making the analyst feel like he is trying to find his way around in a thick fog’ (Green, 2002, p. 166). 20. ‘The discourse lapses into linearity. Associativity doesn’t come to the fore in the apres-coup, so much as it anticipates what follows, opening up to a potentiality’(Green, 2002, p. 171). 21. ‘It is as though phobic functioning had installed itself inside the very discourse, and got in the way of any possible deployment within the psyche’ (Green, 2002, p. 171). 22. Discussing his patient Gabriel, Green writes: ‘At first I thought I was dealing with an attitude that had arisen from massive and prolonged repression. That was until I understood that if he was unable to go into free association it was not through any lack, but rather potentially an excess of associations. In other words, the further he went into what he had to say, the more he felt a sense of danger, because the communication between the elements of his discourse was not sufficiently watertight, and he would mangle his words or muddle them up, as if he was trying to warn of an outcome towards which he would unavoidably be

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drawn if he only let himself be taken there’ (Green, 2002, p. 166). 23. “1111 his case it was really a matter of the great insecurity he was experiencing while putting into perspective the key signifiers of psychoanalysis ... all in all what made this multidirectional progress stagnate and become sterile, was the anticipation of the place it risked taking him. Ultimately, it was as though they all had inevitably to lead to the torrent of traumas, each responding to the others’ (Green, 2002, p. 170). 24. ‘This was a response to the feeling of multiple abandonments which, each time one of them is recalled, divides him even more, making him incapable of using his affects to ask what his Ego can do about, it in some attempt to put together the meaning which might emerge from a process of putting into perspective’ (Green, 2002, p. 172). 25. ‘The pillars of mental life - which before analysis the patient had managed to keep apart, whose relationship he had denied - had touched’ (Green, 2002, p. 153). 26. ‘The real trauma, then, consisted in the possibility of seeing them united in a group configuration in which the subject loses his internal capacity to oppose prohibitions and is no longer in a position to be sure of the limits of his own individuality, resorting to multiple and sometimes contradictory identities, finding himself from then on unable to make use of isolated defensive solutions’(Green, 2002, p. 153). 27. ‘[Wlhat the distress reveals is the murder of the representation of the mother who fails to appear, or the breast which fails to satisfy hunger, but instead increases excitement’(Green, 2002, p. 171). 28. ‘The blame is the result of the primary murder, whose aim is an expulsion of the abandoning object’ (Green, 2002, p. 180). 29. ‘The maternal object murdered in this way “can only be apprehended in terms of the void in which it leaves the subject; and if, on the contrary, it does make its presence felt, its ghost occupies every part of the space; that is, it ‘takesover’”’(Green, 2002, p. 181). 30. Cf. Freud (1925, p. 236). The murdered primary object is simultaneously good, bad, existing and non-existent (Green, 2002, p. 181). 3 1. ‘Thisis followed by a denial of the very psychic reality of the subject who carries it out’ (Green, 2002, p. 171). 32. Green prefers to talk about the ‘destructionimpulse’ and the ‘aggression impulse’, rather than ‘death instincts’. ‘Destructiveness’is the death instinct working within th psychic apparatus; ‘aggressiveness’is the death instinct turned towards the outside (Green, 2000a, p. 164). 33. For this the analyst must overcome ‘his own phobia of thought, that is, his being excited by “retroactivereverberations” and the “annunciatory anticipation”for the positive ways in which it is possible to engage with them. In my experience, it is only in this state that the patient can see in him the reflection of a psychic functioning which follows a similar path ...’ (Green, 2002, p. 179).


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34. Ribas (2002, p. 182). But Ribas also reads what Winnicott wrote on the ‘pure feminine element’ adding ‘link’to ‘impulse’: ‘if the masculine is linked to the active orpassive link to the object, cathexed, the pure feminine element defines a quite different link to the breast or the mother.’ 35. ‘It seems to me that a fanatic will be in a state of adhesive identification with his ideal, which - as has already been emphasised - one should henceforth consider an ideal ego, rather than an “ego-ideal’’’ (Ribas, 1999). 36. The ‘ideal ego’, ‘which is adhesive and defused, and thus eternal and pure, to which all of the risks of fanaticism can be associated,’ is ‘in opposition to the “ego-ideal’”(Ribas, 2002 p. 206). 37. Freud returned to this idea in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (Freud, 1924, p. 294). 39. The attempts made by Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein to describe ‘aggressiveimpulses’endowed with a specific energy are subject to the same criticism. 40. ‘Andyet it was more and more obvious that the massive instances of cell death were absolutely universal, arising in all embryos in all living species’ (Ameisen, 1999, p. 30). ‘It is cell death which - in successive waves - shapes our arms and legs as they grow, from their outlines, from their base to their tip’ (ibid., p. 31). ‘Cell death also shapes the interior form of the embryo’ (ibid., p. 31). 41. From the Greek word for ‘falling’. 42. ‘Cell death didn’t imply the presence of some executioner, nor of combat, nor paralysis, nor ageing; it wasn’t the result of a murder, nor a poisoning. The killer was present at the very heart of the cell. The only effect of the death signal was to lead the cell to kill itself’ (Ameisen, 1999, p. 57). 43. This was signifkant enough to earn the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002 for the researchers who carried out this work.

References Ameisen J-Cl (1999) La sculpture du vivant. L e suicide cellulaire ou la mort crkatrice. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Aristotle (1990) Ethique ii Nicomaque.Tr. J Tricot. Paris:Vrin. Balier CI (1988) Psychanalyse des comportements violents. Paris: PUF. Balier Cl(1996) Psychanalyse des comportements sexuels violents. Paris: PUF. Bick E (1968) The experience of the skin in early object-relations,Int.J. Psychoanal. 49: 484-6.

Bokanowski T (1989) Le concept de pulsion de mort. Bibliographie critique des auteurs psychanalytiques francais. Rev. franc Psychanal. 2/1989,509-33.

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Declerck P (2001) Les naufragks. Avec les clochards de Paris. Paris: Terre humaine, Plon. Denis P (1997) Emprise et satisfaction. Les d e w formants de la pulsion. Paris: PUF. Denis P (2002) Un principe d’organisation-desorganisation. Rev. franc. Psychanalyse Special Congrks 5/2002,1799-1808. Diatkine G (2000) Le surmoi culturel. Rev. franc. Psychanal. 5/2000,1523-88. Diatkine G (2002) Malaise dans la civilisation et desintrication pulsionnelle. Rev. franc. Psychanalyse, 5/2002, 1845-52. Freud S (1909) Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. SE 10. Freud S (1913[ 1912-13)) Totem and Taboo. SE 13. Freud S (1914) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14. Freud S (1915a) Instincts and their Vicissitudes.SE 14. Freud S (1915b) Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. SE 14. Freud S (1918[19141) From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. SE 17. Freud S (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18. Freud S (192 1) Group Psychologyand the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19. Freud S (1924) The Economic Problem of Masochism. SE 21. Freud S (1925) Negation. SE 19. Freud S (1929) Civilization and its Discontents. SE 2 1. Freud S (1933[ 19321) Why War? SE 22. Freud S (1939[1934-381) Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. SE 23. Green A (1999) La pensee clinique, Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. Green A (2000a) La mort dans la vie. Quelques repkres pour la pulsion de mort. In J. Guillaumin (ed.), L’invention de la pulsion de mort, Paris: Dunod. Green A (2000b) Le Temps Eclate. Paris: Les Editions de Minuet. GreenA (2002) La position phobique centrale. Avec un modele de I’associationlibre. In A Green, La pensee clinique. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. (The central phobic position: a new formulation of the free association method. Int. J. Psychoanal. 81, 2000, 429-51.) Green A et al. (1986) La Pulsion de Mort. Paris: PUF. Hartmann H, Kris E, Loewenstein RM (1949) Notes on the theory of aggression. Psychoanal. Study Child. 3 4 :9-56. Kerr JFR, Willie AH, Currie AR (1972) Apoptosis: a basic biological phenomenon with wide-ranging implications in tissue kinetics. British Journal of Cancerology 26: 239-57. Kohut H (1984) Analyse et guerison. Tr. Cl Monod, Paris: PUF, 1991. Lacan J (1948) L’agressivite en psychanalyse. Rapport present6 a la Xle Conference des Psychanalystes de langue francaise. Rev. franc. Psychanal. 3/1948,367-88. Lacan J (1956-57) Le seminaire, lV.La relation d’objet. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1994. Lacan J (1960) Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desk dans I’inconscient freudien. In Ecrits. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1966. Lacan J (1964) Le seminaire, XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaw de la psychanalyse. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1973. Lacan J (1974) Television. Paris: Ed. du Seuil. McDougall J (1972) L’anti-analysant en psychanalyse. Rev. franc. Psychanal. 36: 185-206. Marty P (1966) La depression essentielle. Rev.franc. Psychanal. 32(3): 595-8. Maw P, M’Uzan M de, David C (1963) L’investigation psychosomatique. Paris: PUF.


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Nacht S (1948) Les manifestations cliniques de l’agressiviteet leur r6le dans le traitement psychanalytique. Rapport prksente h la XIe ConfCrence des Psychanalystes de langue franqaise. Rev. franc. Psychanal. 3: 313-65. Plato (1969) Philebe. Tr. E. Chambry. Paris: Gamier-Flammarion. Ribas D (1999) Un sectaire mortifttre. In P Denis, J Schaeffer (eds), Sectes, DCbats de psychanalyse. Paris: PUF. Ribas D (2002) Chronique de I’intricationet de la desintrication pulsionnelle. Bulletin de la SociCtC Psychanalytique de Paris 62: 129-215. Rev. franc. Psychanal. 5/2002, 1689-1 770. Ribas D (2004) Controverses sur I’autisme et tkmoignages. Paris: PUF. Smadja Cl(2001) Clinique d’un &at de dementalisation, Rev. franc. Psychosom. 19: 13. SteinerJ (1993) Psychic Retreats. London: Routledge. Swecz G (1993) Les procCdCs autocalmants par la recherche d e I’excitation. Les galeriens volontaires. Rev. franc. Psychosomatique 4: 27-53. Swecz G (1998) Les galeriens volontaires. Paris: PUF. Winnicott DW (1971) Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. La pulsion de mort. Rev. franc. Psychanal. 1989,Z. Regtition et instinct de mort. Colloque de la SPP de 1969.Rev. franc. Psychanal. 1970,3.

PART

Iv

The Structural Model of the Mind

9 Towards the structural model of the mind MARGRET T O N N E S M A “ When in 1923 Freud introduced the structural model of the mind, sometimes also called the second topographical model, he had become increasingly aware that he needed to alter some of the basic assumptions of the first topographical model. In this chapter I intend to trace the shift between a spatial model of the mind composed of areas to a model of the mind composed of agencies: the id, the ego and superego. In particular I will focus on how the concept of the ego ideal was partially replaced by that of the superego. In the topographical model Freud had divided the mind into three psychic areas, according to whether they functioned on an unconscious, preconscious or conscious level. Freud conceived of a censor between the unconscious and the pre-conscious systems that was capable of holding back unconscious mental activity through repression. Only if the censor allowed thought processes to pass could they become potentially conscious by being recorded in the pre-conscious area. Otherwise they would remain dynamically unconscious. However, pre-conscious thought processes were still descriptively unconscious but could become conscious by being cathected with additional psychic energy; Freud assumed that this was the function of attention. In the paper on ‘TheUnconscious’ (1915), he referred to clinical observations which showed that sometimes pre-conscious thoughts remained dynamically unconscious, and he suggested that possibly there was also a process of censorship in the pre-conscious. What could no longer be maintained was that mental activity in the system pre-conscious was potentially conscious and only descriptively unconscious, and so by 1923 Freud had introduced what is known as the structural model of the mind in ‘The Ego and The Id’. In his introduction to this book James Strachey pointed out that the new terminology ‘had a highly clarifying effect and so made further clinical advances possible. But it did not in itself involve any fundamental changes in

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Freud’s views on mental structure and functioning. Indeed, the three newly presented entities, the id, the ego and the superego, all had lengthy past histories ... and these will be worth examining’(Freud, 1923, p. 7). In ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud pointed out that it is not good enough to equate the dynamic unconscious with what has been repressed and also with the system unconscious, the area in which primary process functioning reigns supreme. In his clinical work he had found that ego-defence mechanisms which are pre-conscious and appear during therapy as the patients’ resistances, are also dynamically unconscious. So he could now say that everything that is repressed is unconscious but not everything that is unconscious is repressed. In his new model he assigned to the id the repressed unconscious and also the representation of our wish impulses. But the id has no organization and its syntax is the primary process. Freud’s main focus in this book is on the ego. From the beginning of his studies he had defined the ego loosely as an organization with a constant cathexis. Via its censor it admits certain ideas to consciousness but holds others back. In his paper ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’(191 la), Freud had discussed the development of the ego in the move from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. At the beginning the infant is a pleasure-seeking creature supported by the mother’s ministrations that make a state of pure pleasure possible. The pleasure principle reigns supreme in the unconscious throughout our lives but as the infant develops, reality soon starts to impinge. The reality principle will then modify the pleasure principle and will become a regulatory principle of the ego. In 1923 Freud defined the ego as the central organizer of psychic functioning by means of the triad of adaptation, control and integration. It has sole access to consciousness, approach to motility and reality testing.

Narcissism, the ego ideal and identification But the ego is also an object. We can take ourselves as an object, we have imaginings and phantasies about ourselves. In the English language we can speak of our ‘self’. In the paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) Freud argued that the ego is both subject and object, and he assigned to the ego a new, central importance. He gave a few examples as to how we can take the ego as the object of libidinal cathexis. The schizophrenic patient does so and then becomes megalomanic. He withdraws libidinal cathexis from the object and cathects his own ego instead. Freud (19 1 1b) had studied the diary of a German judge who had suffered from psychotic paranoid episodes (see Chapter 1 1, this volume). He felt that he needed to understand disordered ego functioning to comprehend ego functioning under normal and psycho-neuroticconditions. He wanted to explore those forces of the ego that led to repression. Up to that time he had

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only talked in general terms of the ego as the repressing force, driven by the experiences of shame and disgust and the impact of its ethical standards. We all withdraw into a narcissistic state when we go to sleep and give up on the world. We also withdraw all our interest from the outside world when we suffer from an illness, and cathect the diseased organ. Freud quoted from the German author Wilhelm Busch: ‘Concentrated is his soul in the molar’s narrow hole.’ Freud also discussed the role of narcissism in early development in this paper and revised the developmental sequence that he had presented in the ‘Three Essays on the Theory Sexuality’ (1905). At first our objects are those which satisfy the vital functions of self-preservationlike hunger and thirst. They are objects of the self-preservative,ego instincts. The libidinal impulses follow along these pathways and there then develops what Freud called the ‘anaclitic’attachment to the objects of the self-preservative impulses. Soon the libidinal impulses become independent of the self-preservative ones but keep to the same anaclitic objects. Even in adult life, when we fall in love or maintain emotional relationships we keep the models of the early anaclitic objects, namely those that feed us and those that protect us. But Freud says we also form narcissistic relationships. At first the baby is in love with himerself. When, however, in the course of growing up the baby suffers the first normative narcissistic mortifications of his infantfie omnipotence, he builds within himself an ideal image of himself, the ego ideal. The ego ideal takes its contents from the environment: the child is a good child when it follows his ego ideal, which contains mother’s ideas of how a good little child should behave. Freud now interpolates a narcissistic stage in between the earliest auto-erotic stage and the object stage of development. We carry our ideal self throughout life, and when the ego ideal has been established, our self-regard comes from the belief that we are close to our own ideal. But we also form narcissistic object-relationshipswhen we choose and love an object that represents our own ideal. Freud said that what we are, what we once were, and what we would like to be can be re-found in a narcissistic relationship. He described how parents over-value their children. He saw it as the revival and reproduction of their own narcissism. ‘Ishe/she not cute?’the parents may say about their tiny offspring. Freud maintained that right through life we form relationships that are a mixture of object love and narcissistic love. When we feel good about ourselves, we have high self-esteem.When we project our ego ideal in a relationship, we idealize the object and feel humble. But by having our love returned our narcissistic love is restored. The ego ideal becomes a special agency in the ego. What Freud had referred to as the repressing forces of our ethical standards, sense of shame and disgust now becomes the repressing forces of the ego ideal. Freud once called it the watchman that functions as our conscience, and it is also the dream censor.

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Identification and melancholia In 1915 Freud sent the manuscript of a paper on melancholia to Karl Abraham, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in Berlin, for his critical opinion. Abraham had already written a paper on melancholia in 1911. Freud had considered some of Abraham’s explanations, for example that melancholia is a psychotic illness in response to the loss of an object that had remained unconscious. Both Freud and Abraham contrasted it to mourning, which is a healthy response to an actual loss that has been suffered. Whereas Abraham thought that it is the unconscious oral-sadistic incorporation of the lost object that accounts for the psychotic state, Freud maintained that it is regression to the early oral organization that leads to an identification of the ego with the object. Freud thought that objects that get incorporated always lead to identification with the object. This seems to be only a small theoretical difference but it is important; we can see it as the very beginning of the divergence between what later became object relations theory as opposed to the classical theory of psychoanalysis. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) Freud thought, like Abraham, that the mourner has suffered an actual loss but the relationship to the object has to be maintained for a while, because the libidinal tie to it can only be slowly loosened by a prolonged period of mourning work. The work of mourning aims at freeing the libido so that new relationships can be formed. The melancholic has suffered a loss of the idealization of a repressed, unconscious, narcissistic object, that might have been a person or an abstract object. The relationship was ambivalent; his hate aimed at destroying the object but his love wanted to maintain it. In order to safeguard the object the narcissistic object relationship has reverted to narcissism. The object is incorporated and the ego has identified with it. ‘The shadow of the object has fallen on the ego,’ as Freud said. The ego now separates into two parts, and one part attacks the object-identified ego mercilessly. The attacking ego is of course the ego ideal that has been watching the ego and maintaining the functions of conscience. The melancholic patient is consumed with feelings of worthlessness, but from the content of his self-reproachesand self-blame we can guess that it is the object with which the ego is identified that is mainly being attacked. Melancholic illness is self-limiting. Freud suggested that either the hate was spent or the identification with the object was given up or destroyed as the object was judged to be worthless. In some cases of melancholia, or manic-depressivepsychosis as it is now more often called, the lifting of the depression is followed by a manic state. In ‘Group Analysis and the Ego’ (1921) Freud drew attention to his earlier discussions. From time to time we let what is repressed circumventthe resistance of repression and allow it into our egos to increase our pleasure; we experience it for example as jokes and humour. He suggested that in the same way we cannot endure for long the separation of the ego ideal from the ego. In all the renunciations and


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limitations that the ego ideal imposes on the ego, from time to time there is an overthrowing of prohibition; we can see this in those festivals in which excesses are allowed and encouraged, for example in the Saturnalia of the Romans or the carnivals of modern times. In the pathology of manic states, Freud suggests, something similar may happen. The ego ideal and the ego become fused and the ego ideal becomes temporarily dissolved into the ego. In a manic state, the patient experiences a sense of triumph and selfsatisfaction with the abolition of his self-accusations and inhibitions. Freud suggested that during melancholic states there is a sharp conflict between the ego and the ego ideal, but if this changes into a manic episode, there has been a rebellion of part of the ego against the ego ideal.

Various levels of identification In the book ‘Group Analysis and the Ego’ (1921) Freud discussed identification in the context of a group’s relationship to the group-leader. He had already speculated in ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913) about the pre-historical development of mankind and the beginnings of social order. He used Darwin and some anthropologicalliterature of the time to postulate a myth about the origins of society. The primal horde had a fierce chief who pushed all sons out of the tribe and refused them access to its women. Only the youngest one was allowed to procreate. The sons both loved and hated the father. They came together and in their hate killed him and devoured him. After they had incorporated him their love came to the fore and they felt remorse. They identified with their father, and laws about not committing parricide and incest were established. The tribe created a totem as the symbol of the father. The totem was not to be eaten apart from a yearly ceremonial common meal. In ‘Group Analysis and the Ego’ Freud considered the dynamics of groups with a strong leader. He argued that all the members of the group will take the leader as their ideal, and as all of them share the same ideal they identify with each other. A double identification takes place and the members’ individual ego ideals are relinquished in favour of the common ideal object. This dynamic leads to a strong bond to the object, in contradistinction to the identification of the ego with the object. In the first case the ego is impoverished and has surrendered itself to the object. In the second case the ego is enriched by the properties of the object that has been introjected. Freud also discussed the various levels of identification. In human development identificationis the frrst kind of emotional tie to another person before an object relationship is established. Freud gave the example of the little boy who identifies with his father and wants to be like him in every respect. We can say that he takes his father as his ideal. With his mother, he has a libidinal relationship of the anaclitic type. So the little boy has two distinct ties: the identification with his father and a sexual object cathexis to his mother. Both these ties subsist independently for a while side by side and prepare for the Oedipus complex. The little boy then notices that his father is

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in the way of his relationship with his mother, and he wants to replace him. His identification with his father now takes on a hostile aspect. Identification is always ambivalent and can be seen as a derivative of the earliest oral organization: ‘1 love you, I eat you and annihilate you in the process.’ It is possible to identify with the positive or the negative valency. Identification with the object can become the precursor of an object-tie, when, for example, the little boy in a feminine attitude looks for satisfaction from his father as his sexual object. If there is an identificatory tie to the father the boy wants to be like the father, if he takes father as an object he wants to have the father. Freud gives the example of the little girl who wants to replace her mother in a hostile striving, and so develops the same troublesome cough as her mother. She wants to replace mother in her relationship to father and her symptom expresses the conflict between her love relationship to father and her guilt towards her mother. Another girl may have a cough like father. As she cannot have her father (as a love object) she identifies with him after the formula ‘what I cannot have I can be’. Here, object-choice has regressed to identification. It is also possible to copy a speciftc trait of someone without having a relationship with them. It is often based on the wish to put oneself in the same situation. Freud gives the example of girls in a boarding school, when one girl is having a secret love affair and has received a letter that has made her jealous. She reacts with a hysterical fit and other girls, who may not be personally friends with her, but who would also like to have a secret love affair, now identify with her and also throw hysterical fits. The identification has been displaced to the girl’ssymptom which signifiesthe desire that has to remain a secret. Freud summarized these three sources as follows: First, identiticationis the original form of emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie, as it were by means of introjection of the object into the ego, and thirdly, it may arrive with any new perception of a common quality shared with some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct. (1921, p. 107)

In ‘TheEgo and the Id’ (1923) Freud pointed out that the whole nature of the ego consists of the precipitates of identifications from abandoned objects. The libidinal charge of the given-up object-cathexis is desexualized and becomes narcissistic energy. Sublimation occurs by means of the switch from the cathexis of the object to the cathexis of the self, and with it the aim of the libidinal charge is changed. Freud said that the ego contains the history of given-upobject choices and has to be viewed as an internalized environment.

Superego and identiacation The most important identi3cations that we make during childhood are those


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that build a special agency of the ego: the superego. The boy’s primary identification with his father is an immediate identification prior to making an object-cathexis,as Freud had previously discussed. Freud added in 1923 that such an identification might be genetically routed. In general the child’s object-choices relate to his father and mother, but when he enters the oedipal stage of development we have to take into account that there is now a triangular relationship involved, and inborn bisexuality plays an important part. Freud assumed that the boy is for a time tied by primary identification to his father and by an early object relationship to his mother. They coexist for a while until his sexual wishes for his mother intensify. Then his relation to his father becomes ambivalent and he wishes to get rid of him. The boy has now entered the triangular Oedipus complex. When the oedipal situation is finally resolved either the objectcathexis of mother is given up and this will result in an identification with her, or there will be an intensification of the identification with father, and this permits an aim-inhibited affectionate relationship to mother. For the girl the situation is similar: there will be either an intensification with her identification with mother which will enhance the development of a feminine character, or the girl will identify with father, become tomboyish and develop masculine character traits. Freud thought that bisexuality affects the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex for both boys and girls, as the relative strengths of the masculine and feminine disposition vary. The negative Oedipus complex is also dependent on the bisexual disposition and we often find that the Oedipus complex is actually twofold. The boy behaves at times like a little girl, and displays affectionate feminine attitudes towards his father with feelings of rivalry and jealousy towards his mother. The same holds true for the negative Oedipus complex of little girls. At the end of the oedipal stage of development we find a superego in boys and girls that has been built from identificationswith father and mother. For the boy the identificationwith his father preserves the object relation to mother and replaces the feminine object relation to father. The precipitate of the Oedipus complex in the ego leads to a modification in the ego: the contents of the ego are confronted by a separate part, as the superego. The superego has a special position, which is not simply the residue of the earliest object choices of the id impulses. Freud stated that it is more powerful than a residue, it is an energetic reaction formation against these choices. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ he argued that the concept of the superego has to be seen as equivalent to the ego ideal. He thought that the ego ideal had been understood as a special grade, a differentiation of the ego, but the novelty now was that this part of the ego was less firmly connected with consciousness. As Strachey has pointed out, after the publication of ‘The Ego and the Id’ ‘ego ideal’ as a technical term disappeared almost completely to be substituted by the term ‘superego’.It is in this book that Freud had arrived at

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his final views on the derivation of the superego from the child’s earliest object-relations. The superego contains the double-bind demand of ‘You ought to be like the father’ and ‘You may not be like the father’. It is the task of the superego to repress the oedipal strivings of the child. His parents became an obstacle to the realizing of them. The child identifies with the parents and erects them in his superego, which in turn becomes a separate part of the ego. The boy borrows his strength from the father Freud said, and the superego retains this character of the father. Hence the more powerful the oedipal wishes, the more rapidly they will be repressed. Freud maintained that the superego is the product of two important factors: a biological one, namely the lengthy duration of the helplessness and dependence of human childhood, and a historical one, the fact of the Oedipus complex and its repression. Freud was sympathetic to Sandor Ferenczi’s idea that the Ice Age had exposed human beings to extreme hardships, and had necessitated adjustments in the way that we live. Offspring had had to abstain from procreation for a prolonged period, so that over time the development of human sexuality became bi-phasic. Infantile sexuality temporarily declines after the oedipus complex has been normatively repressed. Sexuality is latent during the next few years until puberty, when the maturation of the genital organs completes sexual development. Freud said that the superego is the heir of the Oedipus complex. It is the setting up of the superego that masters the Oedipus complex. He was concerned that critics of psychoanalytic theory had often complained that it dealt only with the lower part of human existence and did not recognize the higher values and cultural achievements of mankind. He argued that with the description of how the superego is placed in subjection to the id, psychoanalysis had shown that the id which belongs to the lowest part of mental life has been changed by the formation of the superego into what is highest in human life: morality, religion and a social sense. The superego is built up from our first identifications, and it is also the heir of the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that the ego identifications which have taken place over thousands of years have become the genetic contents of the id. He conceived of a genetic father and mother image in the id. In individual development the genetically programmed id wishes are activated by the child’swishes for his parents during the phallic oedipal stage of development The identification with the parents of our oedipal wishes places the superego close to the id and further away from consciousness. Hence the superego represents psychic reality, in contrast to the ego which represents internalized environment. Freud discussed the question as to whether the superego consists of word or visual mnemic residues. Like the ego it consists of word residues as the residues are from heard words. But when the superego’s function is unconscious the energetic cathexis comes from the id and is therefore nearer to the primary process. The harshness of the superego stems partly from the


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child’s identification with the demands and teaching of his parents, or even more from the parents’ superego and ideals. It maintains the culture and traditions of society. But it is also partly the outcome of the intensity of the child’s oedipal wish-impulses. Freud reasoned that identification is always ambivalent, as it is based on the oral model: ‘I love you, so I eat you and destroy you in the process.’ When the object-cathexis is given up with the move to identification, defusion of the impulses takes place. The libidinal impulses are desexualized and become narcissistic ego energy, but the part that stems from the destructive instinctual cathexis is set free and fuels the superego in its harsh, sadistic attacks on the ego. The more intense the child’s oedipal wish-impulses are, the stricter his superego will become. Hence Freud said that the more man checks his aggressiveness, the more cruel his superego will become. It is not the other way round. The superego functions as the ego ideal and also as conscience. The ego experiences the latter as a feeling of guilt. We experience conscious guilt feelings when we feel remorse for an aggressive act. But we can also feel guilty when a repressed aggressive impulse is not sensed by the ego but is registered by the superego. It demonstrates the close relation between the superego and the id. This is so in obsessional neurosis when the superego makes the ego feel guilty for repressed hostile impulses. Freud said that then the ego does object and feels not guilty but sick. In melancholia the objectidentified ego succumbs to such impulses and feels tormented. Freud drew attention to the incorrect use of the term ‘unconsciousguilt feelings’.Strictly speaking we can only experience feelings when we feel them. We cannot unconsciously feel feelings. What is meant by ‘unconscious feelings’ is a defensive displacement of feelings on to a different subject matter. We can also seek punishment because of an unconscious sense of guilt: the negative therapeutic reaction during treatment is an example. Unconscious guilt can also turn people into delinquents; we may act criminally in order to relieve tension states that cannot be identified as guilt by the ego. Moral masochism satisfies the need for punishment and it vanishes when external life situations provide us with enough hardship.

Conclusion I have tried to show in this chapter how in his paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’(1914) Freud discussed the formation of the ego ideal from the child’s identification with the parents and how he dealt in several later publications with various aspects and levels of identification before he introduced the concept of the superego in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923). The new factor that he discussed here was that the ego ideal was less a part of consciousness than he had previously assumed. From now on he used the term superego, which included aspects of the ego ideal, and the term ego ideal was only to be used a few more times in all his later publications.

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Notes 1. The German term iiber-lch cannot be translated literally as it would read ‘above-1’.James Strachey discussed this difficulty with Freud, who agreed that Strachey should use the Latin terms ego and superego. It is unfortunate that in the translation some of the powerful impact of the original German term was lost. 2 In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) Freud assumed that boys and girls experience the oedipal phase in the same way. Soon after (1923, 1931) he altered his views on the oedipal phase of the girl. He pointed out that both girls and boys become aware of their anatomical differences during this stage of development. He then assumed that girls enter the oedipal situation when they turn away from mother because they blame her for their lack of a phallus. This motivates them to turn to father and wish to have a baby by him. The oedipal situation ends in renewed disappointment. The girl then turns back to mother or identifies with father and develops tomboyish character features before she develops a female identity during puberty. 3. Freud pointed out that some patients react with strong resistance whenever they show some improvement in their condition during therapy. They dread improvement as if it were a danger to them. They find satisfaction in their illness and refuse to give up the punishment of suffering. This negative therapeutic reaction is due to a moral factor, a sense of guilt that remains unconscious; these patients do not feel guilty; they feel ill. This sense of guilt expresses itself only as a resistance to recovery which is extremely difficult to overcome.

References Abraham K (191 1) Notes on the psycho-analytic investigation and treatment of manicdepressive insanity and allied conditions. In Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1965, pp. 137-56. Freud S (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.SE 7. Freud S (1911a) Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. SE 12. Freud S (191 lb) Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia. SE 12. Freud S (1913) Totem and Taboo. SE 13. Freud S (1914) On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE 14. Freud S (1915) The Unconscious. SE 14. Freud S (1917) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14. Freud S (1921) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE 18. Freud S (1923) The ‘Igoand the Id. SE 19. Freud S (1925) Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes. SE 19. Freud S (1931) Female Sexuality. SE 21. StracheyJ (1923) Editor’s introduction. In The Ego and the Id. SE 19.

T P ’

v

S o m e Further Clinical Cases

10 ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’

PAUL WILLIAMS ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ occupies, along with a number of other reports of analyses undertaken by Freud, a particular place in the psychoanalytic literature as it is one of the earliest full accounts of a psychoanalysis. It is therefore of much historical interest in that it provides a picture of the theoretical and technical development of psychoanalysis in 1907 (when Freud began the case). But interest in the paper goes beyond history: the account remains captivating because of its detail and to Freud’s prescient attention to small amounts of data, the importance of which would only become properly understood in the light of subsequent theoretical developments. It is also true that as a literary account of the internal world of an obsessional individual, the paper makes compelling reading. This is in part because it is a ‘demonstration’by Freud of how to understand the meaning of obsessional-compulsive neurosis, something that had eluded medicine and psychology. The paper, together with the original record of the notes on the case made by Freud (which appears immediately after the paper in the Standard Edition), conveys the relationship between the analytic couple, their respective characters, the patient’s internal world, the analytic setting and atmosphere, the methods by which analysis was conducted and what Freud made of a mass of confusing information. Because of the place of this case in the developing theory of psychoanalysis and the fullness of its clinical record, it has been subject to a good deal of scrutiny and interpretation from a range of commentators. There has also been criticism as well as appreciation: in particular, some have castigated Freud for what appear to be departures from ‘classical’ psychoanalytic technique through his use of supportive, social and didactic ways of communicating. Others have defended Freud’s actions, and both sides of this argument will be considered. Freud has also been charged with claiming a level of improvement in the patient that was not sustained, although it will be argued below that this is a less tenable criticism. 177

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The main themes in the case of the ‘Rat Man’ The pseudonym ‘Rat Man’ carries an unfortunate, pejorative overtone for someone with a crippling obsessional illness. The patient was Paul Lorenz; in his twenties he came to see Freud with a number of symptoms that he had suffered since childhood, and which had grown in intensity during the previous four years. The principal theme of his troubles had for a long time been a fear that something terrible would happen to his father and a woman he (Lorenz) loved. Lorenz had found himself caught up in a temptation to marry another woman instead of the woman he loved and had planned to marry. This conflict created indecision in him and he became trapped by an impossible choice, as he saw it, between following his parents’ (particularly his father’s)wishes and his own desires. This conflict echoed, it transpired, a similar one from childhood. He was also troubled by anxieties over an aunt who had died. Lorenz had been experiencing disturbing impulses such as a desire to cut his throat or to commit suicide in other ways and he had imposed a range of prohibitions on himself that restricted his life, to the point of despair. Freud found himself confronted by a bright, shrewd young man whose emotional, sexual and social development had been severely stunted by obsessional thinking, the roots of which appeared to stretch back into his infancy. The analysis began and, under instruction from Freud to speak frankly, Lorenz proceeded to recount his troubles. He talked of his longstanding low opinion of himself, of how he had sought support from his peers in this regard and he mentioned a young man who had befriended him: this friendship was a ruse, it had turned out, as it was designed only to gain access to Lorenz’s sister, Lorenz had felt betrayed, describing it as the ‘fast great blow of my life’. He also described his precocious sexual life, beginning at age four or five when he had undertaken clandestine explorations of his governess’s genitals. His interest in the female body had intensified during childhood through numerous voyeuristic incidents and occasions of sexual contact with servant girls. Freud notes that ‘lookingwas the same as touching’ for Lorenz, and this is particularly interesting in the light of Freud stating later that avoidance of contact and personal touching lies at the centre of obsessional neurosis. Lorenz experienced erections from the age of about six and felt anxious about these and his persistent desires to see women naked. He worried that his parents knew of his thoughts and wishes, and was already (by six) terrified and depressed by the notion that his father would die. Katherine, his sister, had died at the height of his infantile neurosis and this was clearly a profound loss. Lorenz proceeded to recount to Freud his many adult fears, the crisis over the two potential spouses and his fear of contravening his father’s wishes occupying a central place in his narrative. He also spoke of a bizarre incident that was to become a motif of the analysis. It had taken place during military exercises in which Lorenz had participated before starting his analysis. On

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one occasion before a march, Lorenz had lost his pince-nez.He had wired his optician for another pair rather than delay his colleagues but then, after the march had begun and the soldiers had stopped for a break, Lorenz had sat between two officers one of whom (a captain) recounted a particularly gruesome punishment of criminals in the East. With difficulty and much encouragement from Freud, Lorenz revealed the details of the punishment. The criminal is tied up and placed face down: a bucket is put upside down on his buttocks and rats are placed in it. Gradually they bore their way into the man’sbody through his anus. Freud comments in his paper on Lorenz’shorror of the pleasure he (Lorenz) unwittingly took in recounting the story. Lorenz revealed to Freud that he had had a particular thought as the officer had been describing the punishment: that the torture was happening to someone very dear to him,possibly to the woman he loved. He added that on the evening of the day he had been told the story, the same officer handed him a package containing his new pince-nez, saying that another officer had paid the charges and Lorenz should reimburse him. Unaccountably, Lorenz became convinced that he should not reimburse the officer, else the rat torture would happen to his father or the woman Lorenz loved. This was in turn followed by making a vow that he must pay back the money. Lorenz tried to pay back the money but his ambivalence gained the upper hand and he failed. When he eventually did speak to the officer, he was told by him,most confusingly,that in fact another man had paid the charges. Lorenz resolved this dilemma in concrete fashion by deciding to go with both men to the post office, give the money to the young woman behind the counter and she would give it to the second man who had paid the charges. Lorenz would then pay the first man the same amount, thereby keeping his vow. Freud makes an interesting comment about the session in which this disturbing material arose: at one point Freud reassures Lorenz that he (Freud) is personally not fond of cruelty like the captain and has no wish to torment his patient. Freud adds that Lorenz referred to him as ‘Captain’ during the session. As will be seen, the transference implications of Freud’s comment had powerful repercussions, not all of which were taken up by Freud. In subsequent sessions Lorenz elaborated the story of his obsessional vow to repay the money. There is a long, complex account of his unresolved ruminations, and a recovery of a memory that complicated the issue still further. Lorenz had been told by yet another officerprior to the day he heard the rat torture story that it was actually the woman at the post office who had paid the mail charges. The ‘cruel’captain had obviously been mistaken and somewhere in Lorenz’s own mind (given the timing of these events) he must have known this but he had nevertheless proceeded to make his vow on the basis that the captain’s statement was correct. This distortion of reality resulted in endless self-torment. In the ensuing weeks and months after hearing about the rat torture Lorenz was haunted by his insistent (misplaced) vow to repay the officer, to the point of ingeniously developing the idea that if he could show the officer a doctor’s certificate stating that Lorenz’s health

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was at stake if he didn’t repay the money, this would persuade him to accept it. It was whilst caught up with this notion of getting a doctor to support the contention that he was ill that Lorenz found his way to Freud’s office. These bizarre, baffling events were soon followed by a lengthy report to Freud of Lorenz’sfather’semphysema, which had finally killed him some nine years earlier. In particular, Lorenz mentioned a conversation with the family doctor at the height of his father’s illness. He had asked the doctor when the danger would be over and was told ‘the evening of the day after tomorrow’. Thinking his father would be better by then, he rested, only to be woken up a short while later to be told that his father had died. He reproached himself severely for not being present and subsequently found himself denying the reality of his father’s death. His obsessional self-accusations became worse, culminating in incapacitation, thoughts of suicide and fears of what would happen to him in the next world. In the analysis, Freud makes a point of taking Lorenz’s guilty feelings extremely seriously, but emphasizes to Lorenz that the source of his guilt must lie elsewhere, as they both knew that he had not committed any criminal or cruel act against his father. In fact, Freud gives Lorenz what amounts to pedagogical instruction on the differences between unconscious and conscious thinking, linking these to Lorenz’s history of oedipal anxieties, his preoccupation with his father’sdeath and the violently conflicted feelings underlying these. Lorenz was fascinated by and resistant to Freud’s ideas, but his need to confide his troubles and his positive transference to Freud helped him to overcome much of his wariness and he continued to disclose his childhood anxieties. These included falling in unrequited love at twelve with his sister’s friend and imagining that if she knew of a misfortune he’d suffered (e.g. his father’s death) she would be more affectionate towards him.Freud pursued the possibility of this potential misfortune being a wish as well as a fear in Lorenz’s mind, and Lorenz proceeded to divulge other examples of similar oedipal constellations of thoughts. Freud and Lorenz discussed in detail his childhood wishes and fears as they emerged in various guises and in different relationships. In the process Freud built up a picture of Lorenz’s strongly ambivalent feelings towards his father. Freud realized that when Lorenz’s father did actually die, his obsessional symptoms worsened because the death became unconsciously indistinguishable for Lorenz from the fantasized consequences of his wishes to see his father dead. In all, the analysis, Freud reports, lasted eleven months and was a painstaking effort by both partners, but particularly by Freud, to unravel an array of infantile ideas and distortions of reality that had rendered internal and external reality impossibly confusing for Lorenz.

K e y concepts Freud’s summary of the case, of which the above is the briefest outline, was used as a platform to demonstrate his thinking and ideas, as much it was to

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record a clinical case of analytic treatment. This is reflected in the structure of the paper. Having presented an account of the history of the patient’s difficulties and Freud’s own understanding of them, he moves to a more discursive examination of the psychological phenomena of obsessionalideas, and in the final section of the paper he provides a theoretical overview of obsessionality and its place in analytic thinking. We are led from the clinical detail ‘ever upward’ towards a broader perspective that culminates in a theoretical contextualizationof the meaning of symptoms otherwise deemed to be incomprehensible - a veritable tour de force of psychological and literary exposition. Freud employs a variety of interrelated concepts in discussing the meaning of Lorenz’s illness. His first concern, as always, is to render comprehensible symptoms that appear to have neither motive nor meaning. He does this by bringing disturbed ideas into a temporal and experiential framework - when, how and under what circumstances did the symptoms arise? An example is Lorenz’s impulsive wishes to kill himself Freud notes how this related to feelings of loss and rage when separated from the person he loved (his girlfriend in particular). There were indirect wishes to commit suicide also, one of which was linked to a period when Lorenz decided he was too fat and underwent drastic exercise to get slim. During runs in the mountains he occasionallyfelt the impulse to throw himself off a cliff. Analysis uncovered that his disturbed thinking was linked to an English cousin, Dick, who had at one time been attracted to Lorenz’sgirlfriend while on holiday in the same location. It transpired that sexual rivalry underlay these particular suicidal impulses (interestingly, ‘Dick’ in German means ‘fat’). Lorenz’s obsessional thinking took other forms. For example, he could over-protect his girlfriend, including from fantasized accidents that might befall her. When apart from her for any length of time he became at one point obsessed by a need to understand each syllable spoken to him by others, as though he risked losing a priceless treasure (it is not difficult to imagine this to be, among other things, an echo of the loss of his sister). The problem turned out to be linked to having misconstrued or distorted something his girlfriend had said: he believed (wrongly) that she had indicated she no longer wanted to have anything to do with him. When he was corrected he vowed never to misunderstand anyone again, in order to avoid such mental torment. These doubts, protection fantasies and fears of accidents and death were, Freud argues, the products of disavowed hostility towards his girlfriend. Lorenz experienced feelings of unmanageable hatred alongside his love and avoided recognition of this by keeping the affects apart and through use of intellectual rationalization. The conflict between love and hate was of prime importance in all Lorenz’srelationship difficulties. Reflecting on the precipitating causes of Lorenz’s illness, the significance of which had been lost on the patient (although he had not forgotten the

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circumstances), Freud comments on an important difference between hysteria and obsessionality. In the former ‘it is the rule that the precipitating causes of the illness are overtaken by amnesia no less than the infantile experiences by whose help the precipitating causes are able to transform their affective energy into symptoms’ (Freud, 1909, p. 195). The amnesia is the consequence of repression. Obsessional neuroses do not exhibit the same erosion or loss of impact on consciousness. Although some amnesia may mask the infantile precondition of the illness, the precipitating causes and their circumstances are retained in the memory. The patient remembers something of the start and course of the illness, and may, by recounting his self-reproaches,provide indicators of the unconscious origins of his troubles. The principle of a relationship between manifest and latent content is fundamental to psychoanalysis, but Freud is noting here how in obsessional neuroses the links are more accessible through the patient’s conscious awareness of symptoms and his associations to them. Lorenz’s recounting of a conflict between his desire for a particular girl and the woman he planned to marry (lus wealthy young relative) signalled, to Freud, the point at which Lorenz had become most seriously incapacitated. Freud was very interested in the conflict between Lorenz’s desire for the girl and the persisting influence of his father, as it not only reflected Lorenz’s oedipal difficultiesbut also mirrored the way in which the father himself had married into the same wealthy family. Lorenz had found himself paralysed by indecision and unable to work, and Freud points to the symptom not merely being a consequence of the illness but a muse of it. Freud suggests that Lorenz was identified, through his incapacity, with his father who had been in a similar position. Lorenz’s conflict with his father was, at the same time, an ancient one as could be seen from Lorenz’s precocious sexual life. Although he had by and large got on well with his father, despite a few overt conflicts, his persecuted sexual fantasies as a child (e.g. that his father would die and that he (Lorenz) would thereby secure the attentions of a certain little girl) indicated to Freud very longstanding oedipal problems. Interestingly, in the transference, a fantasy of marrying Freud’s daughter ‘for her money’ arose within a short time of beginning the analysis. Freud pieces together Lorenz’s ‘father complex’, including its relation to the rat torture, in a series of steps that take into account Lorenz’s masturbatory fantasies, his longing for his father and his battles with him (especially over his choice of a girl) and a complex story of a beating by the father in which Lorenz had flown into a fury and following which, he told Freud, he had ‘become a coward’, fearing physical violence. Freud was further able to grasp the father-son relationship in the transference through Lorenz’s fear that Freud would turn violently against him. Another source of conflict with his father was discovered via a memory of how his father had once not repaid a debt from his time in the army. Its identificatory signficance in refation to Lorenz’s own obsessional guilt about repaying the

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pince-nez postage money was not lost on Freud. Lorenz had long felt feelings of condemnation towards his father for not settling his debts, and was again identified with him. To complicate matters further, it turned out that the confusion surrounding the two officers was also linked to the earlier confusion in Lorenz’s life between the two girls with whom he had been involved. In the midst of all this ambivalence and sexualized thinking, the rat torture story (imparted to Lorenz by a male figure of authority) had a profound impact on his imagination. Freud states that the story stimulated a number of instincts, the most important of which was anal eroticism, which had been active in Lorenz since childhood. The rats were endowed with multiple symbolic meanings that were associated to by Lorenz: these included money, ‘instalments’(‘Raten’ in German), gambling debts (‘Spielratte’), syphilitic infection (reflecting Lorenz’s fantasies of his father’s life in the military), penis, worms (Lorenz had suffered a roundworm infection as a child), anal intercourse, marriage (‘Heiraten’), the Rat-Wife from Ibsen’s Little EyoZJ children and biting cruelty (an association to the gnawing teeth of rats). Lorenz had himself bitten people as a child and had experienced many sadistic impulses - not least, of course, towards his father. Rats as symbolic of children (including himsew and of cruel wishes and lasciviousness became a hallmark of the analysis. Freud links all these associations in a brilliant reading of the psychological significance of obsessionality in the context of the precipitating circumstances, the patient’s unconscious and affective life (particularly his conflicts with the figures close to him) and his childhood fantasies (including infantile theories of childbirth).

The root of the ideas in Freud’s thinking In the final section of Freud’s paper (preceding the addendum comprising the notes on the case) Freud provides a series of theoretical reflections that follow from the material of the case. He begins, however, by criticizing his own, earlier views on obsessionality as being over-inclusive. He had linked them, in 1896, to repression and sexual activity in childhood, but revises this in the light of the heterogeneity of psychic states that can be gathered together in obsessional thinking. Almost anything may be drawn in to suit the obsessional’sagenda. He comments on the delirium-likehybrid nature of the mental opposition that accompanies obsessionality - the patient, in his fight against his obsessional thoughts, both rejects and accepts aspects of the disordered thinking, and this leads to chronic conflict and indecision. This struggle takes place at a conscious, secondary level but also at a primary level, as can often be seen in obsessionals’ dreams. Mishearing, misrepresentation and distortion of language and ideas characterize obsessionality, Freud posits, and the means of self-deceptioninvolve elliptical thinking and ‘forgetting’(the omission of ideas so as to avoid recognition of

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conflict - ‘errors of memory’ as Freud calls them). Superstition and chronic doubting are further outcomes of these manoeuvres. Freud does not explore in any great detail unconscious processes of thought in obsessionality,partly because of their obscurity and complexity. He deals mainly with the phenomenology of the condition, its mental characteristics and its instinctual sources. His argument as to why obsessionality arises is, as outlined earlier, that there is a withdrawal of affect from the causes of the original conflict which is felt to be unmanageable. This does not lead to amnesia but to severance of mental connections: nevertheless, these connections persist in making themselves felt in shadowy form, via projection onto the external world. Freud makes reference to omnipotence of thinking in obsessional neurosis - not omnipotence to the extent of generating delusions, but expressed as an overestimation of subjective powers. This exaggerated thinking is viewed by Freud as a residual megalomania from infancy. One manifestation of this in Lorenz, and in other obsessional patients, is a preoccupation with death: either worrying about how long they or someone else will live, or a fear that someone loved will die or idiosyncratic superstitions around death. Freud links this to Lorenz’s confused, unresolved conflicts of love and hatred in relation to his girlfriend and his father, and in turn contextualizes these within the framework of instinct theory. Freud places emphasis on Lorenz’s disavowed hostile feelings towards his father as having greatly intensified his obsessional illness: at the same time he discusses how persistent conflict involving loving and hating could have come about during what he calls the ‘prehistoric’period of infancy when the two opposing attitudes may have been split apart and one of them (the hatred) is repressed. Only such an early conflict between love and hate could account for the scope and chronicity of Lorenz’ssymptoms, he suggests. Freud’s concluding theoretical remarks are concerned primarily with the obsessional’s pervasive uncertainty and compulsion to override the uncertainty. Freud’s ideas are again grounded in his theory of instincts and he uses this to explain certain psychologicalforms obsessionalneurosis takes. The sexual instincts, particularly the scopophilic and epistemophilic instincts, are invoked as driving forces behind the obsessional’s conflicts. This instinctual pressure leads to processes of distortion and generalization that disconnect the primary conflict from its representational forms. Analysis of psychological deformations of thinking inherent in obsessionality is a potentially productive research path, and an under-investigatedone, Freud states. We can see from this cursory examination of the case that Freud’s theoretical and technical thinking reflects the developmental stage reached by psychoanalysis in 1907-9. Freud makes maximal use of his theories of sexuality and on the role of the sexual drives in shaping the representational forms of obsessional conflicts. Sadism and ambivalence are conceptual tools employed to understand the hostility in obsessions, but Freud remarks that


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‘the relation between the negative factor in love and the sadistic components of the libido remains completely obscure’ (Freud, 1909, p. 240). He will take up this problem again in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915~)and in chapter 4 of ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923). Freud’s elaboration of the father-son relationship in Lorenz’s analysis derives from sexual conflicts he saw as underlying the relationship. One of Freud’skey reconstructions in the analysis was that Lorenz’s memories of being castigated and beaten by his father were due to his having masturbated. Obviously, this could not be proven conclusively, but he used it to link the sexual and sadistic aspects of the conflict more closely, Freud was able to interpret transference activity towards the father, but certain aspects were to escape him.As Mahony (1986) suggests, this is because Freud had understood the connection between obsessional character and anal eroticism but not the link between the latter and obsessional neurosis. Freud knew well that it was not only a conflict between love and hate that drove Lorenz’s illness: it was made particularly complex by pleasure, shame and disgust at the feelings and ideas associated with the conflict. Psychoanalytic theory at this point in its development could not account for the regressive,primitive nature of these states of mind. We can also see how Freud employs a topographical model of the mind to understand Lorenz, dividing him into a personality that had disintegrated into three areas: an unconscious comprising suppressed passionate and cruel impulses, a conscious that is plagued by symptoms, and a pre-conscious engaged in creating the superstitious and ritualistic behaviour designed to counter his unconscious impulses (cf. Holland, 1975). Finally, reconstruction plays a central role in Freud’s theory of technique: in other words, Freud sets out to identrfy gaps in the history of Lorenz and proceeds to fill them in, building up his explanatory schema as he continues. The evolution of a transference neurosis, which would be of central importance to analysts today, was recognized by Freud only in part and played a much more subsidiary role in the treatment than did reconstruction.

The fate of the ideas in Freud’s thinking Freud’s linking of obsessional thinking to anal eroticism is a clinical insight that should not be underestimated, especially as knowledge of the connection between obsessive-compulsiveneurosis and anal regression only emerges in 1926 - twenty years after Lorenz’s analysis. The absence of a theoretical or clinical understanding of the implications of the maternal transference in the paper reflects, as had been indicated, the point psychoanalysis had reached by 1907. Freud placed relatively little emphasis on the mother-child relationship in the Lorenz case, although there are references to the mother in the full case record. Pre-genital psychological development and libidinal organization were to occupy more of the psychoanalytic stage as Freud began to develop his ideas around the

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occurrence of fixation points that can lead to regression and symptom formation, To contemporary readers endowed with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to interpret the scale of Lorenz’s experiences of loss of the object, his rage at these losses and the concomitant superego activity (often projected onto Freud) as evidence of his profound ambivalence in relation to the primary object. This is not to diminish Lorenz’soedipal difficulties but to note a level of narcissistic injury linked to splitting of the object and the ego, projection and persecution. Another way of thinking about this crisis is to consider the extent to which Lorenz was preoccupied with ridding himself of bad things and preventing their intrusion into himself (Holland, 1975, p. 163): this struggle pervaded his life. Today we might think of splitting and massive projective identification as defensive mechanisms used to forestall a sense of disintegration related to loss of the object. Such vulnerability of the ego and diffusion of the sense of identity began to be addressed more fully by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1 917) and ‘On Narcissism’ (1 9 14) where he discusses the damage to character that identification with the lost object can create. The developmental implications of these crises have occupied psychoanalystsever since. It has been noted how Freud is aware of, and sensitive to, the transference to him,particularly in terms of Lorenz’sinternal image of his father. However, it would be incorrect to say that Freud had at this point grasped the need for a dynamic analysis of the immediate transference. He did not yet appreciate the extent to which memories of the past are inextricably linked to attitudes in the present, especially to the analyst. Lorenz sees threatening authority figures everywhere, and Freud is no exception, but some commentators( e g Kanzer, 1952; Gottlieb, 1989) have criticized Freud because he did not pay sufficient attention to this transference (poor attention to the maternal transference being an unfair charge given the theoretical stage Freud had reached). Mahony (1986, p. 240) suggests that at that point in Freud’s thinking about the case transference liquidation was not a goal in the analysis, reconstruction and education being the predominant objectives. Freud has also been accused of behaving anti-therapeuticallyby reassuring Lorenz of his benign intentions and of attempting to influence the patient positively using didactic methods. The example of Freud distancing himself from the captain’s cruelty, while not properly addressing Lorenz’s transference picture of him as the cruel captain, is often cited. Freud also burst out laughing when Lorenz told him that Freud’sbrother was a murderer who had been executed in Budapest, assuring Lorenz that he had had no relatives living in Budapest. This occurred during a period when Lorenz was terrified that Freud might harm him physically. There is a further, well-known example of Freud providing Lorenz with a meal. Why was Freud unable to address these tense interactions in more depth? The answer may lie in insufficient transference interpretation but Gottlieb (1 989), among others, identifies counter-transference tensions in


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Freud that he was neither theoretically nor technically able to properly address at that stage of his development. The brother-murdereraccusation by Lorenz, for example, is viewed by Gottlieb as a variant of a central transference phantasy that pervades Lorenz’s analysis but that this version triggered in Freud particular anxieties linked to having had an uncle who was arrested for criminal activity. Gottlieb pieces together an intriguing argument to support his view (ibid.,pp. 46-58). Whether or not Gottlieb is correct, it is not unreasonable to infer that Freud’s extensive use of explanation and instruction in the reconstructive narrative he created with Lorenz, and some of his spontaneous, non-analytic actions, were at least in part a response to the counter-transferenceimpact of a disturbed and subtly destructive patient. This observation should not be used to compare Freud’s standard of work in 1907 to a technical standard of subsequent periods. Lipton (1977) went to some lengths to defend Freud from criticism of his treatment of Lorenz, although Lipton himself has been accused of lapses into polemicism. Two important points made by Lipton are that much of the technique employed by Freud in the Lorenz case later became codified as standard in his later papers on technique. A second point is that modern technique expanded greatly in order to deal with the complexity of the analyst-patient relationship, including reducing personal influence and attempts at ‘corrective emotional experiences’. It is therefore inappropriate to compare modern technique with Freud’s technique of the time.

Conclusion The case of the ‘Rat Man’ is perhaps best understood today as the presentation of a coherent, compelling narrative account of the form and symptoms of a chronic obsessive illness explored in the context of the development and life-history of the patient. The case history has been described as an ‘aesthetic object’ constructed to study the central identity theme of the patient (Holland, 1975, p. 168). Although Freud wished to present the paper as a formal scientific account of a psychoanalysis that laid bare the origins of obsessive-compulsive neurosis (his presentation of the case in Vienna was extensive, taking five hours), it is more plausible to think of the account as a piece of original, integrative thinking that stretches to the limits the conceptual and methodological tools available to Freud at the time. The scale of the undertaking and the availability of detailed clinical records have inevitably stimulated psychoanalysts from all schools to review the case as psychoanalytic methodology has evolved: Gottlieb, Grunberger, Holland, Lacan, Reed, Sherwood and Zetzel are notable examples. At the time of writing an original contemporary contribution that takes as its departure point the transference problems of the Rat Man case is a study of ways in which unconscious phantasy and projective identification actually work (Lear, 2002).

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We need to be grateful to Freud for his original insights into Lorenz’s difficulties and personality and for the extended access we are given to Freud’s technique which demonstrated, among many other things, an intuitive capacity to ‘feel into’ the world of his patient while retaining analytic objectivity (the way in which Freud ‘aligns’ his thinking and language to Lorenz’s is discussed by Mahoney (1986)). We need to be cautious about reaching too swiftly to condemn transference and counter-transference failures that were yet to be understood by psychoanalysis. It seems likely that the vicissitudes of counter-transference and Freud’s explanatory, somewhat didactic technique at the time, combined to produce an analytic stance that subsequent generations of analysts would come to regard as insufficiently neutral. A similar qualification applies to Freud’s claim that Lorenz was ‘completely cured’: there may have been exaggeration in this claim in order to impress scientifically, but it is likely that, by the standards of the day, the improvement in Lorenz’s condition was as significant as Freud claimed to both analyst and patient. With the benefit of hindsight it is possible to argue that a considerable portion of Lorenz’s improvement could be attributed to a transference cure. The ‘Rat Man’ case remains a product of its time, but one which reveals analytic skill and insight of a remarkable order. Perhaps the most interesting aspect for readers today is to read the case in the context of Freud’s earlier and later intellectual development: it allows us to participate in the evolution of fundamental psychoanalytic ideas as they emerged.

References Freud S (1909) Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. SE 10. Freud S (1914) On Narcissism. SE 14. Freud S (1915) Instincts and TheirVicissitudes.SE 14. Freud S (1917) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19. Gottlieb R (1989) Technique and countertransference in Freud’s analysis of the Rat Man. Psychoanal. Q. 58: 29-62. Grunberger B (1966) Some reflections on the Rat Man. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 47: 160-8. Holland N (1975) An identity for the Rat Man. Int. R. Psycho-Anal. 2: 157-69. Kanzer M (1952) The transference neurosis of the Rat Man. Psychoana1.Q.21: 181-9. Lear J (2002) Jumping from the couch: an essay on phantasy and emotional structure. Int. J. Psychoanal. 83: 583-95. Lipton S (1977) The advantages of Freud’s technique as shown in the analysis of the Rat Man. Int J. Psycho-Anal. 58: 255-73. Mahony P (1986) Freud and the Rat Man. New Haven: Yale University Press. Reed G (1988) Freud and the Rat Man. Psychoanal. Q. 57: 238-41. Sherwood M (1969) The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Academic Press. Zetzel ER (1966) Additional notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis, Freud 1909. Int. J. Psychoanal. 47: 123-9.

11 Gaze, dominance and humiliation in the Schreber case JOHN STEINER

Introduction The famous memoirs of the German high court judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, have attracted an enormous interest mainly due to Freud’s often brilliant and controversial analysis of them which appeared in 1911. Fortunately the voluminous literature, (including Niederland, 1951, 1959a, 1959b, 1960; Katan, 1959; White, 1961; Santner, 1996) is ably reviewed and summarized by Lothane (1992) and shows that both the memoirs and Freud’s paper continue to make rewarding study If we look at them now, roughly 100 years later, we can ask ourselves to what extent psychiatry and psychoanalysis have changed in that time. Psychoanalysis has certainly changed a great deal and in this chapter I focus on some areas of contemporary interest which seem to me to have a relevance to the Schreber case. First, I will make use of our understanding of depression and its relationship with paranoia on the one hand, and with grandiose narcissistic states on the other. Here I shall argue that Schreber’s illness began and remained fundamentally depressive but rapidly developed persecutory elements which escalated until he became grossly disorganized and paranoid. Finally, the chaotic fragmentation became organized through the dominance of an omnipotent narcissistic organization which led to a clinical improvement without any relinquishment of his delusional beliefs. As a subsidiary theme I will look at the role which gaze played in Schreber’sdelusional object relations. There is a considerable literature on the role of gaze, particularly from the point of view of the development of a sense of self which many writers relate to the experience of being observed. The description of a mirror phase in development is important in the influential but complex writings of Lacan (1956), who makes use of Sartre’s concern with the experience of being observed to discuss the development of subjectivity and self-consciousness. More clinically based are the 189

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observations of Winnicott who depicts the mother’s face as the first mirror. ‘What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself’ (Winnicott, 1967, p. 112). This type of seeing oneself in the object is an example of a narcissistic type of object relationship and, like Kohut (19711, Winnicott recognizes the importance of the mother’s approving gaze to the child’s self-esteem. This view is endorsed by Wright (1991), who suggests that, ‘The image of the child that the Other conveys back to him becomes, in this way, the form through which he grasps himself and comes to know himself’ (p. 270). These affirmative views of the self reflected in the gaze of the object suggest that negative aspects are split off, and this is also implied in Klein’s idea (1953, discussed further below, that the good object depicted by the breast and especially by the mother’sface, should take away feelings of badness. Sometimes these split-off negative views of the self arise from an alternative picture of the mother’s gaze as accusing and terrifying, and Wright (1991, p. 27) sees them as arising from an alternative, terrifying aspect of ‘the mother of childhood’. Often they come to characterize the hostile aspects of the relationship with the father who can then become the embodiment of a persecuting, egodestructive superego. In the case of Schreber this persecuting aspect of gaze became an important feature of his paranoia in the form of attacks by divine rays and led to some of the worst persecutions and humiliations. At the same time Schreber’s own gaze played a central role in the intense projection of both need and omnipotence into his objects. Finally, gaze was deployed in an intense scrutiny of his objects, looking them straight in the eye. When they failed him a sense of being betrayed was accompanied by a triumph over the objects, including even God, who were then discredited and defeated. When he saw through their pretensions he humiliated them and became in turn the receptacle for violent counter-projection whose aim was to reassert their status, to dominate him and to reverse the humiliation. A tragic feature of his breakdown was a failure to find an object with a capacity to contain this type of omnipotent projection and to respond with sufficient understanding to avoid rivalrous acting-out of a struggle for dominance.

Schreber’sdepressive core I became so convinced that Schreber’sillness was at its core depressive that I was surprised to find that, apart from Lothane (1992), in his comprehensive account of Schreber studies, only a few of the many commentators on this famous case gave this feature prominence, presumably because like Freud, they focused their interest on the paranoia. In fact Schreber’sfirst illness and the early stages of his second illness were dominated by an intractable insomnia, severe hypochondriasis and a deep depression which led him to make several attempts on his life. At the time of his admission for his second

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illness he was extremely disturbed and difficult to cope with, and the hospital notes, copies of which were discovered by Baumeyer (1956), describe how he refused to eat, and spent long periods utterly immobile in what seems to have been a stupor. He was convinced he was dying of a heart attack, and complained of softening of the brain. He said he had the plague and wanted to pay an attendant to dig a grave for him. He believed himself dead and decayed and in a condition which prevented him from being buried. He complained that his penis had been twisted off and he maintained he was a woman. He was agitated and disturbed other patients, particularly by bellowing loudly, often shouting abuse. Schreber’s own account of this same period in the memoirs describes how he spent his time in endless melancholy concerned only with ideas of death and made repeated attempts to kill himself. The depressive affect comes over clearly in his helplessness and despair. For example, he describes his humiliation at being placed in what he calls a cell fitted out for dements [maniacs] to sleep in. ... There I was left to my fate ... I made an unsuccessful attempt to hang myself on the bedstead with the sheet. I was completely ruled by the idea that there was nothing left for a human being for whom sleep could no longer be procured by all the means of medical art but to take his life. I knew this was not permitted in asylums, but I laboured under the delusion that when all attempts at cure had been exhausted one would be discharged - solely for the purpose of making an end to one’s life either in one’s own home or somewhere else.

The hypochondriasis quite soon acquired a paranoid flavour when the suffering was ascribed to divine miracles directed at him with hostile intent, at first chiefly by the soul of his psychiatrist, Professor Flechsig, and later by God. However, his preoccupation with his body was typically depressive. He believed that his lungs were diseased, that he had phthisis, and contained a lung worm. The lobes of the lung were at times almost completely absorbed and his diaphragm was raised almost under his larynx so that there remained only a small remnant of lung with which he could hardly breathe (Schreber, 1903, p. 143). In place of his own stomach he had an inferior, ‘Jew’s stomach’,’or was frequently completely without a stomach so that food and drink taken simply poured into the abdominal cavity and into the thighs (ibid., p. 144). His gullet and intestines were torn or vanished repeatedly and he partly ate up his pharynx several times. Attacks on his genitals were prominent and associated with the conviction that he was being unmanned for a divine purpose, at first for sexual abuse and later so that he could redeem the world. Putrefaction of his belly gave rise to a rotten smell which escaped from his mouth in a most disgusting manner (ibid., p. 146). Nerves were pulled out of his head which was also compressed in a vice by ‘little devils’. An extremely painful caries-like state of the lower vertebrae was called the coccyx miracle (ibid., p. 151).

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His mind was also profoundly affected in a manner typical of depressive ideation. For example, he was referred to by his voices as ‘The Prince of Hell’ and was going to be burned alive. He put this down to moral decay which developed within him, ‘into an uncanny power inimical to God’. Freud describes one of the most pervasive of his depressive delusions as follows: under the influence of visions which were partly of a terrifying character, but partly of an indescribable grandeur, Schreber became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world. (Freud, 1911, p. 68)

He persistently believed that, He himself was the only real man left alive and the few human shapes that he still saw - the doctor, the attendants, the other patients - he explained as being ‘miracled up’, cursorily improvised men. (ibid.)

Freud’s formulation was that this ‘end of the world’ delusion arose as a result of a withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the people in his environment making everything indifferent and irrelevant to him.‘The end of the world the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjectiveworld has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it.’ This clinical picture is characteristic of severe depression with nihilistic delusions and many other features which are sometimes referred to as Cotard’ssyndrome (1880).2 It was Freud’s paper on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), published some six years after the one on Schreber, which clarified our view of the internal world of the depressed patient (see Chapter 7, this volume). Freud showed that the obstacle to change in melancholia lay in the identification with a damaged or dead object which could not be relinquished and mourned, and which continued to live inside the patient casting its shadow on the ego. Melanie Klein built on these findings and Kleinians today try to relate the patient’s current situation to early infantile experiences, and see depression to be based on a stage of development when the infant recognizes that its love and hate are directed at the same object, most signiftcantly his most important, or primary object, the mother or her breast. The unavoidability of hatred, based on frustration, envy, jealousy and greed, means that attacks on the breast cannot be prevented and lead to phantasies and images of a damaged, dying or dead object with which the infant comes to be identified, as a defence against guilt and loss. At these stages of development the breast is felt to represent the whole world so that its destruction is experienced as the end of the world. At the same time identification with damaged or diseased internal objects is experienced in bodily terms as somatic hypochondriacalsymptoms (Klein, 1935). It is this internal conflict which characterizes the depressive position in which the subject’s love for the damaged object comes into contact with the hate felt towards the same object and gives rise to guilt. Integration of love


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and hate means that the infant is able to care about his objects and becomes aware of his own incapacity to protect and preserve them against his own destructiveness. If the pain and despair which result can be tolerated, the feeling of guilt can be a powerful factor in motivating regret and remorse and giving rise to a wish to make reparation and to restore the damaged object. Freud (1917) also gave a hint of future understanding of the superego by describing the establishment of a special agency which is able to treat a part of the ego as an object because of the identification with the lost external object. It is not always recognized that if the lost object casts a shadow on the ego, the light producing this shadow must come from somewhere. I think Freud implies that it comes from above and represents the observing object critically assessing the ego just as it previously assessed the primary 0bject.j A shift from depression to paranoia involves a corresponding shift from a concern with the primary object to a preoccupation with the critical observing object and, because of the critical nature of this kind of superego, is accompanied by a shift from a concern with guilt towards a preoccupation with shame and humiliation. This is almost totally the case in Schreber’s memoirs where there is a striking absence of any concern with guilt and, except through identification,very little mention of any maternal figures.

Paranoia When depressive guilt and despair become too painful, defences are deployed to make the experience more bearable. The most prominent of these involves a shift towards paranoia and the deployment of mechanisms such as splitting, fragmentationand projective identification. Klein described the close relationship between depression and paranoia (1935) and later (1946) formulated it in terms of a shift between the depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid positions. This paranoid trend became apparent quite early in Schreber’s breakdown when his suffering was attributed to persecution by divine rays. Projection does not always lessen suffering but at least responsibility for it, and the guilt associated with it, are got rid of and this seems to provide critical relief. The depressive flavour of Schreber’s persecution emerges in many passages from the memoirs which emphasize his conviction that he is incurable. For example, he writes, In this way a plot was laid against me, the purpose of which was to hand me over to another human being after my nervous illness had been recognized as, or assumed to be, incurable, in such a way that my soul was handed to him, but my body - transformed into a female body - ... was then left to that human being for sexual misuse and simply forsaken, in other words left to rot.... Always the main idea was toforsake me, that is to say, abandon me ... to allow my body to be prostituted like a female harlot, sometimes by killing me and later by destroying my reason.

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The worst suffering is referred to as ‘soul murder’ which is never precisely defined but seems to involve the deepest humiliation and misuse which a person can undergo and in which an attempt is made to destroy the very essence of his identity, for someone else’s benefit. For a time the delusions of persecution became more and more fragmented, with attacks emanating from Flechsig and later from other souls, and ultimately from God himself who became divided into an anterior and a posterior god, and the posterior in turn into upper and lower gods. The souls which attacked him were also multiple, represented as forecourts of heaven, as singing birds and as numerous little men who swarmed over his body. This was the period when his overt disturbance was at its most disorganized and disturbing, and when destructiveness ran rife beyond the control of any love or reason.

The redemptive delusional system Later the fragmentation lessened and a delusional system was organized around the central idea that Schreber could restore mankind to a state of bliss, by becoming a woman so that he could be impregnated by God. His special status as someone who had the power to attract the rays of God now gradually become eroticized, and ‘The order of the world’ which was a principle of higher authority that was coming from God himself, began to demand that he cultivate ‘voluptuousness’.The state of bliss to which the soul is raised after death by the process of purification was initially seen as one of uninterrupted enjoyment bound up with the contemplation of God, but soon came to be viewed as a state of uninterrupted feeling of ‘voluptuousness’.Indeed it transpires that an eventual reconciliation with God will end Schreber’ssuffering since the rays abandoned their hostility as soon as they were certain that they would experience spiritual voluptuousness. God himself demanded that He shall be able to find voluptuousness and threatened him with the withdrawal of his rays if he neglected to cultivate it and did not offer God what he demanded. A great deal of the memoirs are devoted to the elaboration of the demand for feminization and for the adoption of a submissive attitude to God which gradually loses its persecutory flavour and acquires the redeeming quality connected with the state of bliss. As the noisy persecutions lose their force Schreber is able to become more coherent and even to gain some pleasure from his situation. While he insists that it is his duty to generate the greatest possibie spiritual voluptuousness he adds that, ‘If in the process, a little sensual pleasure falls to my share, I feel justified in accepting it as some slight compensation for the inordinate measure of suffering and privation that has been mine for so many years ...’ Freud was impressed with the support these delusions gave to the importance of sexuality in mental life and to the thesis that Schreber’s


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relationship to his father was basically homosexual. Today the idea of a universal bisexuality is no longer controversial and we are more concerned to understand how relationships with either sex can become eroticized as a means of adapting to them. A particular reaction often observed in analysis is that an experience of persecution and cruelty is eroticized and rendered more bearable by becoming imbued with sexuality in the form of sadomasochism. It is perhaps more common to frnd cruelty to be associated with the male organ, and a phallic identification not only reverses the suffering, but, by inflicting the cruelty, reverses the humiliation by humiliating someone else. Just as the depressed patient is identified with a damaged internalized breast the omnipotent patient is commonly identified with an internal erect penis. In this respect Schreber’s redemption delusion is unusual since it deals with his experience of cruel persecution by an identification with the submissive woman, transforming the cruelty into sexual pleasure and the purpose from abuse to omnipotent reparation. At times Schreber did toy with the fantasy of an identification with Christ ascending to heaven after his suffering to enjoy a blissful union with God, which ironically would be more clearly homosexual. Mostly, however, his attempt to rebuild his destroyed world was trans-sexual and heterosexual. Perhaps this is splitting hairs because usually both active sadistic and passive masochistic identifications exist side by side. Certainly a highly eroticized relationship existed between Schreber and God which no doubt had a resonance with the earlier one with his father.The idea that bliss consists of the uninterrupted voluptuousness of both participants corresponds to a common childhood phantasy of the pleasure the parents give each other when they are alone. However, it is possible to trace this phantasy back to earlier experiences of the baby at the breast which is eroticized and idealized as completely f u l f i i g to both baby and mother. Each is felt to be all the other needs and to have eyes only for the other, perhaps before the advent of any third figures such as a father or sibling. These eroticized, grandiose fantasies became delusions for Schreber and seemed to help him to organize his mental capacities and to evade the terrible experience of feeling small, vulnerable and exposed to contempt and ridicule. The identification with the child-bearing mother also protected him from awareness of his envy and gudt towards women, since it was he who now had the breasts and feminine capacities to give rise to ‘a new race of men’. Where Freud’s insight seems most impressive is in his recognition of the reparative element in Schreber’s delusional system. Having destroyed his world through omnipotent attacks on his good object, Freud describes how, the paranoiac builds it again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. H e builds it up by the work of his delusions. The delusionalformation, wbtcb we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, aprocess of reconstruction.(1911, pp. 70-1; emphasis in the original)

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In fact the delusional system seemed to help Schreber to achieve a considerable degree of integration and he made a remarkable social improvement without relinquishing any of his fundamental beliefs. He was eventually able to behave appropriately in most social situations, to write his memoirs, and to plead for his freedom in a coherent way. He was released from the asylum in December 1902 and managed to function reasonably well, keeping his delusions and hallucinations private until some five years later when he relapsed into his final deteriorating illness following his wife’s stroke.

The delusional system as a psychic retreat I have so far argued that it is possible to distinguish three elements in Schreber’s illness. First, the depression and despair which not only dominated the early part of his breakdown but continued to colour the more grossly psychotic manifestations. Secondly, the paranoia which began with the projection of responsibility and guilt and which was marked by progressive disorganization as defensive splitting gave rise to fragmentation of the persecutors and also of the self leading to a chaotic, all-out struggle for survival. Finally, the third element consisted of a relatively organized delusional state in which the persecution was made acceptable by an identification with a redemptive femininity and an eroticized submission to the father. I find it useful to think of these three states as existing in an equilibrium where movement to and fro between them is always taking place even though a progression from depression to paranoia and thence to the delusional system can be recognized. Indeed I have thought of Schreber’s delusional system as a psychic retreat based on a psychotic organization (Steiner, 1993) and one which was turned to when both depression and paranoia became unbearable. I shall argue that both his failure to find a containing object to respond to his omnipotent projections and the humiliation which arose as a consequence were factors which made it impossible for Schreber to tolerate and work through the depression and which consequently pushed him towards paranoia and subsequently towards the psychotic organization.

The role of gaze in Schreber’s psychosis Gaze plays a prominent part in Schreber’smemoirs. The gaze of others, often represented as divine rays in his delusions, was responsible for his humiliation, and his suffering was increased enormouslywhen he felt himself to be observed, ‘fallen so low’, and mocked and looked down on. His own gaze was also important in his capacity to challenge authority and defend himself, sometimes to triumph over powerful figures like Flechsig and even God. This capacity involved a delusional omnipotence and was strikingly

Gaze. dominance and humiliation in the Schreber case

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demonstrated, for example in his capacity to out-gaze the sun whose rays went pale as a result. Gaze was also a means by which he was able to project into his objects and through which he believed his objects could project back into him. A variety of psychotic identifications took place, for example with God’s omnipotence and later, in the redemptive delusion, with a submissive and yet also omnipotent mother figure. It is not possible to trace the complex evolution of such projections and identificationsin detail, but I believe some hints of how gaze operated can be found by looking at the development of Schreber’s relationship with Professor Flechsig in the early stages of his illness. I think one can see how the projection of omnipotence into his psychiatrist was followed by a triumphant discrediting of him when he saw through his pretensions, and that this was one of the factors which led to a catastrophic descent into paranoia.

The urgent demand for relief and the projection of omnipotence By the time he consulted Professor Flechsig, at the beginning of his second breakdown, Schreber was already in the depths of a depression, beginning to feel persecuted and unable to get relief in sleep. He proceeded in haste from Dresden to Leipzig, confirming the appointment by telegraph, and arrived with his wife at the professor’s office in a desperate state. Under the pressure of the demand for relief and perhaps flattered by the high hopes the family had for a cure, Professor Flechsig responded optimistically. Later, in the memoirs, Schreber described how, A long interview followed in which I must say Professor Flechsig developed a

remarkable eloquence which affected me deeply. He spoke of the advances made in psychiatry since my first illness, of newly discovered sleeping drugs, etc., and gave me hope of delivering me of the whole illness through one prolific sleep ... My mood thereupon became steadier ...

However, perhaps inevitably, the treatment failed. For various reasons, the sleep was delayed, the bed was cold and further symptoms had developed, so that the drug failed almost entirely in its effect. After a night ‘almost without sleep’, he became deeply depressed and had to be stopped by his wife from making a suicide attempt with a towel. The next morning the professor was called and took him personally by cab to his asylum (Schreber, 1903, pp. 48-9). It is easy to recognize the intense demand for relief made to the psychiatrist at a time when he could not even find relief in sleep. However, the response from the professor suggests that he was put under such pressure that he could not resist taking on a task that would prove to be too much for him.

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After his admission Schreber’s mental state continued to fluctuate. He described how his deeply depressed mood lifted when Professor Flechsig’s assistant tried to raise his spirits and assured him that there was no intention of giving up treatment, leading to ‘the only day on which I was enlivened by a joyful spirit of hope’. Once more a doctor was pressured to respond with optimism, and once more, Schreber was betrayed. His mood deteriorated again dramatically after two events which occurred in close proximity. First his wife, who had visited and taken her lunch with her husband every day, went away for four days to stay with her father in Berlin in order to give her a rest. On her return he had deteriorated so badly that he asked her not to visit him any more because he could not bear to have her see him ‘in the low state into which he had fallen’.Later, when she did come, he no longer considered her to be a living being. It seems likely that, until then, her daily presence was able to absorb and contain some of his projections, perhaps sustaining his faith in his doctors which was undermined in her absence. When she returned he was certain she would look down on him. The second incident involved an interview with Professor Flechsig during which the patient challenged him again over the question of his curability. Schreber describes how ‘he held out certain hopes, but could no longer - at least so it seemed to me - look me straight in the eye’ (emphasis in the original). It was the averting of his gaze which confiimed him in the view that Professor Flechsig could not live up to his promise and could no longer respond to the projections of need. Schreber believed that his incurability had defeated the psychiatrist and that Flechsig could not tolerate the accusations and felt humiliated and then vengeful. Supernatural powers directed by Flechsig were from this time confiimed as the source of his persecution. The description of the professor’s ‘remarkableeloquence’ suggests a hint of irony and in fact Schreber’sdoubts about Flechsig were present even at the time of his first illness nine years previously. He writes that at that time he had, ‘on the whole only favourable impressions of Professor Flechsig’s methods of treatment’,but then goes on to say, Some mistakes may have been made ... Even in the course of that illness I was, and still am,of the opinion that white lies, which a nerve specialist may perhaps not be able to dispense with altogether in the case of some mental patients, but which he must nevertheless employ only with the greatest circumspection, were hardly ever appropriate in my case, for he must have soon realized that in me he was dealing with a human being of high intellect, uncommon keenness of understanding and acute powers of observation. (Schreber, 1903, p. 51)4

Looking the object straight in the eye and Freud’s parable of the eagle It was not only Professor Flechsig who failed to tolerate direct eye contact with Schreber. His defiance and superiority were expressed by his belief that


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he could look into the sun, ‘without being more than slightly dazzled by it’, and indeed that ‘the sun’s rays turned pale before him’. When he was bellowing loudly in his disturbed state he would sometimes shout ‘little Flechsig’ and would sometimes declare that ‘the sun was a whore’, as if to humiliate these superior figures as he felt they humiliated him. There are also several sections of the memoirs which describe how Schreber triumphed over God, seeing him as inferior in his inability to understand people, because he was only familiar with the dead, that he could not understand human nature and that he could not learn from experience. Moreover God’s power was being exercised, ‘contrary to the order of the world’ which represented a higher force to which God himself was obliged to submit. Schreber’s capacity to gaze into the sun was of special interest to Freud who in a postscript to the Schreber paper described myths which attributed the power of being able to gaze at the sun to the eagle alone, ‘who as a dweller in the highest regions of the air, was brought into especially intimate relation with the heavens, with the sun, and with lightning’. Moreover the eagle ‘puts its young to a test before recognizing them as its legitimate offspring. Unless they succeed in looking into the sun without blinking they are thrown out of the eyrie’ (Freud, 1911, p. 81). Freud sees this myth as an example of an ordeal, a test of lineage and as a confirmation that the sun is indeed a father symbol. ‘The Eagle behaves as if he were himself a descendant of the sun and were submitting his children to a test of their ancestry. ,.. Schreber has in this way,’says Freud, ‘rediscoveredthe mythological method of expressing his filial relation to the sun’ (ibid., p. 81). However the description also suggests that Freud was responding to the terrible image of falling into an abyss of depression when condemned and humiliated by a father intent on asserting his superiority, A number of interesting connections have been made between the character of Schreber’sactual father and the delusional father he experienced as Flechsig and God (Niederland, 1951, 1959a, 1959b, 1960; Katan, 1959; Lothane, 1992). Dr Moritz Schreber was an eminent physician who developed a system of gymnastic exercises, physical restraining devices and educational principles for children which created an authoritarian climate, perhaps not unusual in nineteenth-century Europe, against which it was difficult to rebel. We can speculate that he wanted to look up to his father but that he also recognized the defensive narcissistic nature of his father’ssystem of child training with its emphasis on obedience and renunciation. He was a figure who interfered with such authority that he was unable to show any respect for his wife’s capacity to look after her children.

The counter-projectionby the object leading to the descent into paranoia and humiliation As the paranoia progressed Flechsig and God behaved as if threatened by Schreber and started to inflict punishments on him in which humiliation

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played a critical part in making his suffering unbearable. He was looked down on and made to feel small, dirty and inferior by the persecutors who mocked and tormented him. They tried to force him to submit by setting up a struggle over dominance in which gaze played a central role. The downward direction of gaze signified inferiority to Schreber, who dreaded being looked down on, so that, as we have seen, he could not even bear to have his wife see him in the ‘lowstate’ into which he had fallen. The humiliation was particularly painful in relation to the central persecution of being unmanned where Schreber complained that the voices persistently treated his transformation into a woman as a sexual disgrace which gave them an excuse for jeering at him. The ‘rays of God not infrequently thought themselves entitled to mock me by calling me Miss Schreber, in allusion to the emasculation which, it was alleged I was about to undergo’. Or they would say, ‘So this claims to have been a Senatspresidant, this person who lets himself be fucked.’ Equally humiliating was the way he believed God tried to persuade him he was stupid. Here faeces were forced into his bowel, creating the need to empty himself, and small remnants were smeared on his behind. He believed that God saw the urge to shit as indicating his victory over him and that the goal of destroying his reason had been reached. He complained that the perfidy of the policy was indicated by the fact that whenever this need was created, some other person was sent to the lavatory which was always occupied when he needed it. God even mocked him by suggesting that he could not shit because he was too stupid. This was one of the ways he became convinced of God’s blindness and lack of knowledge of human nature (Schreber, 1903, pp. 205-6). It is clear that Schreber tried to fight back and to defeat his persecutors and this rebelliousness led to the war-like struggle between Schreber and God and prevented further contact with depression, which to Schreber signified a defeat and a submission. Schreber’sinadequacies are exposed and the humiliations forced on him by powerful figures who assert their dominance over him. It is then the humiliation which has to be fought and the observer has to be stood up to and defeated. In Schreber’scase it was as if a war had to be waged in a struggle over dominance reminiscent of the war between God and Lucifer in Paradise Lost. Freud points out that, ‘In his relation to God Schreber showed the strangest mixture of blasphemous criticism and mutinous insubordination on the one hand, and of reverent devotion on the other’ (Freud, 1911, p. 51) which, he suggests, is typical of the infantile attitude of boys to their father. Sometimes Schreber was defeated, emasculated and horribly punished and sometimes he was able to strike back and look down on ‘littleFlechsig’ and even to defeat God.

The tragic absence of a containing object The struggle over dominance experienced by Schreber and the constant


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attempts to humiliate him were among the factors which drove him towards an omnipotent solution in the form of a pathological organization of a delusional kind. Another related factor which seems to emerge with some poignancy from the memoirs is his failure to find an object able to contain his distress and to cope with the projections which he was obliged to deploy. A central aspect of containment is that the object has to be able to be open to the projections of the patient and to be able to understand the experience evoked in him in a manner which retains a relationship with reality. It was impossible for Schreber to find anyone who could understand his desperation and yet retain a capacity to treat him as a separate individual with human needs; moreover, to recognize and be able to confront the patient with the reality of his illness and the reality of what could and what could not be done to help him. Schreber was so preoccupied with gaining relief that he was barely interested in a need to be understood. The pressure on his objects was such that they too became concerned with finding him a cure and again could not give space to a need for understanding. Klein recognized that a child turns to a good object, not only to gain nourishment and understanding but often primarily in a demand to have his bad feelings removed. The demand is to be able to evacuate the badness into an object who will do away with feelings of destructiveness, guilt and ~ a r a n o i aWhile .~ it is understandable that the desperate patient should seek such relief, the object needs to be able retain contact with reality and to see and accept the patient for what he is, both in his goodness and his destructiveness Of course the more omnipotent the delusions, the more difficult they are to contain and Schreber’s grandiosity is evident throughout the memoirs. In the paranoid phase of his breakdown he described how ‘he was the only object upon which divine miracles were worked, and he was thus the most remarkable human being that ever lived upon earth’. The omnipotence was reflected also in his objects who acquired omnipotent curative capacities which, like the destructiveness, were also mediated by the divine rays. He believed that, his ‘organs suffered such destructive injuries as would inevitable have led to the death of any other man ... but divine miracles always restored what had been destroyed, and therefore, as long as he remains a man he was altogether immortal’ (Freud, 1911, p. 17). It may be that no one could cope with this degree of delusional certainty and yet Schreber did seem to recognize a need to be understood and treated as a human being, and I think it was his experience of being dismissed as a human being which he meant to convey by the term ‘soul murder’,6which suggests some awareness of the failure of containment. Here the direction of gaze is again important and clarifies that the eye is not only used to take in sense impressionsbut is also an avenue for projection. When Schreber looked up to his father, his doctors and to God he hoped to be able to project his feelings of smallness and inferiority and to find understanding and containment

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which might make such feelings bearable. When the professor could not tolerate the projections he turned his gaze away, without being able to admit his helplessness. Schreber, however, believed that the respected figures not only failed him but began to persecute him. When they felt that their status was threatened and they began to disown shameful elements of their own by projecting them into the patient and established their dominance through the infliction of humiliation and ridicule.

The shamelessness of the psychotic solution By the time Schreber had established his redemptive delusional system he had transformed the persecutions into an idealized submission and his delusional system functioned as a psychic retreat which seemed to completely protect him from shame. It was this freedom from shame which made it possible for him to provide such minute, and one could say shameless descriptions of his own madness. In his open letter to Professor Flechsig that precedes his memoirs, he acknowledges the possibility that his revelations might be painful to Flechsig and others, but his delusional certainty in his moral right makes him justify their publication. ‘I very much regret this,’ he says, ‘but unfortunately cannot make any changes without from the very outset precluding making myself understood. ... My aim is solely to further knowledge of truth in a vital field, that of religion.’ His concern extended to ‘considerationfor certain persons still living’,but he concludes, ‘YetI believe that expert examination of my body and observation of my personal fate during my lifetime would be of value both for science and the knowledge of religious truths. In the face of such considerations all personal issues must recede.’ Dr Weber, the superintendent of the Sonnenstein Asylum, was impressed by this shamelessness and in his report to the court, dated November 1900, used it to argue that he had no insight into his delusions.’ Freud also had some doubts about the effect of exposing Schreber in print, and he stated, as if apologizing, that, It is possible that Dr Schreber may still be living t o d a y and that he may have dissociated himself so far from the delusional system which he put forward in 1903 as to be pained by these notes upon his book [...I In so far, however, as he retains his identity with his former personality, I can rely upon the arguments which he himself I...] used to counter the efforts which were made to restrain him from publishing the memoirs,

and he quotes some of the points Schreber made which I have quoted. This seems to mean that, provided Schreber remained deluded, his omnipotence would protect him from the pain that otherwise exposure might inflict. The delusional system acted as a psychic retreat, and functioned as a hiding place which contact with reality would shatter in a humiliating way.


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Indeed, it is the psychotic’scapacity to defy shame which allows him to reveal private aspects of his make-up which are concealed by less disturbed individuals. Freud recognized this when he wrote: The psychoanalytic investigation of paranoia would be altogether impossible if the patients themselves did not possess the peculiarity of betraying (in a distorted form, it is true) precisely those things which other neurotics keep hidden as a secret. (Freud, 1911 , p. 9)

It is the shamelessness of the psychotic patient which sometimes allows him to display things which others are ashamed of and which enables us to see mental mechanisms laid bare. It is the detailed description of his cries for help and of the humiliations which followed which makes it possible to review Schreber’s illness from a contemporary perspective and to use the observations he made on himself to understand better some of the anguish he suffered and perhaps to identlfy similar suffering in our own patients.

Notes 1. Santner (1996) makes the interesting point that Judaism and femininity in

2.

3.

4.

5.

nineteenthcentury Germany were both viewed as signs of inferiority and may help to understand why Schreber became preoccupied with the story of the ‘wandering Jew’ and feared he had an inferior Jewish stomach. Cotard’ssyndrome: Delire de negation. A syndrome of mental depression and suicidal tendencies in which the patient complains of having lost everything: possessions, part of or the entire body, often believing that he or she has died and is a walking corpse. This delusion is usually expanded to the degree that the patient might claim that he can smell his own rotting flesh and feel worms crawling through his skin. Paradoxically, being ‘dead’often gives the patient the notion of being immortal. Other megalomelancholic ideas may be present (Cotard, 1880). Freud wrote, ‘Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical agency of the ego and the ego as altered by identification’(1 917, p. 249). These white lies related to his illness being put down ‘solelyto poisoning with potassium bromide, for which Dr R in S ... was to be blamed’,and he also complains that, ‘I could have been more rapidly cured of certain hypochondriacal ideas with which I was preoccupied at the time, particularly concern over loss of weight, if I had been allowed to operate the scales which served to weigh patients a few times myself.’ Klein (1957, pp. 179-80) wrote as follows: ‘Also,the infant’s longing for an inexhaustible and ever-present breast stems by no means only from a

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craving for food and from libidinal desires. For the urge even in the earliest stages to get constant evidence of the mother’s love is fundamentally rooted in anxiety. The struggle between life and death instincts and the ensuing threat of annihilationof the self and of the object by destructive impulses are fundamental factors in the infant’s initial relation to his mother. For his desires imply that the breast, and soon the mother, should do away with these destructive impulses and the pain of persecutory anxiety. 6. Shengold (1978) defines soul murder as, a deliberate attempt to interfere with another person’sseparate identity, joy in life, and capacity to love. 7. In this context Dr Weber wrote: When one looks at the content of his writings and takes into consideration the abundance of indiscretions relating to himself and others contained in them, the unembarrassed detailing of the most doubtful and aesthetically impossible situations and events, the use of the most offensive vulgar words, etc., one finds it quite incomprehensible that a man otherwise tactful and of fine feeling could propose an action which would compromise him so severely in the eyes of the public, were not his whole attitude to life pathological, and he unable to see things in their proper perspective and if the tremendous overvaluation of his own person cause by lack of insight into his illness had not clouded his appreciation of the, imitations imposed on man by society’ (Schreber, 1903, pp. 347-8).

References Baumeyer F (1956) The Schreber case. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 37: 61-74. Bion WR (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. Cotard J (1880) Du delire hypochondriaque dans une forme grave de la melancolie anxieuse. Annales medico-psychologiques, Paris, 4: 168-74. Freud S (1911) Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographic Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides). SE 1 2 , 3 4 2 . Freud S (1917) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14,237-58. Katan M (1959) Schreber’s hereafter - its building-up (Aufbau) and its downfall. Psychoanal. St. Child 14: 314-82. Klein M (1935) A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. Int. J Psycho-anal. 16: 145-74. Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein. 1, 262-89. London: Hogarth Press (1975). Klein M (1946) Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. Int. J Psycho-anal. 27: 99-110. Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein. 3,1-24. London: Hogarth Press. (1975). Klein M (1957) Envy and Gratitude. London: Tavistock. Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein. 3, 176-235. London: Hogarth Press (1975). Kohut H (1971) Thoughts on narcissism and narcissistic rage. Psychoanal. St. Child 27, 377-8. Lacan J (1956) The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Book I11 The Psychoses 1955-1956. Trans. Russell Grigg. New York and London: Norton, 1993. Lothane 2 (1992) In Defence of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.


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Niederland W (1951) Three notes on the Schreber case. Psychoanal. Q. 20: 579-91. Niederland W (1959a) Schreber: father and son. Psychoanal. Q. 28: 151-69. Niederland, W (1959b) The ‘miracled-up’world of Schreber’s childhood. Psychoanal. St. Child. 14. Niederland W (1960) Schreber’sfather. J. Am. Psychoanal.Assoc. 8: 492-9. Riesenberg-Malcolm R (1999) Two ways of experiencing shame. Paper given at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Santiago. Santner EL (1996) My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schreber DP (1903) Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Tr. and ed. I Madpine, RA Hunter. London: Dawson, 1955. Reissued New York: Review of Books, 2000. Shengold L (1978) Assault on a child’s individuality: a kind of soul murder. Psychoanal. Q. 47: 419-24, Steiner J (1993) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations of the Personality in Psychotic, Neurotic, and Borderline Patients. London: Routledge. White R (1961) The mother-conflict in Schreber’s psychosis. Int. J. Psychoanal. 42: 55-73. Winnicott DW (1967) Mirror-role of mother and family in child development. In P Lomas (ed.), Predicament of the Family: A Psycho-analytical Symposium. London: Hogarth. Reprinted in Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock (1971). Wright K (1991) Vision and Separation. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

12 Unconscious phantasy and apres=coup:‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (the Wolf Man) ROSINE JOZEF PERELBERG

Introduction It was in the period between February 1910 and July 1914 that a young Russian man, who was later to be known as the Wolf Man, was treated by Freud. He was born on 6 January 1887,the child of a rich Russian landowner who had died, age 49, from an overdose of veronal, leaving his son and widow well provided for. During his life the father had been diagnosed as manic depressive. Another daughter, two and a half years older than the patient, had also committed suicide. After the initial period of four years of analysis with Freud, the Wolf Man returned to Russia, married a German nurse, successfully frnished his law studies and got a licence to practise law. James Strachey in the Introduction to the case suggested that this was ‘the most elaborate and no doubt the most important of all Freud’s case histories’ (Freud, 1918,p. 3). Ernest Jones stated that it was assuredly the best of the series. Freud was then at the very height of his powers, a confident master of his method, and the technique he displays in the interpretation and synthesis of the incredibly complex material must win every reader’s admiration. (Jones, 1974,vol. 11, p. 307)

The treatment with Freud began a few years after a gonorrhoea1infection which had left the Wclf Man incapacitated and dependent on other people. Throughout his childhood and until his tenth year, Freud tells us, the patient had suffered from anxiety hysteria, in the shape of an animal phobia, which changed into an obsessional neurosis with a religious content. In the written account of the case, Freud concentrates on his understanding of the infantile neurosis, which was reconstructed and treated fifteen years after its termination. This is, therefore, an account of infancy through the eyes and understanding of an adult, in itself an example of apr&s-coup(see the 206

‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (the Wolf Man)

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discussion of this concept below). Peter Gay suggests that in concentrating on the childhood neurosis, Freud was in a dialogue with both Jung and Adler. Jung believed that the memory of childhood sexuality is a later event that is then projected back, whereas Adler believed that the early sexual impulses are not sexual but aggressive (Gay, 1988, p. 286). Freud’s paper is divided into nine parts. A general introduction is followed by an account of the patient’s environment and the history of the case. The Wolf Man’s parents are said to have had a happy married life until his mother started to suffer from abdominal disorders, and his father from depression. From very early on the Wolf Man had been looked after by a nurse who had an immense affection for him, and whose own child had died young. He was a quiet child throughout his childhood,so much so that it was said that ‘he ought to have been the girl’.The family used to spend the summer in a country villa, which was visited by several relatives. One year the Wolf Man and his sister were left with an English governess, and on his parents’ return he was transformed: ‘He had become discontented, irritable and violent’ (Freud, 1918, p. 15). His mother believed that this change was due to the English governess who was eccentric and addicted to drink. The boy’s grandmother thought that the boy’s behaviour was due to conflict between the Enghshwoman and the nurse. In these, the boy had taken the side of his ‘Nanya’.There are two screen memories that relate to this period. In one the English governess was walking in front of the children and said ‘Do look at my little tail’ (ibid., p. 19). In another her hat flew off while they went on a drive that left the children happy. Freud points to the castration complex. There are also memories pertaining to the patient’s experience of his sister’s seduction. Once she had suggested that they show each other their bottoms. At another time she had played with his penis, while telling him that his Nanya did that all the time (ibid., p. 20). Freud suggests that this was not a phantasy, as a cousin later corroborated that she had done the same with him. The sister was highly intelligent, in a way that made the patient feel inferior as a child. Progressively she suffered from depression and ended by poisoning herself, dying far away from home. Freud takes her history as one of the proofs of the ‘conspicuously neuropathic heredity in her family’ (ibid., p. 21). In adolescence the relationship between the siblings had improved. Attempts by the patient to seduce his sister were rebuffed by her. The patient turned towards a peasant girl in the household who had the same name as his sister. This, according to Freud, had a consequence for his future type of object choice, in that he always chose women whom he regarded as inferior to him. He had a memory of suffering from a fear. There was a book with a picture of a wolf standing on its hind legs. He used to scream whenever he saw this picture, afraid that the wolf would eat him up. He was also frightened of other animals. Once he was frightened by a yellow butterfly with striped, pointed wings. During this period he also remembers tormenting beetles and caterpillars. He was also frightened of seeing horses being beaten. At other

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times he himself would beat them. He was both pious and blasphemous. Freud is not sure about the sequence of events, but hypothesizes that the symptoms of obsessional neurosis belong to a later period than the anxiety and the cruel treatment of animals. Freud also reports an unsatisfactory relationship between the patient and his father. Freud dated his age at the time of the sister’sseduction as 3 l / 4 years, just at the time of the alteration in character. Freud links the two to an awakening of his sexual activity (ibid., p. 24). The Wolf Man turns to his Nanya who threatened him with castration: boys who masturbated got a wound in that place. Watching his sister and a friend of hers became a confirmation of that threat. He reports that he gave up masturbation soon after Nanya’s refusal and her threat. With the suppression of masturbation, the boy’s sexual life took on a sadistic-analcharacter. ‘Hissexual life, therefore, which was beginning to come under the sway of the genital zone, gave way before an external obstacle, and was thrown back by its influence into an earlier phase of pre-genital organization’(ibid., p. 25). The patient also treated himself cruelly with beating phantasies, so that sadism was transformed into masochism (ibid., p. 26). Vacillation between activity and passivity became part of his character. There was, however, a path that led from his Nanya to his father. The seduction by his sister had led to a passive identification, giving him a passive sexual aim. Identification was replaced by objectchoice. He attempted to force his father to punish him,and in that way attempted to realize the masochistic sexual aims that he desired. His naughtiness was therefore an attempt at seduction. Freud thus divides the period of childhood into two phases: a first phase of naughtiness and perversion from the age of 3% years until the fourth birthday, and a subsequent phase in which the signs of neurosis are predominant. The division between these two phases was marked by a dream (ibid., p. 28). In The Dream and its analysis Freud relates this dream: I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. (ibid.,p. 29)

Freud foUows the free associations that connect with each part of the dream, and the analysis of this dream takes centre stage in the understanding of the patient’s infantile neurosis. The wolves remind the Wolf Man of the picture of the upright wolf that his sister used to show him as a child. Their whiteness, a flock of sheep which had died in an epidemic. The tree reminded him of another story, of a tailor whose house was invaded by a wolf which came

‘Fromthe History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (the Wolf Man)

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through the window. The tailor managed to pull its tail off and the wolf fled in terror. Some time later, the tailor met the maimed wolf again, though this time the wolf was with other wolves. The tailor managed to take refuge in a tree, but the wolves reached the tailor at the top of the tree by climbing on top of each other, with the maimed wolf at the bottom. The tailor succeeded in frightening him off by reminding him of their previous encounter, and the whole pack fled. The fox tails of the wolves in the dream were an allusion to the taillessness of the wolf in the story, and a representationof the castration complex. The number of wolves led to another association, to the children’s story ‘The Seven Little Goats’,in which six goats are eaten up by a wolf, whereas the seventh manages to escape. Freud asks if the fear of wolves in fairy tales ‘maynot be infantile fear of the father’(ibid., p. 32). Freud indicates that the analysis and understanding of the dream continued over the course of the treatment, and that it was only towards the end that further understanding took place. The stillness of the wolves and the intent way in which they looked at the patient represented the opposite: the intense movement (violence) of the primal scene he would have witnessed between the parents. The text proceeds slowly, always following the path of the patient’s associations. The strong sense of reality is connected with something that was registered and yet remained unknown (ibid., p. 33). The windows suddenly opening are linked to his opening his eyes. ‘The attentive looking which in the dream was ascribed to the wolves should rather be shifted on to him’(ibid., p. 34). This transposition is repeated in that in the dream the wolves were sitting in the tree, whereas in the fairy tale they had been unable to climb the tree; similarly the stillness in the dream could be the reverse of violent action. Freud follows the dreamer’s associations and traces the timing of the dream to just before the patient’s fourth birthday. However, there is a point at which I suggest that there is a methodological leap, which is when Freud formulates his own construction of the process: ‘I have now reached the point at which I must abandon the support I have hitherto had from the course of analysis. I am afraid it will also be the point at which the reader’s belief will abandon me’ (ibid., p. 36). He continues: ‘What sprang into activity that night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious memorytraces was the picture of copulation between the parents ...’ The time of the observation of such a scene was established at about 1% years, when the patient was suffering from malaria, due to which he was perhaps sleeping in his parents’ room. He had then ‘witnessed a coitus a tergo [from behind], three times repeated; he was able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ ...’ (ibid., pp. 36-7) The footnote on this page introduces the reader to the fuller account of Freud’sconceptualization of upres-coup.At 1‘/z years, the patient witnessed a scene of parental intercourse (the primal scene). The scene he seemed to evoke consisted of ‘theman upright and the woman bent down’,the position

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of the man being associated with the upright wolf. His understanding of what was happening, however, was deferred until the time of the dream, when the patient was then able to understand it, owing to his development and sexual excitations and sexual researches (ibid., pp. 37-8, 45). The dream activates that scene (ibid., p. 44). Two crucial ideas in Freud’swork follow: the notion of apr&-coup (which in the Standard Edition has been translated as ‘deferred action’), and the idea that the primal scene, that is the scene of parental intercourse, is (in the mind of the young child) an act of violence in which the father is inflicting pain on the mother (ibid., p. 45). Moreover, the observation of that scene, for the child, confirms the reality of the mother’s castration. There is a furation on the buttocks as the most attractive part of the woman’sanatomy. Freud follows the free associative process that takes him through the transformation of the material ‘primal scene’ - wolf story - fairy tale of the ‘The Seven Little Goats’,which are interpreted in terms of the longing for his father, castration and fear of the father (ibid., p. 4 2 ) . Freud gives an explanation for each detail of the dream (ibid., pp. 42-3). The patient wakes up from the dream in a state of anxiety. The wish to copulate with his father (in identification with his mother) is repressed, and fear of his father appears instead, as an animal phobia. He had reached a stage of genital organization (his wish for his penis to be touched), but there follows a regression and instead there is a wish to be beaten and punished. In Part 5 Freud discusses the process of recollections versus constructions in the analytic treatment. Memories are interspersed with imaginary elements (ibid., p. 5 l), and dreaming is a kind of remembering. Freud points to two different relationships between the past and the present. Regression points in one direction, but there is another, from past to present: I am of the opinion that the influence of childhood makes itself felt already in the situation at the beginning of the formation of a neurosis, since it plays a decisive part in determining whether and at what point the individual shall fail to master the real problems of life. (ibid., p. 54)

The case of the Wolf Man illustrates how his neurosis in adulthood was preceded by a neurosis in childhood. Freud then initiates a discussion of the relationship between reality and fantasy; I will return to this below. Part 6 is an account and discussion of the Wolf Man’sobsessional neurosis. When he is 4 K his mother introduces him to religion, and the anxiety symptoms are replaced by obsessional symptoms. Freud divides the Wolf Man’s childhood into four periods: the period up to the seduction when he was 3% years old, during which the seduction took place; the alteration in his character until the anxiety dream at four; the period of the animal phobia until his initiation into religion; and from then on the period of the obsessional neurosis until his tenth year. After his rejection by Nanya he developed in the direction of sadism and masochism, tormenting small animals and fantasizing


21 1

about beating horses. In his sadism he identified with his father, but in his masochism he chose him as an object. The dream, with the influence of the primal scene, could have led to the primacy of genital organization. Instead, he woke up in a state of anxiety and a phobia constituted itself in the fear of being eaten by a wolf. Freud suggests, therefore, that from the time of the dream, the Wolf Man was unconsciously homosexual; in his neurosis he was cannibalistic, whereas the masochistic attitude remained predominant. In all these three modes he had passive sexual aims (ibid., p. 64). In his preoccupation with Christ, the Wolf Man wondered if Christ had a behind and if he used to shit. Freud suggests that these obsessional doubts express the wish to be anally penetrated by the father. He was filled with blasphemous thoughts, which Freud understood as expressions of hostile feelings towards his father. He had to breathe in a ritualistic manner under certain conditions, such as when he saw beggars, cripples or wretchedlooking people, as he did not wish to become like them. He linked this to visiting his father in a sanatorium as a child, the father becoming ‘the prototype of all the cripples, beggars and poor people in whose presence he was obliged to breath out’ (ibid., p. 67). However, when breathing out he was also imitating his father’s breathing in the primal scene. Thus, before his fourth birthday the Wolf Man had an anxiety hysteria (animal phobia) which changed to obsessional neurosis with religious content, and which lasted until he was ten years old. When he was little more than three, his sister had seduced him into sexual games, playing with his penis. He had resisted her and instead sought to seduce his Nanya, by exposing himself and masturbating in front of her (ibid., p. 24). Nanya warned him that children who did such things got a ‘wound’in that place. Her threat took some time to register but after he observed his sister and a friend urinating and established that some people have no penises, he began to be preoccupied with castration. The Wolf Man retreated to an earlier phase of sexual development,to anal sadism and masochism. He tortured butterflies and himself with beating phantasies. He now chose his father as a sexual object; he longed to be beaten by him and provoked his father into administering physical punishment. His character changed and his dream about the wolves followed soon after, just before his fourth birthday. Half a year later his fully fledged anxiety neurosis was in place, complete with an animal phobia. He compulsively practised a variety of rituals, suffered attacks of ferocious rage and grappled with his youthful sensuality, in which homosexual desires played a largely invisible part. Freud describes the patient’s ‘unbridledinstinctual life’ (ibid., p, 104). To summarize Freud’s hypotheses about the case, the Wolf Man had been at the threshold of genital organization, but at the threat of castration by his Nanya his genital organization broke down and he regressed to the stage that preceded it (that of sadistic-analorganization).

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He maintained the passivity of his sexual aims. Freud points out that the child’s reaction to his observation of intercourse at the age of l’h years was preponderantly passive (ibid., p. 109). The dream at the age of four brought into deferred action his observation of intercourse at the age of 1%. His genital organization, which had been broken off, was reestablished. There was however the repudiation of a new element and its replacement by a phobia. Thus the sadistic organization continued to exist during the phase of the animal phobia which now set in, and the child persisted in sadistic as well as masochistic activities. What was repressed was the recognition of the existence of castration, and the homosexual attitude understood in the genital sense. The repression was a result of his masculinity (ibid., p. 110). Freud suggests the possibility that repression was the result of conflict between masculine and feminine tendencies, i.e., bisexuality. However, it was the ego that put the repression in operation.

Further notes on the Wolf Man’streatment With the Bolshevik Revolution, the Wolf Man lost all of his considerable fortune. He returned to Vienna in 1919, when Freud saw him for a few months without any remuneration, and in addition collected money from many of his colleagues and pupils for the patient’s living expenses, as well as for his then sick wife. Between October 1926 and February 1927 the Wolf Man was treated by Ruth Mack Brunswick. He returned to her again in 1929, and then kept in irregular contact until about 1940. When he went to see ‘DrMack’ in 1926,the Wolf Man insisted that he was the victim of a nasal injury caused by electrolysis which had been used in the treatment of obstructed sebaceous glands of the nose. He thought that it had left a scar or a hole in his nose, and that this had been intentionally caused by a doctor who meant to harm him. He sought out Freud because he felt consumed by his preoccupation about the state of his nose. Although nothing was visible to the external observer, the Wolf Man was completely obsessed by the presumed injury to his nose to such an extent that it dominated his life, leaving him unable to work. In terms of his personal life, the Wolf Man was able to obtain a junior job in an insurance company in Vienna, which he kept until his retirement. For some six years, Freud collected money once a year to help with his general living expenses, which included the hospital treatment of his sick wife (ibid., pp. 96-7). In April 1923 Freud had his first minor operation, with another to follow in the autumn. It has been suggested that the deterioration in the Wolf Man’s state of mind was connected with the persecutory anxiety at seeing Freud ill. In November, the patient’s mother came from Russia, and she had a wart on her nose, which her doctor had advised her to remove. The patient himself


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had to have two of his teeth removed by a dentist, called Dr Wolf (!). The nose symptom appeared in February 1924. Ruth Mack Brunswick was struck by one particular change in the character of her patient, his dishonesty. He had no qualms about Freud’s collecting money to help him, and concealed the existence of some jewellery he had managed to save from his estate in Russia, and which he believed to be worth a lot of money (which was later discovered not to be the case). The analysis uncovered hostile death wishes against the father/analyst Freud from the rejected son, and also the identificationof himself with a castrated father. The patient was despairing, once threatening to kill both his current analyst and Freud, and was cut off from reality. He was filled with persecutory anxiety and presented himself in a manic state. In the progressive analyses of several dreams, the analyst indicates the slow process of working through some of these themes. In a transformation of the dream about the wolves, there is a dream in which a beautiful and calm landscape can be admired, and branches intertwined in a beautiful pattern are interpreted as the parents in a sexual and loving embrace. Towards the end of his treatment, the patient was shocked at his own behaviour. A clue is given by his statement that ‘women are always like that - distrustful and suspicious and afraid of losing something’ (ibid., p. 94). The wish to be made into a woman is thus expressed, linked to the wish to obtain sexual pleasure from the father. The analyst pointed to several points in his diagnosis: the hypochondriacal delusion; the delusion of persecution; a regression to narcissism; the absence of hallucination in the presence of delusion; mild ideas of reference; absence of mental deterioration;the mono-symptomatic nature of the psychosis, in that when thinking about anything else but his nose, the patient was sane. Mack Brunswick stresses the impenetrability of the patient during his psychosis; since the ‘veil’ that had enveloped the patient in his previous illness was there again. The identification with his mother was all encompassing. The Wolf Man kept in intermittent contact with Mack Brunswick for several years. In 1938 his wife committed suicide, by gassing herself, at the time of the Nazi invasion, although there is no apparent link between the two events. Immediately after his wife’s suicide the Wolf Man’s state of mind seriously deteriorated. He initiated contact with Muriel Gardiner, a doctor and psychoanalyst who lived in Vienna at the time but later migrated to America. This contact lasted to the end of the Wolf Man’slife, through several meetings over the years, as well as in correspondence. It was Gardiner who stimulated the Wolf Man to write his memoirs. The account has been published in the book The WolfMan and Sigmund Freud (1 989). Other major documents and reports about the Wolf Man are Obholzer’s recordings of forty hours, which apparently began when the Wolf Man was approaching his 88th birthday. Another is Eissler’s tapes covering hundreds of hours of conversation with the Wolf Man.

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Discussion Peter Gay has suggested that the case of the Wolf Man contains echoes of Freud’s earlier stories. Like Dora, the Wolf Man presented a dream, the interpretation of which supplied the key to his neurosis. Like Little Hans, he had suffered from an animal phobia in childhood. Like the Rat Man, he was sometimes dominated by obsessive ceremonies and neurotic ruminations. Strachey, in his Introduction, has suggested several of the themes that underpin the text, such as the issue of infantile sexuality; the emphasis on the oral organization of the libido; the connections between incorporation, identification, the formation of an ego ideal, the sense of guilt and pathological states of depression; the relationship between primal scene and primal phantasies, and the question of whether the mental contents of primal phantasies can be inherited; and the question of primary feminine impulses in men. I would like to add the crucial importance of the different notions of time that Freud discusses in the text, with special reference to upr&s-coup.The understanding of the interrelationship between these different notions of time cuts across many psychoanalytic writings which reduce Freud’s thinking to a simplistic developmental perspective. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to address four main issues: the constitutive role of phantasy for the structuring of the mind in Freud’s framework; Freud’s conceptualization of time in relation to the function of trauma and phantasy; the issue of the feminine in men; and finally the connectionsbetween the Wolf Man’sobsessionality and mourning.

Unconscious phantasy and external reality Laplanche and Pontalis indicate the different meanings of phantasy covered in Freud’s writings, ranging from conscious phantasies and daydreams to unconscious phantasies and primal phantasies (1985, pp. 314-18). At the beginning phantasy was of the order of the pre-conscious or conscious. It took Freud until the metapsychologicalpapers of 1915 to give the notion of unconscious phantasy a metapsychological status. It is the connections between the various modes that gives complexity to Freud’s meaning. To quote Laplanche and Pontalis: ‘Freud’sprincipal concern ,.. seems to have been less with establishingsuch a differentiation than with emphasizing the links between these different aspects’ (1985, p. 316). This leads Laplanche and Pontalis to disagree with the distinction proposed by Isaacs between two alternative spellings: fantasy (to connote daydreams, fictions and so on) and phantasy for the primary content of unconscious mental processes (Isaacs, 1952). Laplanche and Pontalis think that this distinction does not do justice to the ‘complexityof Freud’sthought and that a choice for each in Freud’s writings in itself would lead to arbitrary decisions’. What needs to be emphasized in Freud is the ‘heterogeneityof psychic life’(Iaplanche and Pontalis, 1985, p. 18). Moreover, they fundamentally stress the link between phantasy and


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desire. For Freud, phantasy takes place when the external object is abandoned, in contrast to a conception of phantasy that they identify in Isaacs paper, which is about ‘I want to do that to the object’. They suggest that the differentiation between subject and object is abolished in phantasy (ibid., p. 73). What one is left with is a ‘scene’. The primary function of phantasies is ‘the mise en s c h e of desire - a mise en sc6ne in which what is prohibited (Z’interdit)is always present in the actual formation of the wish’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988 [ 19731, p. 318). I will now return to Freud’schronology. In a letter to Fliess written in 1897, Freud stated: ‘I no longer believe in my neurotica’ (the theory that neurosis was caused by childhood seduction). This statement indicates a major shift in Freud’s thinking. The incestuous incidents recalled by his patients, which he had previously taken at face value, were now seen as representing wishes on the part of his patients gratified by fulfiient in phantasy. The abandoning of his neurotica allowed Freud to make a major shift and to establish a crucial distinction in psychoanalysis, namely that between historical and psychical truth, as well as the discovery of key aspects of psychoanalytic theory (such as repression, conflict, repetition compulsion and projection). Moreover, in psychoanalysis, all events become invested with phantasy so that memories are not only of events but also of thoughts and phantasies. This shift, linking phantasy to unconscious processes, took place in the topographical model of the mind, and followed many elaborations in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, Freud’s clinical cases and the metapsychological papers. As Laplanche and Pontalis indicate, however, the unconscious phantasy is reached through a process of analysis which reaches the latent content that lies behind the symptom (1985, p. 38). Between 1897 and 1906 Freud’s work focuses on the transformation of phantasies (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ and ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’. Throughout his discussion of the Wolf Man, Freud raises a question concerning the extent to which it is factual history that produces phantasies, and how far, on the contrary, the production of the event itself is governed by pre-existing phantasies (see Perron, 2001). How far does the individual’s objective history condition his psychic development and his functional structure? On the other hand, how far is external reality the product of psychic reality? To what extent does factual history produce phantasies, in particular primal phantasies, and how far is the production of the event itself governed by phantasies? Freud’s conclusion is that ultimately phantasy must include elements of things seen and heard, and that memories are also impregnated with phantasies. This conclusion has profound implications for psychoanalysis in that it establishes the distinction between material reality and psychic reality. In ‘Formulationson the Rvo Principles of Mental Functioning’, Freud had already suggested the

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difficulty of distinguishing unconscious phantasies from memories which have become unconscious. But one must never allow oneselfto be misled into applying the standards of reality to repressed psychical structures, and on that account, perhaps, into undervaluing the importance of phantasies in the formation of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities ... (Freud, 1911, p. 225)

In the Wolf Man, he states the following: Scenes from early infancy, such as are brought up by an exhaustive analysis of neuroses (as for instance in the present case), are not reproductions of real occurrences, to which it is possible to ascribe an influence over the course of the patient’s later life and over the formation of his symptoms. It considers them rather as products of the imagination, which find their instigation in mature life, which are intended to serve as some kind of symbolic representation of real wishes and interests, and which owe their origin to a regressive tendency, to a turning-away from the tasks of the present. (Freud, 1918, p. 49)

Later in the discussion of the Wolf Man Freud adds that scenes from infancy are not reproduced in treatment as recollections, ‘they are products of constructions’ (ibid., p. 51) through a laborious process ‘from an aggregate of indications’. These memories may also appear in dreams, following the rules of primary process, since ‘dreaming is another kind of remembering’. These give the individual a sense of conviction about the reality of the primal scenes (ibid., p. 51). Freud nevertheless insisted on the fact that phantasies must have some connection with material reality, which indicates the role of experience in the formation of phantasies. Yet at the same time recollections are ‘interspersed with imaginary elements, just like the so-called screen memories which are preserved spontaneously’(ibid., p. 51). The fact that the present has roots in the past represents an important dimension of temporality in Freud’s formulations. Freud also discusses the role of repression: to what extent is one dealing with psychic formations that are unconscious from the outset and to what extent with ones that are made unconscious by the effect of repression? Freud proceeds to discuss the organizing role of phantasies, specifically those related to the primal scene, as well as the origins of primal phantasies themselves and the manner in which they are inherited. Freud suggests that there are three primal phantasies: seduction, castration and primal scene. These constitute a ‘treasure’that the analyst may discover in all neurotics and probably in all children (Freud, 1915). They all refer to the origins: the origin of the individual in the primal scene; the origin of sexuality in seduction; the origin of the differences between the sexes in the phantasies of castration (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985, p. 52). The concept of primal phantasies themselves may be viewed as a theory about the origins of the mind. These are somehow given, they are present in the unconscious with ‘primal repression’, and are only accessible to


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consciousness through their derivatives. They are inherited phylogenetically. They pre-date the specific history of the individual, although they are repeated in the ontogenesis. The idea of phylogenetic inheritance is the least accepted of Freud’s ideas. However, the idea that some phantasies are ‘given’ is not far from Bion’s notion of ‘preconceptions’that await a realization. To my mind, however, the concept of primary phantasies is, for Freud, a requirement of his model of the mind. They are instituted by primal repression and it is that which establishes the distinction between Ucs and Pcs-Cs. For the same reason, these primal phantasies are never accessible, except through their derivatives, otherwise the distinction between the systems in the psychic apparatus would be destroyed. In Freudian metapsychology there is a continuous reshaping of phantasy, which takes place in terms of apr&s-coup, as an ongoing work of reelaboration, which is constantly transforming the past. The discovery of the role of phantasies comes together with that of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex. Freud regarded dreams as phantasies which ‘the dreamer had made on the subject of his childhood at some time or another, probably at the age of puberty, and which had now come to the surface again in this unrecognizable form’ (Freud, 1918, p. 19).

Unconscious phantasy and apres-coup In the discussion of the Wolf Man, the concept of unconscious phantasy is intrinsically linked to the notion of time and specifically apr&s-coup.The neurosis was constructed along two time scales; it was the second time scale that determined the constitution of the phantasy and the choice of neurosis. It is not, therefore, a question of a linear, cumulative effect which resulted in the symptom, but a reorganization of already existing memory traces related to a new stage of maturation (Freud, 1918). Moreover, for Freud this is fundamentally related to the role of castration, the law of the father that forbids the mother as an object of desire. This notion not only rules out linear determinism and thus emphasizes the relevance of the present when reinterpreting the past (a notion which is so fundamental for psychoanalytic work), but also places sexuality at the centre of the theoretical formulations. To quote more extensively from Freud’s writings about the Wolf Man (ibid., p. 45, footnote 1): We must not forget the actual situation which lies behind the abbreviateddescription given in the test: the patient under analysis,at an age of over twenty-fiveyears, was putting the impressions and impulses of his fourth year into words which he would never have found at that time. If we fail to notice this, it may easily seem comic and incredible that a child of four should be capable of such technical judgements and learned notions. This is simply another instance of deferred action. At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he is

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unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only twenty years later during the analysis is he able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him.The patient justifiably disregards the three periods of time, and puts his present ego into the situation which is so long past. And in this we follow him, since with correct self-observation and interpretation the effect must be the same as though the distance between the second and the third periods of time could be neglected. (emphasis added)

Strachey adds the following: [This theory of deferred action had already been put forward by Freud in ‘Studies on Hysteria’ [Breuer and Freud, 18951 when he discussed what he then called ‘retention hysteria’ (S.E. 2, p. 161 ff). He also gave a very elaborate account of its workings in hysteria in Part I1 of his posthumously published ‘Project’also written in 1895. But in these earlier statements of the theory, the effects of the primal scenes were deferred at least until the age of puberty, and the primal scenes themselves were never imagined as happening at so early an age as in the present case (SE 17,p. 45).] Trauma is linked to the work of memory: ‘hystericssuffer from reminiscences’,Freud suggested.This points to the intrinsic link between trauma, time and space in the memory of ‘anotherscene’.

Apr&-coup is related to the interaction between memory and phantasy. In Freud’s formulations, phantasies constantly reshape memories retrospectively, although one cannot overlook the direction that goes from the past to the present (Freud 1896c, see also Thoma and Cheshire, 1991). Repression establishes the rupture between conscious and unconscious, so that it is only retrospectively that one can speak of unconscious phantasies in Freudian metapsychology. From that perspective, phantasy, like time, is multidetermined, and to my mind (here I am in disagreement with many British and American writers such as Sandler and Nagera (1963) and Spillius (22001), and in tune with the French psychoanalysts)one cannot select any one of the layers in Freud’s work as ‘central’.What gives depth to the Freudian theory of the mind is indeed the fluidity, the dynamics between the various concepts. One has only to read the clinical papers such as the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans or the paper on Leonard0 to comprehend the way in which unconscious phantasies are only accessed through their derivatives, retrospectivelyin terms of apr&s-coup.Primal phantasies - urphantasien - as discussed above, however, are there from the beginning. In all these unconscious phantasies, Freud seems to be concerned with the question of how sexuality comes about for human beings (see Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985).

..

Anality, the masculine and the femmne In a letter to Ferenczi written in 1913, Freud reported that the Wolf Man initiated his frrst session with him by offering to have rectal intercourse with Freud, and then to defecate on his head (see Jones, 1974,vol. 11, p. 308).


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A rich young Russian, whom I took on because of compulsive tendencies, admitted the following transferences to me after the first session:Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head. At the age of six years he experi-

enced as his first symptom cursing against God: pig, dog, etc. When he saw three piles of faeces on the street he became uncomfortable because of the Holy Trinity and anxiously sought a fourth in order to destroy the association.(p. 138)

Bokanowski (1995) has suggested that in this first session, the phantasies understood in the dream of the wolves are again present. This scene dramatizes a homosexual relationship characterized by anality and the threat of castration: it expresses the patient’s state of mind at the beginning of his treatment. There is a repetition at the beginning of the analysis of a traumatism which is analogous to that which had activated the anxiety linked to the obsessive symptoms. In his analysis of the statement in that first session Bokanowski suggests the experience of a feminine that is not well internalized in the Wolf Man. He also suggests that the phantasies of seduction, castration and primal scene are present. In his analysis of the case, Freud indicated the anal-sadisticregression and cruelty that followed the prohibition of masturbation. The Wolf Man tormented insects and people, had beating fantasies and enjoyed mistreating horses. Freud had identified serious sado-masochistictrends in the Wolf Man, in his identification with the suffering Christ, and in his beating phantasies and depressive and masochistic self-reproach.The obsessionality appears to have continued until the age of ten. Freud understood the Wolf Man’s terror of being eaten by wolves as referring to his conflicting wishes in relation to the father: fear of him on the one hand, and unconscious longing for homosexual gratification on the other. Freud also referred to the Wolf Man in the paper ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ (1919). In the case of the Rat Man, Freud interpreted the patient’s obsessionality in terms of the conflict between activity and passivity, masculine and feminine identifications. I would suggest that the contrasts between passivity/activity, femininity/masculinity and sadism/masochism are indeed central to Freud’s understanding of the structuring of psychic reality. They are the axes around which Freud thought about most of his patients, whether hysterics, obsessional neurotics, perverse or psychotic. So much of the Wolf Man’s psychopathology has been discussed in terms of his homosexual impulses, which were unacceptable to him (in connection also with his masochistic and passive identifications). The pre-oedipal phase and the relationship to the mother are not considered in this case, as indeed they are is not in any of the other cases discussed by Freud. The Wolf Man’s biological mother appears as a minor character, predominantly as a partner in the primal scene (Gay, 1988, p. 505). Indeed the mother is a faint presence in all of Freud’s clinical cases. One must, of course, remember that the discovery of the pre-oedipal phase was still to come in Freud’s later writings, in his papers on female sexuality.

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Laplanche and Pontalis have suggested the importance of the anal stage in the psychic structuring of both boys and girls. This is a theme that permeates Freud’s writings, and which, I believe, frnds its most important expression in contemporary French writing. The notion of a pre-genital organization where sadistic and anal-erotic instincts predominate appears for the first time in ‘The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis’ (1913). In later footnotes to ‘The Three Essays’, in 1915 and 1924, the anal stage appears as one of the pre-genital organizations lying between the oral organization and the phallic one. It is the first stage in which there is a polarity between activity and passivity: Freud views activity as coinciding with sadism, and passivity with anal eroticism. Throughout several of his papers (‘The Wolf Man’, ‘The Schreber Case’ and ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ immediately come to mind), anality progressively becomes linked to a specific phantasy and to the interplay of identifications in the primal scene. The child has a universal phantasy of intercourse as an act of anal penetration, where the mother submits masochistically to the father, who inflicts pain on her. This becomes a path in which Freud identifies anality, masochism and femininity. Other papers where Freud specifically discussed this issue include ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908), ‘On Transformationsof Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism’ (1917b). Freud concluded that the Wolf Man’s symptoms of obsessional neurosis were the result of a regression of libido to this stage of development,which is characterized by the preponderance of the anal and sadistic components. A few years later, in 1924, Freud was to substantially change his views on masochism in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’,where he distinguished between three forms of masochism: emtogenic,feminine and moral. The first establishesa link between pleasure and pain; the second is present in all human beings, and the third is the result of an unconscious sense of guilt. Freud added, however, that ‘the first, the erotogenic, masochism - pleasure in pain - lies at the bottom of the other two forms as well’ (SE 19, p. 161). This primary, erotogenic, masochism, is directed towards the subject himself, and is the expression of the fusion of the death instinct with the libidinal drives: ‘even the subject’sdestruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction’ (p. 170). The paper ‘Beyondthe Pleasure Principle’,written in 1920, is at the origin of the transformation of Freud’s views on masochism, which led, in the words of Catherine Chabert, to the ‘scandalous liaison between love and punishment, excitation and pain’ (p. 224, this volume). It follows the thread present in Freud’swork since his discovery of the primal phantasy of seduction of a child by an adult. The mother is the first seductress; yet, at the same time, she institutes a certain rhythm in the tolerance of displeasure. This indicates the importance of integrating a measure of eroticized suffering in early life. In the 1924 paper Freud suggested that ‘themasochistic wants to be treated like a small and helpless child, but particularly like a naughty child’ (p. 162). He added: ‘If one has an opportunity for studying cases in which the masochistic


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phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a characteristically female situation: they signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby’. These ideas, written some ten years later, shed uprd-s-coupfurther new light on the Wolf Man’s masochistic phantasies and evoke what might have felt uncontained in ‘the vicissitudes of the primordial eros’ in the relationship with the mother (Green, 1986,p. 245).

Obsessionality, anality and melancholia In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917a) Freud gave the first account of an internal object relationship that involved projection and identification. The melancholic is back to a narcissistic identification with the object where the ego treats itself as an object. The ego splits into two parts, one of which rages against the other. In melancholia there is thus an introjection of the object and identification with it. The melancholic blames the object with which the ego is identified - it looks as if it is blaming himself. Freud discovered in this text the process through which the ego unconsciously identifies with the introjected bad object (the rejecting loved object) thus becoming a victim of its own superego. His idea is that when one feels bad one is in fact unconsciously accusing somebody else whose victim one feels one is, but whom one has become through a process of introjection and identification. In ‘TheEgo and the Id’, Freud states: In persecutory paranoia the patient fends off excessively strong homosexual attachment to some particular person in a special way: and as a result this person whom he loved most becomes a persecutor, against whom the patient directs an often dangerous aggressiveness.(Freud, 1923, p. 43)

In 1924 Abraham also established a strong link between melancholia and obsessional neurosis. In melancholia loss of the object is emphasized. In obsessional neurosis the individual keeps the object, towards which he has ambivalent feelings. Obsessionality, one could then suggest, may be viewed as an attempt to fend off a melancholic state. Abraham further suggests that the unconscious regards the loss of an object as an anal process, and its introjection as an oral one (Abraham, 1924, p. 444). In paranoia the patient represents his persecutor by a part of his body, and believes that he is carrying it within him. It is interesting to think about the Wolf Man’s psychopathology in light of these ideas. Indeed I would suggest that there are issues of unresolved mourning which are central to the Wolf Man’spsychopathology - the death of his father and sister, who both committed suicide, as well as a dead mother complex, a mother who was there, but unavailable, preoccupied with her own bodily symptoms, unable to relate to her child. In the later analysis with Ruth Mack Brunswick, one can indeed trace the Wolf Man’s bodily symptoms

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themselves as an expression of an identification with the mother. There is also persecution. Abraham suggested that the melancholic incorporates his lost love-object as a whole, whereas the paranoiac only introjects a part of his. Death may be viewed as central to his preoccupations. The Wolf Man’s anality represents an attempt to deal with an object that he has not been able to relinquish.

Conclusion The Wolf Man is one of Freud’s most discussed cases. A search of the PRP CD-ROM identified 577 papers that specifically relate to that text in the English language alone. Some authors have suggested that the Wolf Man - with his ‘persistentconstricting and very severe obsessional neurosis’ - would be better classified as a borderline personality with severe ego impairments (Blum, 1974), and episodes of infantile psychosis and paranoid states in adult life. As studies of both clinical cases and of the theory of psychoanalysis move on, one is compelled to revisit the classical papers and examine what has changed, and what has remained unchallenged in psychoanalytic knowledge. In this chapter I have concentrated on four main themes which can be derived from a discussion of a classic paper: the constitutive role of phantasy for the structuring of the mind in Freud’s framework, Freud’s conceptualization of time in relation to the function of trauma and phantasy, the issue of the feminine in men, and finally the connections between the Wolf Man’sobsessionalityand mourning. I have indicated that there is an intrinsic link between unconscious phantasy and time in Freud’sformulations. In the discussion of the Wolf Man, the concept of unconscious phantasy is intrinsically linked to the notion of time and specifically up?-&-coup.It is not, therefore, a question of a linear, cumulative effect which resulted in the symptom, but a reorganization of already existing memory traces related to a new stage of maturation. Moreover, for Freud this is fundamentally related to the role of castration, the law of the father that forbids the mother as an object of desire. This notion not only rules out linear determinism and thus emphasizes the relevance of the present when reinterpreting the past (a notion which is so fundamental for psychoanalytic work), but also places sexuality at the centre of the theoretical formulations.

References Abraham K (1924) A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In K Abraham (1979) Selected Papers o n Psycho-Analysis. London: Maresfield Reprints. Baranger M, Baranger W, Mom JM (1988) The infantile psychic trauma from us to Freud: pure trauma, retroactivity and reconstruction. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 69: 113-28. Blum HP (1974) The borderline childhood of the Wolf Man.J. h e r . Psychoanal. Assn. 22: 721-42.


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Bokanowski T (1995) La premiere sckance de 1’Hommea m Loups. Revue franqaise de Psychanalyse 3. Brabant E, Falzeder E, Giamperi-Deutsch (eds) (1994) The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Breuer J, Freud S (1893-95) Studies on Hysteria. SE 2 Brunswick RM (1948) A supplement to Freud’s History of an Infantile Neurosis. In R Fliess (ed.), The Psycho-AnalyticReader. Madison and Connecticut: International University Press. Freud S (1896) The aetiology of hysteria SE3. Freud S (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4-5. Freud S (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. SE 6. Freud S (1905a) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. SE 8. Freud S (1905b) Three Essays on Sexuality. SE 7. Freud S (1906[ 19051) My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of Neuroses. SE 7. Freud S (1908) Character and Anal Eroticism. SE 9. Freud, S (1911) Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. SE 12. Freud S (1913) The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis. SE 12. Freud S (1915) A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease. SE 14. Freud S (1917a) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14. Freud S (1917b) On Transformationsof Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism. SE 17. Freud S (1918) From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. SE 17. Freud S (1919) ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. SE 17. Freud S (1923) The Ego and the Id. SE 19. Freud S (1924) The Economic Problem of Masochism. SE 19. Freud S (1933) New Introductory Lectures. SE 22. Freud S (1937) Analysis Terminable and Interminable. SE 23. Gardiner MM (1964) The Wolf Man grows older. J. h e r . Psychoanal.Assn. 12: 80-92. Gardiner MM (ed.) (1971) The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. NewYork: Basic Books. Gardiner MM (1983) The Wolf Man’s last years. J. h e r . Psychoanal.Assn. 31: 867-97. Gardiner MM (ed.) (1989) The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud. London: Karnac. Gay P (1988) Freud: A Life of Our Time. London and Melbourne:J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Green A (1986) Passion and their vicissitudes. In On Private Madness. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Isaacs S (1952) On the nature and function of phantasy. In M Klein, P Heimann, S Isaacs et al. (eds), Developments in Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Jones E (1974) Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. London: Hogarth Press. Laplanche J, Pontalis J-B (1985) Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantase. Paris: Hachette. Laplanche J, Pontalis J.-B (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis (1973). Obholzer K (1982) The Wolf Man, 60 Years Later. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Perron R (2001) The unconscious and primal phantasies. Int. J. Psychoanal. 82: 583. Sandler J, Nagera H (1963) Aspects of the metapsychology of phantasy. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 16: 159-94. Spillius EB (2001) Freud and Klein on the concept of phantasy. Int. J. Psychoanal. 82(2). Thoma H and Cheshire, N (1991) Freud’s Nachtraglichkeit and Strachey’s Deferred Action Int. R. Psycho-Anal, 18: 407-427.

13 Clinical and metapsychological reflections on ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’ CATHERINE CHABERT ‘A Child Is Being Beaten: a contribution to the genesis of sexual perversion’ appeared in 1919,at a period of transition of the two great movements of the Freudian oeuvre: the text’s intention, though implicit, was to consider the fantasy A child is being beaten as one of the seduction fantasy’smost vivid translations, and in addition describe the paradigmatic developments involved in the fabrication of this fantasy as a psychical product and a product of analysis; at the same time, it featured the ‘infantile’ representations of masochism, announcing upheavals to come before the publication of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), thus anticipating the scandalous Iiaison between love and punishment, excitation and pain. If I turn to this fantasy once again, certainly it is because, first, it unfolds in a movement that is intrinsic to the cure and transference, but especially because its different phases show psychical productions of differing status, making it possible to discard a general conception of fantasies, massive and too compact. This dialectic, identifiable in the course of analysis and in this situation only, attests to the possibility for the patient of appropriating an exciting psychical event inside the analytical scene by constructing a phantasy whose content excludes the analyst, apparently: only apparently, for the phantasy is addressed to him, seeks to seduce him and no other, even if the desire is, then and there, repressed. The passage from faint and indifferent memory to a first scene, a banal one, seen merely from anonymous indifference (A child is being beaten), to the creation of the second scene, precise and exciting (I [a giri] am beaten by my father), where the phantasy’s author occupies the place of the beaten child and becomes its protagonist, hinges on an essential moment: the patient constructs and shapes, actively, in representations, what she believed she experienced passively. There’s no question there of recalling something, even less of acting out in a ‘mutative’sense, but of a change of position that unleashes the desire that was hidden until now: the enunciation He beats 224

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me, loves me, beats me unearths, from beneath the phantasy’s manifest content, an essential conviction: He loves only me! Even so, for this change to have any power, the seductive action, the one that previously engendered the child’sexcitation and that today is repeated in the analysis, should first be recognized as coming from the other, as a reaction to him: the passive position makes it possible for the patient to accept the effects of the analysis, the effect of the analyst in him (her). Assuming the passive role in the second phase of A child is being beaten, the one enunciating its feminine version I [a girl] am beaten by my father, could attest to this appropriation through representation and to its consoling function: she condenses the father’s love and his being forbidden, she brings together the desire to seduce and the punishment accomplishing this desire calls forth; in other words, she announces the compromise that makes it possible for the ego, thanks to the construction of the phantasy, to satisfy the demands of the id and those of the superego, equally active. In this view, we can comprehend and understand the emergence, development and resolution of the phantasy as the voice of a fundamental movement of the analysis, as a way of opening up positions of identification in movement: changing places in the phantasy’s scenario reflects the change in position internally. It represents a formidable hope which makes it possible to accept the paradox or contradiction between the passivity imposed by excitation and the representation activity imparting order to the treatment - that is, in the analysis, the recognition of the desires and their instinctual source on one hand, and on the other the work analysis requires as a matter of course.

* * * Do we need to present clinical proof to support Freud’saffirmation regarding the frequency of the phantasy A child is being beaten not only in neurotics but even in individuals who do not feel constrained to engage in analysis? Must we also return to this text to grasp the multiplicity of pathways it traces and follow, more particularly, the phantasy’s genesis and dialectic? Beyond the content and the fascination of the images it evokes, beyond this article’s immense interest for the analysis of sexuality, what a new reading unveils in a quasi-brutal way concerns the plot of the discourse in its relation to repression and its different translation in the cure. A concomitant issue of psychopathology, though not central here, is: what did Freud mean when speaking of ‘perversion’?Don’t we find there a coincidence of that affect (whose negation would be neurosis) and the modes of psychic functioning assembled today as ‘new’ indications of psychoanalysis, those chiefly characterized by disturbances of the inner being and that question the notion of psychical reality by enlarging its limits? The emergence of the phantasy A child is being beaten does not occur in all analyses. It surfaces at certain moments, in certain cures and under certain forms that do not always correspond to those described by Freud. However,

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these variations in clinical expression, thanks to the figurative charge of the representations of childhood sexuality and its avatars, shed light on the dialectic of the transference that dramatizes and reworks them. In the analysis of fantasies Freud developed, a movement is at work, a powerful movement that disturbs the components. The successive places occupied by the author of the phantasy - an analysand, let us not forget betoken the importance of the displacement from one role to another and of a mobility in identification that leads us to see this as a key place, where the analytical enterprise is at stake: the change in point of view is one of its major hopes; and the change reveals a modification, sometimes even a transformation, of psychical materials. In this sense, we discover in Freud’stext an astonishing trajectory, evident from the first reading in the descriptions of the variations in the phantasy’s manifest content. Freud is formal, the phantasies of punishment, but perhaps all fantasies, have a prehistory and a development: their inaugural formulation in the cure is more ‘terminal result than initial manifestation’ (1919, p. 224). The analysis confirms the evolutionary character of phantasy because its unfolding through time is complex and its different aspects will nearly always all be transformed in ‘their relation to the phantasy’s author, their object, and their meaning’ (ibid., p. 224). We might ask what in the end does not move in this staging. The first phase, the oldest and apparently the faintest, draws its sources from historical memory, by making the memory live again. Thefather beats the child is the translation of this, and Freud wonders if it is really the case of a phantasy or only a preliminary of an ulterior phantasy. Being anchored in a perceptible reality, in an effective experience, remains in fact one of the main characteristics of this version, drawn from the reserves of childhood and embodied in the position of the phantasy’s author in the scene I look. The latent content revealed later makes it possible for a drama of passion to appear, in contrast to the hesitant detachment of the beginning, undoubtedly nourished by the force of the resistances. Hatred, jealousy of the younger sibling mask the belief in the father’slove: if the father beats this child that I hate, it is because he does not love her (him), He loves on@ me (ibid., p. 227). He loves only me ... What excitement, what a feat, what pleasure! Thus, the originating content of the phantasy is inhabited by incestuous loves: it upholds the conviction of being the father’spet, and the secret enjoyment of having seduced him. The quality of the phantasy in this first phase has a double component: the first one is conscious, inscribed in an ‘objective’material reality; the second is unconscious, finding its pathway to resolution in the hallucinatory fulfilment of desire; both are embedded in the parental complex. The heart of the phantasy My father loves only me becomes a travesty, as much in the representation’s manifest content as in the affect of displeasure that accompanies it, thanks to the reversal into its opposite.


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The second phase, I / a gfrl] am beaten by my father, is contingent on a different psychic state; this phase is not a memory, not the result of recalling anything; it is and remains unconscious, as Freud firmly and repeatedly insisted. Here the phase is a construction of analysis produced from repression: this is probably what confers on it its extreme importance and explains the heaviness of its consequences. This second phase is necessary and its passage through the cure inevitable. A product of the analysis, a product of transference, it occupies, with regard to the originating fantasies, a particular place at the crossroads of the subjective and the objective, entirely caught up in the tension between the inner world and its search for pleasure and the outer world and its reality constraint.This double pressure underlines the commitment of the phantasy that makes it possible to satisfy the desire for the father through regression and at the same time makes punishment for this transgression a sure thing: He beats me, loves me, beats me. For we must of course bear in mind the high degree of pleasure colouring the production of the phantasy. The turn back into displeasure will be erased by the change of place of the phantasy’s author and will reveal the masochistic fundament made of the association of a pain and a pleasure. Notwithstanding,a remnant remains hidden, remitting to genital sexual desire disguised by the anal envelope of the scenario. Thus, the repressive action remains incessant, and lifting a repression unfailingly will be accompanied by the repression of other representations. What is the effect of the analysis on this second phase of the phantasy? Aren’t the really important transformations the phantasy undergoes the effect of transference movements? Once past the first period of the analysis that silently draws strength from the analysand’s certainty of having seduced the analyst, because he too has become involved in the cure; after the amorous elation of the beginning, leaning entirely on repression or lifting repression, inevitably comes deception, revealed by discovering the sexual nature of the desire, and its impossible fulfilment. This ‘frrst flowering of incestuous love’ is spoiled by frost ... At this point the analysand can appeal only to producing the phantasy with its part of pleasure, even illusory pleasure, contributed by its hallucinatory fulfilment - pleasure made real by enunciating the phantasy, putting it into words addressed to the analyst. Finally, the third phase (the one appearing first in the analysis) resembles the first because, like it, it is conscious and because in it the author of the phantasy again occupies the place of spectator. However, two notable elements differentiate it, The partners have changed; the beaten chiid of the first phase has been replaced by a multitude of unknown children, and the father (the beater) by a more distant substitute.The scene of the third phase has become anonymous, general and impersonal. The second difference is undoubtedly connected to this transformation: the phantasy now carries a strong excitation, ‘sexual beyond any doubt’, because it leads to a clearly erotic satisfaction. Now this confirms with remarkable evidence the

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importance of the relation to pleasure in the dialectic of the phantasy. The changes do not only concern the representative/representation of the drive, but also its affecthepresentative. Thus, the central issue of the relations between affects and representations is also treated in Freud’s text. An enigma, hard to resolve, subsists: ‘By what route,’ Freud continued, ‘has the presently sadistic phantasy where strange and unknown boys are beaten become the durable possession of the little girl’s libidinal aspiration?’(ibid., p. 226). The phantasy A child is being beaten is wholly inscribed in psychosexual organization,in the Oedipus complex, and in the network of representations arising from the weave of the originating fantasies that attempt to treat it. Let us consider it as one of the primordial translations of the seduction phantasy inlaid in the primal scene phantasy, for it presents the full set of characteristics of originating fantasies: visual, even panoramic, support, essential for giving them a form, and the passive position assigned to the subject both in the primal scene and castration. In its hysterical version, the seduction phantasy would exacerbate even further the passivity of the child submitted to the adult’s desire; we know how the evolution of Freudian thought followed the movement of this: the event he (she) suffers, and that constitutes the determinant trauma in the neurotic disturbance’s aetiology, entraps an innocent child in the sexuality of the other - the perverse adult, the father, the stranger bearing evil, the analyst in the cure. This figure furnishes the active seductive function while the subject maintains his (her) passive position as a victim. Then, thanks to a notorious compromise, in afterwardness, the sexual element will take over the seduction scene: the fiction that captures the event now hinges on a representation activity that protects and maintains the version of an assault by the other. Whatever the nature of the event - Freud believed it to be materially real until 1897,then viewed it as psychical reality - the subject, even when he (she) becomes the author of the phantasy, remains passive in the face of the foreign intrusion. The phantasy A child is being beaten follows the same trajectory and obeys the same rules. The author of the phantasy keeps to a passive position in all phases: no seductive provocation but an incoming flux of excitation equally in the vengeful jealousy of the frrst phase, in the equivalence of being beatemeing loved of the second and in the contemplation of the spectacle of unknown children given over to corporal cruelties of the third. One might think that the phantasy comes to life in the process of analysis, that it unfolds as the transference is enacted: certainly it offers itself as the voice of sadomasochism and borrows its plural forms, certainly it betrays stark excitation and intense anxiety to match the enjoyment that sustains it. But especially, its occurrence opens up the possibility of appropriating the event inside the analytic scene by means of a construction that excludes the analyst at the manifest level while including him in its address, and this


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thanks to repression: to conjure up the scene of the second phase implies in fact discarding, here and now, the desire to seduce the analyst inside a paradoxical situation that provokes the excitation and contains it, lifts the repression and creates it. If what is essentially at stake in the seduction theory is establishing an intrinsic relation between sexuality and repression, the latter inevitablyposes the question of interiorizing the object. Whether referring to real fact or traumatic fiction, the seduction scene alwuys, anyway, implies the presence of the other, his suggestive excitation that situates it outside of the subject, even in opposition to the ego and the drives of self-preservation.Aren’t these the components we find in the analytic scene? The sexuality is inscribed in otherness and in the same movement its independent existence and the strangeness of the unconscious are imprinted. For that to happen, we must admit that the action at the origin of the excitation and the disturbance should come from the other. This situation places the subject in a position of re-action, if the effect of the other on him is recognized, that is, if a passive modification by this stranger is admitted, the indispensable prelude to accepting the internal excitation and finding the means to treat it. The same situation that aggravates a fundamental passivity also makes it possible to integrate and work it through. If the real fracture is substituted by a fiction, if the material reality of the memory is transformed into psychic reality, the double positivehegative valence continues to be mobilized: the subject is passive in the content of the scene, he (she) is active in the construction of the representation.We find there the elements developed by Freud (1920) in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, from the observation of the child with the reel. Through the creation of the scene, the analysand enters into a movement of appropriation of the phantasy and subjectively oriented interiorization. This passage is inherent in the analytic process; it is translated by the leap from repetition compulsion to representation compulsion, as proposed by J Rolland (1998). This passage, assured by recognizing the passive role in the scene and what it implies in terms of excitations and affects, makes it possible to construct the phantasy and provides it with its consoling force. In other words, actively taking possession - through language - of the representation requires that the excitation should be experienced passively. In this light, we can understand the phantasy A child is being beaten, the way it emerges, unfolds and is resolved as the emblem of a crucial moment of analysis, with rich possibilities of identification admitting the paradox of and contradiction between passivity and activity, excitation and representation: thus in the cure the possibility of accepting the excitation provoked by the other determines setting in motion the work necessarily required by the arousal of the drive.

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What happens when the classical unfolding of the phantasy does not occur and instead a very different sequence is substituted, creating an upheaval in our previous reference points? I would like to refer to the evocation, from the beginning of certain analyses, of scenes organized according to the principles of the second phase described by Freud, but that no longer manifest the character of the psychical status previously assigned to them. They have not been repressed, they are not unconscious, they can hardly be considered as a product of the analysis. They come on as real situations, as conscious obsessions or even, more gravely, as instances of more or less compulsive acting-out. Any apparent failure to repress these productions could signal the perverse connotation not only of the phantasy - it is perverse by definition, anyway - but of psychical functioning itself. But this hypothesis is hard to defend, in light of the massive nature of the guilt feelings associated with the evocation of these scenes, even if their tone of shame gives them a strong inflection of narcissism. Because the analysand (in my experience more likely to be a female) does not fail to accuse herself of the worst of crimes: it is she who gets herself beaten, she the incestuous daughter who provokes the father’s going beyond the limit, she who pushes him to these excesses. Certainly the father (or his substitute) conserves his function of beater, but even so he is not active; he is excited by his daughter. Because she recognizes and lays claim to this misdeed, the sacrifice and compulsive conduct that express it open the way to the expiation of masochistic sexuality and its triumphs. Evidently, sequences like these condense with striking acuity the phantasy A child is being beaten, and the seduction scene. In this context, the hysterical version, protected from repression, is replaced by a version I call ‘melancholic’ (Chabert, 1999) that inverts the respective positions of the two partners: it is not the other, the stranger, the father who seduces me; it is I who provoke, excite and conquer him. Erotogenic masochism and feminine masochism, massively present in the phantasy’s second phase, a classical one, seemingly disappear in this melancholic version, with gains for moral masochism and the narcissistic bogging down of the aims of the drives. The relation between moral masochism and sexuality is loosened, Freud wrote in 1924. Whereas in erotogenic masochism and feminine masochism, the suffering implicates the loved one, this condition is not fulfilled in moral masochism because there it is suffering itself that matters: ‘whether inflicted by a loved person or an indifferent one, that plays no role’ (Freud, 1924, p. 293). The arrival in the real of the scene Z la girl] am beaten by my father bespeaks the incestuous force of the transference and the punishment it engenders. It is proof that the analysand is in the terrain of moral masochism and melancholy, which as we know sometimes retains in its abysses ‘perverse’scenarios that try to turn away the affects of desolation. More than elsewhere, in these singular versions we find, side by side, a rush into


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transference - intense, exciting, nearly maniacal - and a flight into quick healing, effaced by a tragic, desperate relapse from the analysis’s initial effects. And there a major reversal occurs: the disappointment does not carry with it hatred for the analyst, not even reproach for what could be experienced as betrayal or misunderstanding; no, we see the hatred being turned back against the analysand herself, mired deeply in self-accusationand mortification. The form of the phantasy of the beaten child I have just evoked then appears as the effect of transference marked by moral masochism: we are aware of the effects of this in the negative therapeutic reaction and its possible impasses. Moral conscience still plays a central role here because, remarkably, the guilt that transformed the sadism of the first phase into masochism in the second is repressed in the classical organization of the phantasy; but in the form borrowed by moral masochism, the morality is conscious even if the superego, now the ego’s executioner, plunges its roots down into the id. We must return to Freud in an attempt to approach this essential difference, even if his train of thought is not easy to follow. In a natural course, he said, consciousness and morality flow from the Oedipus complex, from its displacement and de-sexualizing. In moral masochism, to the contrary, ‘morality has been re-sexualized, the Oedipus complex resuscitated, an aggressive path facilitated from morality to the Oedipus complex’ (ibid., p. 296). Part of moral conscience has been lost, with a gain for masochism, and sin is sought out as a means of obtaining punishment. This theoretical construction fits the clinical material I am dealing with astonishingly well: a defect in repressing oedipal sexuality, an extravagant sexualizing of morality, a narcissistic slide of the whole coinciding with unexpectedly taking up the problem again, re-editing the phantasy of the beaten child. If moral masochism is dangerous, Freud continued, it is because it draws its sap from the death drive, ‘it corresponds to the part of this drive that has avoided being turned outward in the form of destruction. But because it has, on the other hand, the meaning of an erotic component, even the person’s self-destructioncannot ensue without libidinal satisfaction’ (ibid., p. 297, emphasis in the original). Here again we find the prevalent idea according to which, even if the relation is reinserted into a narcissistic system, whenever suffering is sought for its own sake, when the hatred for an object is brought to bear on the subject herself (himself), demeaning and tormenting her, the benefit of a sadistic satisfaction is conserved. The libidinal part apparently extracted from moral masochism continues to live in self-punishment:this makes it possible to carry through the revenge on the originating objects; and the state of illness offers itself as an intermediary to get to the beings one holds dearest. Even so, I wonder today if this sacrificialadvance is not seeking, at the end of the day, protection for the other, if it does not interpose itself as a shield to

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fend off murderous and destructive movements. It would be a case of a form of masochism or melancholia where the libidinal valence, despite the narcissistic turning back of the hatred against the ego, would conserve a function of safeguarding the other, in girls possibly the mother, strangely absent from the phantasy A child is being beaten; and in boys, merely assigned the role of a shield. By this I mean that the form of masochistic phantasy would find ‘as benefits’, both having avoided the attack against the mother thanks to turning back the hatred against oneself and by the same token having preserved her from the projection of any sadistic representation. In this sense, the negative, intrusive or persecuting maternal figure would be distanced from the scene: it is the father who occupies this place, made tolerable because of the erotic libidinal cathexis of which he is the object. One can thus understand how the instinctual movements are turned away from the maternal figure, denied even: there will be n o aggressive or destructive attack directed against her (it is the girl who is the victim) or coming from her (it is the father who beats); nor will there be any homosexual menace. It is a ‘purified’ maternal image, apparently cleansed of any instinctual representation, that appears at that point. In anorexia, for example, we could interpret the asceticism of certain adolescent girls as depending on a narcissistic identification with this figure of intransigent purity. The repressed representation (of the mother) forges the socket into which the phantasy’s most elaborate version fits, the one including behaviour and visible repetition compulsion. The compulsive scenes would then be primed to furnish the material for the figuration of the phantasy. If the girl offers her guilt, the result of seducing the father, as a privileged target for the accusation of the transgression and punishment to which she is exposed, if the accused girl herself takes in hand the task of making such punishment certain, there can be no doubt that she also has her mother in her sights in these self-destructiveacts; yet the mother is preserved anyway because she is exempted from the misdeed and because the motive for accusing her is repressed. What masks the idealization, what remains untouchable, is the image of a mother above suspicion, perfect because the sexual never reaches her. Here again a repression takes up the relay of another one: in the ‘unbaked’ versions of the phantasy A child is being beaten, the seduction scene arises in its fascinating and terrifying incestuous valence, but the representation that takes hold there displaces another one, that of a mother also entangled in the net of sexuality. As long as it is stated for the analyst and finds sanctuary in transference, the phantasy A child is being beaten, whatever its modes of translation, seems to affirm the perennial character of libidinal liaisons. Even in its most reworked forms, it makes it possible to conserve the figure of a mother who survives the violence of the attacks thanks to the drive-based resources she

Clinical and rnetapsychological reflections on ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’

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solicits and mobilizes in transference. This potential, carried by the current of the analysis, is present in the scenario of the phantasy of A child is being beaten by means of the displacement of the charge of the drive onto the father. As long as words can fully encompass this phantasy, it participates in psychical vitality, in the conflictive intensity inhabiting it, in the figurative dynamic that nourishes the representation activity. The passage to the act can be grasped when putting it into words, as required by analysis, in the hope of making sense of it: language can harbour its perception and give it its dimension of waiting. This means that Freud was right when declaring that if language conserves the term of masochism in its moral form, even if the relation to eroticism appears to have been abandoned, ‘it should make some sense’ (1924, p. 296). For this sense, the phantasyA child is being beaten acts as a safe-keeper: does it not keep intact, in all its phases, under all its forms, a common kernel, unmoveable, that can only by stated after creative guesswork or construction as ‘I am loved by ...’? This chapter was translated by Peter Shaio. Notes 1. The gist of this text was published as ‘Lessurprises du masochisme moral’, Libres cahiers pour la psychanalyse,no. 1 ‘L‘espritde survie’, pp. 107-18. 2000: Paris.

References Chabert C (1999) Les voies interieures, Revue frangaisede psychanalyse 63(5), numCro special congrks (59kme Congrks des psychanalystes de langue frangaise), Enjeux de la passivitt, 1445-88. Freud S (1919) Un enfant est battu. Contribution h la connaissance de la genkse des perversions sexuelles. In Nevrose, psychose et perversion. Paris: PUF, 1981, pp. 219-49. Freud S (1920) Au-delh du principe de plaisir. In Essais de psychanalyse. Paris: Payot, 1981, pp. 41-117. Freud S (1924) Le probleme Cconomiquedu masochisme. In Nevrose, psychose et perversion. Paris: PUF, 1981, pp. 287-97. RollandJC (1998) Compulsion de rkpetition, compulsion de representation. In GuCrir du mal d’aimer.Paris: Gallimard, pp. 201-59.

14 ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality’ SUSAN BUDD Freud published this paper, his last case history, in 1920. As the title makes clear, it is a brief analysis of how a woman - or rather, an eighteen-year-old girl - came to be homosexual. It is not an account of a treatment - Freud maintained that treatment would have been unsuccessful, and he broke it off after a few weeks. The paper was taken up as part of a contemporary debate on the nature of sexuality in women, but the issues it raised about female homosexuality were not specifically discussed. It was then largely ignored until the 1990s, when feminists, lesbians, and the attitude of psychoanalysts to them, drew more attention to the subject. (See Perelberg, 2005, and in Raphael-Leff and Perelberg, 1997 for a summary of the psychoanalytic debate on femininity.) But it has never had a particularly sympathetic reception; the issues which it addresses are complex and contentious, and the paper is written with a kind of elegant didacticism which begs as many questions as it answers. (It is characteristic of this paper that some of Freud’s most interesting observations are contained in asides and footnotes.) The rich human interest of his other case histories is largely lacking here. Why is this? The case history is being used for a specific purpose, to reflect on the genesis of female homosexuality.As all commentators concur, female sexuality has attracted far less interest than that of men, and lesbianism less anxiety, and therefore less attention, than homosexuality. There is no equivalent of the thorough account by Lewes (1995; though see O’Connor and Ryan, 1993) of changing psychoanalytic views about male homosexuality, and their interaction with wider social attitudes. Freud begins his essay by pointing out that homosexuality is just as common among women as men, but it is not illegal, it is not felt to be socially subversive, it is far less conspicuous, and, although he does not say this, perhaps we wish to avoid thinking about the active sexuality of women. He does, however, as in his other case histories, present us with a remarkably honest account, recognizing the ambiguity and complexity of the situation and his own difficulties with it. His case history is full of unresolved questions; but despite 234

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the predominantly critical analysis of it by later commentators,we still seem unable to agree on the answers. Adrienne Harris (1991) calls ‘gender one of the most contested concepts in contemporary social thought and social life’. So many of the key terms in the paper - inversion/perversion, biology, gender, normal, sexual identity - have become contentious, and so their meanings constantly break down and have to be redefmed.

The beginning Freud started his case history thus: A beautiful and clever girl of eighteen, belonging to a family of good standing, had

aroused displeasure and concern in her parents by the devoted adoration with which she pursued a certain ‘society lady’ who was about ten years older than herself. The parents asserted that, in spite of her distinguished name, this lady was nothing but a cocotte. It was well known, they said, that she lived with a friend, a married woman, and had intimate relations with her, while at the same time she carried on promiscuous affairs with a number of men.

Who is to be the judge of this situation?The girl, her parents, public opinion or Freud? The lady remains enigmatic. The girl never acquires a name; the lady has various aliases, since we see her through various eyes. They exist like characters in Chekhov, part individuals, part emblematic, and so although many recent commentators think their anonymity an insult, to me it seems appropriate to call them ‘the girl’ and ‘the lady’. Their anonymity is used to make a point, at the cost of the rich immediate charm with which Freud’s other cases are suffused.’ We notice, too, Freud’s circumlocutory title: ‘the psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman’. He was never a clumsy writer - why didn’t he just say ‘lesbian’?Freud wished to consider to what extent homosexuality is inborn or acquired, and how far it determines or is determined by other aspects of the personality; and he also wished to question how far ‘homosexuality’is a category. In broad terms, we may see throughout the paper the conflict between the Freud of the ‘Three Essays’ (1905b), who emphasizes that we are all bisexual, and that we all have to achieve adult sexuality through a series of identificationsand introjections, and the later Freud, who was more inclined to write about the psychology of women as if our biological sex does entail a separate developmental destiny. Some commentators cannot understand why Freud laid so much emphasis on the physical appearance of ‘the girl’ at the beginning of the paper; but it is crucial to his argument, and to this I now return.

The formation of sexual choice Freud began by pointing out that it was her parents, and not the girl, who

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wished her to enter treatment. They viewed the relationship with ‘displeasureand concern’;she was neglecting her studies, was deceitful over meeting ‘the lady’, and was careless of her (and their) reputation in allowing herself to be seen in public with such a disreputable demf-mondaine. Things came to a head when her father met them together; he glared at them, and the girl flung herself over a wall down into a railway cutting, injuring her back. This suicidalgesture made the parents more concerned for her welfare, and caused them to bring her to Freud. She consented to analysis only because concern for her parents made her do what they wanted; she did not wish to end the relationship. The father, a stern man, was irrationally horrified by his daughter’sliaison, ‘regardingher either as vicious, as degenerate, or as mentally afflicted’. Her mother was more equivocal; her objection was mainly to her daughter making her infatuation so public. In fact she found her daughter’s homosexual attachment convenient, since she herself wanted to be seen as still young and attractive, and had used her ‘neurotic troubles’ to extract ‘a great deal of consideration from her husband’. In consequence, she treated her three sons indulgently and was ‘decidedly harsh towards her daughter. The parents are still caught up in the Oedipus complex: the mother is seductive towards both her husband and her sons and sees her daughter as a sexual rival, whereas the father, enraged and disappointed by his daughter’s rejection of his sex, first tries to command her obedience and then decides to sort her out by marrying her off. Once having seen how much her attraction to women displeased her father, the girl realized how she could wound him. She enjoyed deceiving him,but he had to know of her attachment in order for her to be revenged. Hence her carelessness, and her father’s disproportionate fury; he sensed that he was being deliberately slighted. Freud then enlarges on why the treatment that the parents wished was doomed. Psychoanalysiscan only be successful when the patient wants help; if someone else wants them changed to order, the results may well be disconcerting. ‘The girl’ was not ill or neurotic, nor did she wish to become heterosexual. Homosexuality cannot be reversed; occasionally we may enable a homosexual to become bisexual. ‘One must remember that normal sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object.’ He pointed out that homosexuals who entered treatment were having to renounce a source of pleasure, either because of its social disadvantages and dangers, or because they did not wish to distress their parents and friends. He told the girl’s parents that he was only prepared to study their daughter for a few weeks, to determine whether or not her homosexuality would be amenable to treatment. Freud then traced the process by which he believed that the girl had become homosexual. She had passed through the Oedipus complex ordinarily, with no memories of sexual trauma or infantile masturbation. At thirteen or fourteen, she had become briefly passionately fond of a little boy,

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of nearly three; but then switched to an erotic interest in older women who were family friends. This change took place when she was sixteen, at the time that her third brother was born. The older women to whom she became attracted were all mothers; she had transferred to them her attraction to her own mother.’ ‘Thelady’,to whom her attention then turned, was a substitute not only for her mother, but her older brother, whom ‘the lady’ resembled; she had transferred both homosexual and heterosexual impulses to her. Why did her mother’s late pregnancy lead to her daughter turning away from her own blossoming maternal capacities toward love for a mothersubstitute?Many girls in similar circumstances would have felt ‘a mixture of compassion,contempt and envy’for their mothers; and this girl’smother was unkind to her, being especially concerned to prevent any intimacy between father and daughter. The girl, with the revival of her libido at puberty, had longed for a male child, who in phantasy would be her father’s.But it was her mother who bore the child; ‘furiouslyresentful and embittered, she turned away from her father and from men altogether’. Freud then draws our attention to the way in which libido oscillates. Disappointment in love for one sex can turn us toward the other; ‘the bachelor gives up his men friends when he marries, and returns to club-life when married life has lost its savour’. So why was this girl’s swing so fundamental and final? In a long footnote, Freud discusses ‘retiring in favour of someone else’; where someone may feel compelled into abandoning a type of erotic attachment, or area of work, because a father or sibling seems to own it. We might now think of it as a kind of projective identification. Freud then shows how his thinking has moved from the instinct to the object-relationsmodel since the ‘Three Essays’. The girl had ‘changedinto a man, and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love’; she has identified with her early love, her father, and now loves women as he does, but narcissistically. Her continuing early love for her mother, her overcompensation for her present hostility towards her, and the effort to win her mother’s love back again by retiring from competing with her for the attentions of men, all eased the transition to homosexuality. Freud shows the complex interconnections between the real, current relationship between the girl and her two parents, and the way in which it has reactivated early potentialities. This is nuchtruglichkeit, which has been rendered rather inadequately into English as ‘deferred action’. A recent event can potentiate changes which are caused by something that happened long ago, which might otherwise have lain dormant. It is this sort of process which means that we have to abandon any simple idea of psychic determinism. Just as in history, all sorts of things might have happened, but chance and underlying unforeseen processes play their part in tipping the balance. Freud points out at the end of the paper, in an extraordinarily prescient passage (Freud, 1920, pp. 167-8), that if we try to explain the outcome by looking for causes, everything appears connected and clear; but if we try to

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predict the progress of a human life, we ‘notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter’. This is because we can see the causes at work but we do not know their relative strengths in a particular case. Another girl might have reacted to the same traumas very differently. Life must be lived forward, but understood backward.

Aspects of love Freud then abandons his linear account to consider some unconscious factors in greater depth. The girl’s passionate but chaste adoration of ‘the lady’,with whom she did not seem to seek sexual satisfaction, Freud saw as characteristically masculine. He refers back to his 1910 paper on ‘A Special ‘Qpe of Choice of Object made by Men’.Some men seem prone to a repeated and hopeless form of love, in which their loved one always seems to have to be attached to someone else, and to be known to be unfaithful and unreliable. They are extraordinarily faithful to their faithless mistresses, and convinced that they can rescue them from themselves. Freud argues that the love really belongs to their mothers, whom they must never possess: the conviction that mother must be chaste conceals the horror and longing that the boy feels when he realizes that she is not, for otherwise how could he and his siblings exist? The rescue phantasy is the child’s reversal of his dependence on his parents. In exactly the same way, ‘the girl’ had fallen in love with a series of profligate women who were not homosexual; in fact, she had spurned the advances of a homosexual girlfriend. She fantasied that she could rescue ‘the lady’ from her degraded life, but it was her mother whom she wished to possess. The girl’s attempted suicide had improved her position with both her parents and the lady. But there were further unconscious motives for her action. She had ‘fallen’;in German, as in English, the word means both to fall and to have a child (Fuss, 1995). She had wished for her father’s child; her lover’s prohibition led to her symbolically enacting her wish. And she was punishing herself; and in doing so punishing both her parents. Freud remarked that the girl’s relationship to her father was crucial; her defiance and desire for revenge held her to her homosexuality. He goes straight on to his irritation at her bland intellectual compliance with and resistance to her analyst-father. Once when I expounded to her a specially important part of the theory, one touching her nearly, she replied in an inimitable tone, ‘How very interesting’,as though she were a grunde dame being taken over a museum and glancing through her lorgnon at oDjects to which she was completely indifferent. (Freud, 1920, p. 163)’

He described how such obsessional patients can insulate themselves against psychoanalysis:

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‘It would all be very fine’, thinks the patient, often quite consciously, ‘ifI were obliged to believe what the man says, but there is no question of that, and so long as this is so I need change nothing.’ [She had] transferred to me the sweeping repudiation of men which had dominated her ever since the disappointment she had suffered from her father. Bitterness against men is [...Ieasy to gratify upon the physician [...I it simply expresses itself by rendering futile all his endeavours and by clinging to the illness. [So he] broke off the treatment, and advised her parents that if they set store by the therapeutic procedure it should be continued by a woman doctor.

Meanwhile, the girl had promised that she would give up seeing ‘the lady’, and here Freud ends their story. Subsequent commentators disagree over Freud’s motives and arguments for breaking off the analysis. Some point to his open-mindedness;he thought that the girl’s own disposition and wishes should be respected, and that psychoanalysis could not and should not be used to make her conform. Others think that he was identified with the father, unaware of his countertransference, wounded by the girl, and should have continued treatment. They argue that the girl might well have been ultimately heterosexual: she was still an adolescent; she did not seem to be seeking sexual satisfaction with the lady; and, early in the treatment, she had reported a series of dreams which showed her hopes that it could cure her, and allow her to marry and have children. Freud had considered these dreams hypocritical, as she was talking in her sessions about her contempt for a future husband, and her intention of using him as a cover to enable her to pursue homosexual liaisons. He charged her with lying to him as she lied to her father, because she wanted to both please him and deceive him, and the recent biography confirms that he was right. He then contradicts himself, by pointing out the inconsistency and inscrutability of human erotic life. He draws a parallel with men who embark on casual affairs, only to realize later their passionate and enduring love for those they lightly discarded; and the unexpected consequences of some abortions, apparently easily entered upon. Freud reminds us that it takes some time for everyone to become predominantly heterosexual or homosexual. ‘Homosexual enthusiasms, exaggeratedly strong friendships tinged with sensuality,are common enough in both sexes during the first years after puberty.’ The girl’s conscious attachments had for a long time been directed towards women, probably as a continuing infantile fixation on her mother. The analysis had shown the process by which the deeper heterosexual libido had also been deflected into a homosexual channel. The girl had always been a tomboy, ‘alwaysready for romping and fighting’. The sight of her brother’s genitals had led to marked penis envy; ‘shewas in fact a feminist; she felt it to be unjust that girls should not enjoy the same freedom as boys, and rebelled against the lot of women in general’. In particular, she seemed horrified by the idea of pregnancy and childbirth, and the ‘bodilydisfigurement’they entailed.

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Were these reactions due to the girl’sinborn constitution, or the events of her early life? They are too intertwined for us to separate out what is inherited and what is acquired. Freud thought that there is not a simple distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals. We have to discriminate between each person’s choice of object, their sexual characteristics,and sexual attitudes (we would now call this gender identity). The three vary independently; ‘a masculine man, masculine in his erotic life, may nonetheless love only men’; a feminine man, who loves like a woman, may be wholly heterosexual. Similarly for women; physical sexual characteristics, masculinity or femininity, and type of object choice vary independently. All normal people, in addition to their manifest heterosexuality, contain ‘a very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality’.Human sexual differentiation is multi-factorial;there is not a separate homosexual ‘third sex’. Freud then embarks on a series of caveats. Psychoanalysis cannot explain homosexuality; it can only trace the psychical processes which lead instinctual dispositions towards a particular choice. Biology can affect the psyche but not vice versa; sex-change operations could alter the psyche, but hermaphroditic women were not likely to accept them, since they would not only have to relinquish sexual pleasure, but also be made infertile.* Psychoanalysis cannot investigate what is ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’:the terms merely become synonyms for ‘active’ and ‘passive’.His argument is becoming increasingly fragmented; and at this point he ends both it and the paper.

Freud’s thinking before and after the Psychogenesis paper Before I describe the effect of the paper, I shall look at its main precursor, the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’(1905b; but revised until after the date of the Psychogenesis paper) and draw some parallels with Freud’s treatment of Dora (1905a). In the ‘Three Essays’, Freud made a distinction between perversion and inversion. Inversion (i.e. same-sex object choice) only differed from heterosexuality in that the sexual instincts have a different object. Perversion is a situation where the sexual instinct is arrested, and is aimed not at a whole adult person, but on a component part of sexuality, as in fetishism, voyeurism, fellatio, etc., where it becomes fixed, taking the part for the whole. The child is, in his famous phrase, ‘polymorphously perverse’;but as it matures, the erogenous zones and sexual instincts which belong to various stages of development become subordinated to genital sexuality. He pointed out that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, may be absolute and fured; or the person may be bisexual; or the homosexuality may be contingent, i.e. due solely to the absence of the opposite sex. In the same way, inversion may date


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from infancy or later, and it may change during life - homosexuality is common in adolescence - or arise in later life. Most perversions can coexist with both homosexuality and heterosexuality, or may replace them entirely. The importance of these remarks was forgotten during the middle and latter part of the twentieth century, when many psychoanalysts did tend to see homosexuality as both pathological and a unitary condition - ‘The homosexual’. Freud was addressing a previous hardening of attitude which had occurred in the late nineteenth century, connected to the advance of psychiatry and of the classificatory systems of mental illness. Before this sexual choice and identity were seen as relatively fluid and unimportant; but as human sexuality became seen as more important, the ‘homosexual’was reifed and seen as defdng a person, rather than a relationship. (The term ‘homosexual’ was first used in 1869 (Lewes, 1995).) In particular, homosexuality became part of the wider cultural anxiety about ‘degeneration’,the weakening of the racial stock (Pick, 1989). Freud was very opposed to seeing homosexuality as degenerate; it was the medical fashion, he said, ‘to regard any symptom which is not obviously due to trauma or infection as a sign of degeneracy’. Freud was wrestling here with the important question as to how far sexuality exists outside culture, and how far our conceptions of sexuality are socially constructed. He was a Darwinian, and therefore had to tackle the question of why, unless it was an aberration, homosexuality existed at all. One of his answers (1922) was that it reduced rivalry between men and so made society possible; ‘socialfeeling is a sublimation of homosexual attitudes towards objects’. However, even in the ‘Three Essays’ it is apparent that female homosexuals are regarded with less enthusiasm than their male counterparts. Many scholars working in this field, at a time when classical culture was widely admired, believed that Greek culture tolerated, even extolled, the virtues of love between men - but not between women. Freud always acknowledged,and was later to write about, many outstanding male creative artists who were homosexual, and stressed that male homosexuality was common and accepted in classical antiquity. But what was sauce for the gander doesn’t seem to have been sauce for the goose. Whereas male homosexuals are not necessarily ‘feminine’, inverted women ‘exhibit masculine characteristics, both physical and mental, with peculiar frequency, and look for femininity in their sexual objects’ (Freud, 1905b, p. 145). It is for this reason that his descriptions in the Psychogenesis paper of the girl’s appearance are so important for his argument; and he is fair-minded enough not to assume that her active intelligence made her masculine. The parallels between the Dora (l905a) and the Psychogenesis (1920) cases are marked. Both girls had attempted suicide, which had forced their dominant fathers to insist they go into treatment and to try to force them into heterosexual attachments; both were neglected by their mothers; and both

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resented their mothers’ preferences for their brother@), whose part in their story is probably major but is not examined. In both cases, Freud focuses on the relationship to the father rather than to the mother, although in the girl’s case, it was partly because she wouldn’t say much about it. In both cases, the treatment was unsuccessful and was broken off. He felt that he had underestimated Dora’s homosexual furation on Frau K.; maybe this time he went too far in the other direction. He clearly found feminists irritating; yet he could see that convention limited women’s lives, and generated hysteria. Many of the recent feminist commentators have considered that Freud disliked ‘the girl’;5I think that he liked and respected at least some of her aspects; her active intelligence,her directness and her lack of hysteria. Freud found women in general to be less open about their sexuality. In his treatment of both Dora and the girl, it is their resistance and secretiveness that he finds the most irritating, combined with what he feels as their snobbery. ‘The girl’ behaves like a grande dume; Dora dismissed him ‘like a servant’. His vulnerability is evident in both case histories; the low standing of analysis, his lack of money, the parents who only call him in because they are desperate (Fuss, 1995). It is understandable that he should have felt angry with them, but perhaps his counter-transference led him into first, a frustratedfuror therupeutfcuswith Dora, followed by a refusal to treat her when she tried to reenter treatment; and into a summary dismissal of ‘the girl’,possibly to a woman analyst. (Around this time he was psychoanalysing his daughter Anna; but decided to hand her on to the ‘exquisitelyfeminine’ Lou Andreas-Salome;Orgel (1996)) Later he admitted that he was uneasy with the maternal transference, and this may have led him to think that only a woman could analyse ‘the girl’.

Biology and destiny The aspect of Freud’s theories which was to most exercise feminists, both in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1970s, was penis envy. In the Psychogenesis paper, however, it is mentioned only once; anatomical sex is much less important than the various identifkations of the little girl. Mary Jacobus (1995) points out the confusion and slippage in the paper between identification and object-choice. Freud speaks at times as if identrfying with her father was what had carried the girl into his masculine love of women; at other times, her early attachment to her mother is presented as the natural objectchoice of both sexes, which the girl never outgrew. Since the ’Narcissism’paper of 1914, however, Freud had believed that the capacity to fall in love rests either on an attraction to the different, based on our identification with the same-sex parent, or a desire to love someone who is the same as us, whom we can love as our mothers once loved us. This paper, which linked homosexual love with narcissism, began a train of thought in which love of a same-sex object was by definition narcissistic. But


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we may question the extent to which the real gender of our early objects is the central part of our relationship to them; the pre-oedipal child may see his parent as a composite of both sexes, and we may find aspects of the same-sex parent in our attraction to someone of the opposite gender, and vice versa. No analyst would dispute that heterosexual love can be narcissistic. The question as to whether a child must have two parents, one of each sex, in order to develop a satisfactory sense of gender identity and heterosexual object-choice,has become hotly debated.

How central is gender? Freud took up the question of anatomy and gender again in 1925. He now saw the psychic development of girls as less similar, less like a mirror-image, to that of boys than he had done, because he is beginning to focus on the early relationship to the mother. Girls, like boys, have their mother as their first object: how then do they perform the more complex task of detaching themselves from her and turning towards men? But by the 1920s, other psychoanalysts had begun either to contest or to extend Freud’s views on the nature of female sexuality. The debate was perhaps the major one in Freud’slifetime where he was able to acknowledge that his colleagues’ arguments had led him to change his mind (Grigg et al., 1999). He was to reduce his insistence on the unique importance of the Oedipus complex, and hence of castration and penis envy, and turn to the very early relationship between the little girl and her mother. I shall outline some aspects of Freud’s thinking as it developed in the early 1930s, in the paper on ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) and the chapter on ‘Femininity’ in the New Introductory Lectures (1933). In ‘Female Sexuality’,Freud states clearly that the sexual development of little girls is different. They have to detach themselves from their first objects, their mothers, and replace them by their fathers, and at the same time, shift their dominant genital zone from the clitoris to the vagina. How are these changes connected?He had come to see that a girl’sstrong attachment to her father had always been preceded by a similarly strong one to her mother; and that ‘we had underestimated not only the intensity but also the duration of this attachment to the mother’: In view of this possibility, the pre-oedipal phase in women acquires a significance which we have hitherto not ascribed to it.

Freud expresses how difficult he found the girl’s primary attachment to her mother to grasp - ‘so dimmed by age, so shadowy’ - because the women whom he had analysed had buried the early attachment to their mothers beneath their transference to him as a father-figure.He did, however, feel that he had seen clinically how the girl’s ‘early dependence on the mother has in

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it the germ from which a woman may later develop paranoia’. The germ is the phantasy of being killed and eaten by the mother. (For reasons of length, I shall omit any discussion of the connections which Freud made between homosexuality and paranoia, but briefly, he believed that it stemmed from an early love for the same-sexparent which is both projected outward and turned from love to hate; so ‘I love him’ becomes ‘He hates me.’ He went on to add, in 1 9 2 2 , that an intense childhood jealousy of older siblings and rivals is repressed and reversed, so that they become the boy’s first loves. In consequence, many homosexuals are highly sociable and community-minded,because they are less rivalrous with other men (Freud, 1922). The connections between homosexuality and paranoia were to become part of the later view that homosexuality was a defence against paranoid and psychotic anxiety. ) Freud then argues that bisexuality, inherent in mankind, is in fact much more true of women than men. Women have a male and a female sexual organ; despite the new evidence that girls have early vaginal sensations, nonetheless, they must transfer between the two. ‘The sexual life of women is divided into two phases, the first of which is masculine in character; only the second phase is specifically feminine.’ We notice that Freud is now prepared at times to use masculinity and femininity as terms which describe ‘natural’ differences, rather than as social constructs. Also, he no longer assumes that desire and identity must be opposed; he describes how, for women, the long period of attachment to the mother may result in them falling in love with men who remind them of their mothers, and repeating in their marriages the struggles that they had with them. Why do women feel such resentment towards their mothers?The strongest resentment is that the mother never gave the girl a penis, forced her to share her love with her siblings, and in addition, did not give her enough milk or nurse her long enough. It doesn’thelp to be the favourite; the child’s ‘demands for love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no sharing’. The very force of the girl’s attachment to her mother results in a swing to antipathy and ambivalence. Little boys can cope with the situation more easily by directing their hostility to their fathers. The girl’s sexual attachment to her mother goes through oral, anal and phallic stages; it is repressed for fear of being killed and eaten by the mother whom she would like to devour. The mother’s own unconscious hostility to her child may make things worse. Finally, the girl blames her mother for her lack of a penis. The unsatisfiable lack may well bring a woman to analysis; she may wish for a baby, for an intellectual career, find refuge in physical vanity, in being loved, in substituting a son for a penis. It is all made more difficult for her by her greater difficulty in sublimating or re-channelling her instincts than men; perhaps it is as well that she has less libido. There is a continuing tension in Freud’s writings between the ‘naturalness’ of the move towards heterosexuality, and the difficulty in reaching it.

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After Freud Part of the gay liberation case has always been that homosexuals are not deficient or inferior, just different. But if homosexuality is seen as arrested development, then inevitably the question becomes: what went wrong and how can it be prevented or put right (Schwartz, 1998)? Melanie Klein, who was to become the dominant influence on British psychoanalysis, and the major force in restoring the importance of the early mother, also saw homosexuals as fixated at the oral-sadistic, paranoidschizoid phase, and far more than Freud, saw heterosexuality and desire as the ‘natural’expression of a given gender. Girls want to possess the father’s penis, to steal it from the mother, and equate it with the mother’s breast, and by equating their mouths with vaginas become receptive to the penis. Girls’ oedipal impulses are therefore far more oral than boys’, and lesbian relationships inevitably more part-object, more dominated by envy and idealization of the penis. To some extent, the debate within psychoanalysis fragmented between national cultures. In general, there was a move away from the distinction between oedipal and pre-oedipal themes, and more attention was focused on the very early, pre-verbal child and its relationship with its mother. For some authors, but only for some, the sexuality of women was explored not only in relation to men but in their relation to motherhood and to children. The question of intrinsic differences between men and women remains a minefield. In Britain, psychoanalysts have increasingly focused on the ungendered baby of the pre-oedipal period, and on the relationship with the mother, who is phantasized to contain a penis. But France, the father continued to be seen as crucially important, because it is he who detaches the child from a symbiotic relationship with its mother, releasing it into language. British psychoanalysts never really regained much interest in specifically female sexuality until the rise of feminism in the 1970s; their focus was on the early, ungendered child and on its fears of aggression and separation. (Raphael-Leff and Perelberg, 1997; Birksted-Breen, 1993 have summarized some of these discussions.) In their discussions of perversion, homosexuality is sometimes listed; for example, Masud and Khan (1989) thought that female homosexuality was based on a perverse relationship between a hypochondriacal and depressed mother and a child who needed to remain attached to the mother’s body. And there is a return to the significance of the Oedipus complex with the argument that the child has to be able to accept the parental couple in creative intercourse. But, as elsewhere, feminism, and the legalization of male homosexuality, influenced psychoanalytic thinking. O’Connor and Ryan (1993) point out that many psychotherapists and analysts are uneasy with the nature of lesbian eroticism, and may have taken refuge in the motherfiaby paradigm in the effort to avoid considering adult desire (and see my argument that this is equally characteristic for

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heterosexuality in British object-relations theory; in Harding, 2001). The changes which have taken place within British psychoanalysis especially, so that there is more emphasis on transference-counter-transference issues, on the interpersonal, on the sense of identity as fractured, unstable and discontinuous, mean that there is now little focus on questions of sexual identity. In the United States, there was more interest in empirical and physiological research into sexual behaviour, and psychoanalytic theory continued to rely more on drive theory and the role of the ego. In the postwar period, it was increasingly assumed that male homosexuality was a unitary clinical entity, and that like schizophrenia, it was either an inborn condition or the product of faulty mothering. The rise of behaviourism led to an increased focus on environmental factors, and less interest in sexuality. Homosexuality became seen as more about power and dependence than sexualityper se. The Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953 had found that bisexuality was much more common than homosexuality for both men and women, that homosexuality was not a unitary condition but a continuum, it could be acquired or inborn, and that women, like men, could find their sexual orientation changing as they aged. The view that sexual orientation is inborn is used to argue that homosexuals are not responsible for their condition, and that it is futile and wrong to try to use psychoanalysis to change it, just as the inborn hypothesis can be used to ‘explain’alcoholism, addictions and various gender disorders. Stoller and his colleagues began to study the sense of being masculine or feminine, and its aberrations among those who felt that they were really of the opposite sex. They tried to clarrfy the discussion. Sexuality should be seen in relation to biological sex; it implied erotic excitement, physiologically based motivations and behaviour, but with psychic consequences, and belonged firmly to the id. A sense of gender identity as masculine or feminine is part of the ego; it implies conceptions of the self, identificationsand so on. The sense of gender identity may not be consistent with biological sex. Stoller produced a new and influential definition of perversion which focused not on object-choice or behaviour but on the phantasies accompanyingthe act - ‘the erotic form of hatred’ - which uncoupled it from sexual orientation and restored it to psychoanalysis. He was the most influential psychoanalyst to argue that homosexuality is not a syndrome or a unitary condition, and should be removed from the DSM classification of psychiatric disorders. This could be more easily done because by the 1980s psychoanalytic theory was less influential within American psychiatry anyway. With the revival of feminist and radical interest in psychoanalysis, the gender debate focused on the conflict between biological essentialism versus social constructivism. American psychoanalysis was changing by the late 1980s because of the influx of feminists and clinical psychologists trained in the


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humanities and the social sciences into the profession, which had been forced to abandon its medical monopoly. Lacan had been translated into English by the 1970s, and literary scholars made much use of his writings, which focused on the shifting, uncertain nature of identity and the way in which we can only understand and interpret the world through language. He took up Freud’s central emphasis on castration, not as a literal anatomical difference, but as the basis of the linguistic construction of gender; it is a metaphor which signifies the separateness of human beings from their object of desire. It refers to the universal, not just female, experience of lack. Lacan was trying to detach psychoanalytic explanations not just from biology but also from the patient’s history; human psychology is constituted by language, and sexual identity is socially constructed. Terms such as masculine and feminine do not refer to ‘real’entities, but to how we come to learn such distinctions through language. However, in some ways Lacan was an unreliable ally. Feminists agreed with his view that psychic identity was elusive, and constructed by language and within culture; there is no such thing as a ‘natural’sexuality. But Lacan remained universalist in that the phallus was always the signifier of difference and sexual desire; gender and sexuality remain aligned. His commentary on the Psychogenesis case stressed the girl’s longing for her father. For him, disappointment is central to female homosexuality. The child becomes a social being through the law of the father, the experience of lack; it is unsatisfied desire which drives us on to the acquisition of language, to seek the consolations of culture. Castration anxiety means that we must move on into the symbolic realm; our primary love-object is irretrievably lost, and with it, the imaginary world. We can never express or articulate our desire outside language; there is no fured truth expressible in literal speech. The modern commentators on the Psychogenesis paper are, of course, very alert to the use of language to structure and limit thought and imply particular conclusions. Mostly, they see homosexuality as an equally valid condition, arguing that, apart from the effect of social pressures, there is no reason why a homosexual relationship should not be just as loving and mature as a heterosexual one. Some believe that homosexuality is relatively fixed, possibly inborn; others, that it is achieved, just as heterosexuality is. Some of their arguments are now widely accepted within psychoanalysis; in many cases, they only reiterate what Freud was saying. That is, we cannot assume that the homosexuals who present for treatment are representative of all homosexuals; if they present with pathology, it may or may not be related to their sexual orientation; the general dislike and fear of homosexuals, and their need to conceal their condition, will have created their own problems. Above all, sexuality is not a ‘seamless, monolithic, unfractured whole’ (Fuss, 1995). All the contributors, both psychoanalysts and literary figures, to a recent volume of essays on the Psychogenesis case (Lesser and Schoenberg, 1999)

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argued the subjectivist, socially constructivist case for gender; all are concerned to argue that homosexuality is neither deviant nor deficit. The only exception is Carolyn Grey (1999), who echoes Freud’s criticism of ad hominem arguments. The knife that cuts both ways is here: if we are to argue that currently acceptable sexual behaviour is to be regarded as normal, what happens when mores shift again? We seem no nearer to solving Freud’s original question: what role does the physical body play in the formation of sexual identity, and to what extent is our experience of our bodies psychically constructed (Raphael-Leff and Perelberg, 1997; Mitchell and Rose, 1982)? Notes

1. Recently, a biography of the girl has been published (Rieder and Voigt, 2000), and the authors have now deposited their material with the Freud Museum in Vienna. The girl’s real name was Margarethe Csonka, and the lady was the Baronin Leonie Puttkamer. 2. Jorge Garcia Silva was one of the few postwar analysts to comment on the Psychogenesis paper before the revival of interest among feminists and Lacanians in the late 1980s. He argued that Freud underestimated the extent to which the girl simply longed for maternal love, and tried to frnd it in a series of women. (Silva, 1975). 3. Quinodoz (1989) thought that her scorn was because she was defending herself against a regression into psychotic fragmentation. 4 . Freud talked about sex-change operations in other writings at this time; he was to undergo a Steinach operation himself three years later when he had a vasectomy, in the hope of arresting his cancer, relieving his tiredness, and restoring his sexual energy. 5 . See, for example, most of the contributors to Lesser and Schoenberg (1999).

References Birksted-Breen D (1993) The Gender Conundrum, London: Routledge. Budd S (2001) No sex please, we’re British: sexuality in English and French psychoanalysis. In Harding C (ed.) Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Hove: BrunnerRou tledge. Freud S (1905a) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. SE 7. Freud S (1905b) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7. Freud S (1910) A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men. SE 11. Freud S (1914) On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE 14,73-104. Freud S (1920) The Psychogenesisof a Case of Female Homosexuality. SE 18. Freud S (1922) Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. SE 18. Freud S (1925) Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes. SE 19.

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Freud S (1931) Female Sexuality. SE 21,223-46. Freud S (1933) New Introductorykctures. SE 22, Ch. 33, 112-35. Fuss D (1995) Identification Papers. London: Routledge, Chapter 2. Grey C (1999) Conduct unbecoming. In RC Lesser, E Schoenberg (eds), That Obscure Object of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited. New York: Routledge, Ch. 9. Grigg R, Hecq D, Smith C (1999) Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies. London: Rebus Press. Harris A (1991) Gender as contradiction. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 1: 197-224. Jacobus M (1995) First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, Chapter 3. Lesser RC, Schoenberg E (eds) (1999) That Obscure Object of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited. New York: Routledge. Lewes K (1995) Psychoanalysis and Male Sexuality. New York: Aronson. Masud M, Khan R (1989) Alienation in Perversions. London: Karnac, Mansfield Library. Mitchell J, Rose J (1982) Introduction to Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. London: Macmillan. O’Connor N, Ryan J (1993) Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism in Psychoanalysis. London: Virago. Orgel S (1996) Freud and the repudiation of the feminine. JAPA 44,supplement on the Psychology of Women: 62-5. Perelberg RJ (2005) Feminisme et psychanalyse. In Mijolla, Alain de et al. (eds), International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. New York: Macmillan. Pick D (1989) Faces of Degeneration A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinodoz JM (1989) Female homosexual patients in psychoanalysis. IJPA 70: 55. Raphael-LeffJ, Perelberg RJ (eds) (1997) Female Experience: Three Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women. London: Routledge. Rieder I, Voigt D (2000) Heimliches Begehren: Die Geschichte der Sidonie C. Munich: Deuticke. Schwarz AE (1998) Sexual Subjects: Lesbians, Gender and Psychoanalysis.New York and London: Routledge. Silva JG (1975) Two cases of female homosexuality - a critical study of Sigmund Freud and Helene Deutsch. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11: 357-76. Stoller RJ (1975) Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. NewYork: Pantheon.

PART VI

Later Papers

15 ‘Negation’

ANDRJ? GREEN ‘Negation’is a short work, very condensed and sometimes difficult to follow, written in 1925. Though it can be read standing on its own, quite selfsufficiently, with a feeling of accomplishment, encompassing many threads and reaching an impression of covering a vast field, it can be seen as one highly important step in an exploration of a function which started long before. But, from another viewpoint, it is also a breakthrough, as it reaches its conclusion in the final paragraphs. Its ending opens up new perspectives which, sometimes, have been sketched earlier by Freud and will be further developed later, by him or others. Still, these developments in the psychoanalyticliterature are not directly connected with the ideas of the paper, but have to be considered as being inspired by them. The paper is not very frequently quoted - except among French analysts (ten different translations) and, thanks to Jacques Lacan, has caught the interest of philosophers (Hippolyte, 1956) and occasioned a dialogue between the two. ‘Negation’classically belongs to linguistics and is a topic largely dealt with in philosophy. In linguistics, there is no unique marker of an operation of negation (Culioli, 1988). Significant behaviour, whether verbalized or not, can be found in two registers: that which is bad, inadequate, unfavourable to be rejected, and that which consists in a void, hiatus, an absence. They can be named ‘subjective valuation and spatio-temporal localization’ (representation of the existent and the discontinued). This primitive negation develops and gives birth to constructed negations. Though one may note how Freud’s categories of judgement come close to this linguistic approach in his 1925 paper, it is important to recall that Freud’s point of departure is quite the opposite in his first intuition.

The double negation Freud starts with a double negation already present in his ‘Interpretationof Dreams’. His original findings are linked to a non-verbal material in the 253

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thoughts of the dream and the dream work. He states his ideas very clearly, at least four times (Freud, 1900, pp. 246, 318,326, 337). He notes the disregard of the categories of contraries and contradictions in the dream: No seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned [...]. Dreams feel themselves at Liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at first glance whether any element that admit s of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughtsas a positive or as a negative. (ibid., p. 318)

Sometimes, we find in the dream-thoughts a category which can be described as ‘just the reverse’, some piece of the dream content which has been constructed and which happens to be adjacent to it ‘- as it were by an afterthought -’ is turned round the other way. The process is more easily illustrated than described (ibid., p. 326 - italics added). There are two different ideas in Freud’s early descriptions. The first one is about the content of thoughts, the second deals with a feeling of inhibition in the dream expressing a conflict of will (ibid., p. 337), a volition being counteracted by counter-volitions. Here, Freud corrects his preceding assertions: when the wish-fulfilment of a dream meets an obstacle which is translated, in the dream, by a feeling of ‘not being able to do something’. This ‘is the way of expressing a contradiction - a “no”;so that my earlier statement (ibid., p. 318) that dreams cannot express a “no”requires correction’ (ibid., p. 337). Freud seems to imply that, as long as the meaning is conveyed through thoughts or representations of thoughts, the idea of the absence of contradiction is valid, but when a manifestation is linked to a will, which comes close enough to its realization through a displacement, the overcoming of the ‘no’is not always possible and the contradiction fmds a way to be expressed through a feeling. Here, the element of force overshadows the contradictions and contrarieties in thinking, which are suppressed in the dream-work.Freud was to summarize very clearly his ideas in the paper ‘On Dreams’ (1901), written three or four months after the publication of the ‘Interpretation of Dreams’. In a passage which is worth quoting, because of its clarity and concision, he says: ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. Opposition between two thoughts, the relation of reversal, may be represented in dreams in a most remarkable way. It may be represented by some other piece of the dream-content being turned into opposite - as it were by an afterthought. We shall hear presently of a further method of expressing contradiction. The sensation of inhibition of movement which is so common in dream also serves to express a contradiction between two impulses, a conflict of will. (Freud, 1901, p. 661)

In all further editions of his book on dreams, Freud insisted on bringing into line his ideas about the dream with those he exposed on the antithetical meaning of primitive words (1910>,based on an idea by Karl Abel, implying to his eyes a parallel between archaic language and dreams. However, there is

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a general agreement among linguists that one word could not have opposite meanings. Gradually, the idea of the non-existence of the no in dreams was included in a broader conception, around 1915, defining the system unconscious (Ucs). In the paper on the Unconscious in the ‘Metapsychology’,Freud notes the absence of categories, which would go against the wish to discharge the instinctual representatives (or the impulses), which coexist side by side without being influenced by one another. Therefore, there are, in this system, ‘no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty; all this is introduced by the work of the censorship between Ucs and Pcs’ (1915d, p. 186). Following the pursuit of his elaboration, Freud mentions negation in itself for the first time: ‘Negationis a substitute, at a higher level, for repression’ (ibid., p. 186). We will meet this sentence again, with almost the same formulation, in the paper on ‘Negation’(1925a). The intuition was already there, but not the construction of the concept. The absence of negation seems to be part of a larger number of related characteristics, as we find it combined, with other notions: no sense of time, no sense of reality. Soon afterwards, Freud will add that our unconscious ‘knows nothing that is negative, and no negation; in it contradictories coincides. For that reason, it does not know its own death for to that we can give only a negative content’ (Freud, 1915c, p. 296). All these ideas are stated before the last theory of instincts, which pleads for a death instinct. The postulation of a death instinct does not mod@ Freud’s ideas on negation (particularly about death), but will probably influence his way of dealing with the problem. Moreover, we find the same statement reframed according to the second topographical model, when he subsequently mentions the defusion of instincts: ‘There is nothing in the id that could be compared to negation’ (Freud, 1933, p. 74). The 1925a paper tries to go beyond the double negation ‘no, no’ and wishes to bring precision on the functions and relationships of Negation with other psychical functions.

‘Negation’ (1925a) Now, for the first time, 25 years after ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and ten years after the paper on the Unconscious in the ‘Metapsychology’,Freud tries to analyse the phenomenon of negation. The main interest of the paper is to show, in the light of his metapsychology, the relationship between an intellectual category of judgement and its supposed roots, at the level of the most basic drives. This attempt at continuity is impressing and must be followed step by step, revealing many obscurities: I. Freud starts with a few examples met in the clinical situation, some of them being still very familiar to us as when a patient says: ‘You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.’ We emend this to ‘So

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it is his mother’ (Freud, 1925a, p. 235). In other examples (which sometimes give us an unpleasant picture of Freud manipulating his patient), the meaning hidden behind repression is found after the patient has been asked what is the farthest from his mind at a certain time. His answer is always related to what had immediately occurred in his mind just before the question. Freud mentions other different issues, projection in his first example (the analyst being supposed, by the analysand, to think that the patient means to say something insulting) or, otherwise, the thoughts of an obsessional patient, who has already some experience of the cure and has begun to understand his way of thinking, notices a new obsessive thought whose meaning he first rightly interpret, and then repudiates his own associations. 11. Freud proposes his frrst theoretical conclusion: ‘Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness on condition that it is negated‘ (ibid., p. 235). This result has, nevertheless, certain limitations, even if it shows a lifting of the repression. Of the two components of the repressed - the ideational content and the affective process which he describes as separated - the lifting is only about the frrst one, allowing a sort of intellectual acceptance, ‘while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists’ (ibid., p. 236). Moreover, it can happen, in some cases, that even when the function of negation is analysed during the cure and accepted by the patient, it produces: ‘a very important and somewhat strange variant of this situation’: the full acceptance of the repressed, without any removal of the repressive process itself. This leaves Freud puzzled. There is a contrast between Freud’s true amazement about what negation can accomplish in enabling someone to take cognizance of what he has repressed, and his observation of the persistence of repression. We can assume that what is essential to the repression is the affective process, but Freud does not make this statement. We may think he is alluding not so much to the quality as to the dynamic force which goes with it. Freud’s first thoughts seem, in spite of the importance of the discovery, to lead to a dead end. Maybe all the rest of the paper expresses the wish to approach the problem from another angle that he has to find out after a certain detour. IILApplying to the contents of thoughts an affirmation or a negation is a function of intellectual judgement. By showing that negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed, Freud thinks he has discovered the links between intellectual judgement and its psychological origin. If negation can lift repression, even partially, then a negative judgement may undo the capture of the underlying affirmation behind repression. Developing his thoughts and, in some way, turning them upside down, he declares that to negate something in a judgement is at bottom to say ‘this is something I should prefer to repress’. He goes on, repeating a sentence written ten years before, in a slightly modified form (‘Negation is a

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substitute, at a higher level, for repression’ (ibid., p. 186)): ‘A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression’ (ibid., p. 236). It is implied in 1915 that repression, at a lower level, does not belong to intellectual judgement. Freud now turns his back on the earlier distinctions between the ideational and the affective, and proceeds to address the relationship between repression and intellectual judgement. What could this lower level be?We can recall the beginning of his paper on Repression (1915b). Recalling the difference between external stimulus which, when unwelcome, provokes flight and the impossibility of this operation with instincts, he writes: ‘At some later period, rejection based on judgement (condemnation) will be found to be a good method to adopt against an instinctual impulse’(ibid., p. 146). Moreover,in the 1915b paper, he had written: ‘Repressionis a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between judgement and condemnation’ (ibid.). Freud’s position about condemnation is not very clear - sometimes he seems to believe it is a psychic process which is extended beyond and before judgement, sometimes he links it closely to judgement. He finally leaves the question open and concludes: ‘Theessence of repression lies simply in turning something away and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious’ (ibid., p. 147; emphasis in original). We shall observe that any reference to intellectual judgement, even in the basic form of condemnation at that stage, is absent. It is as if condemnation will give meaning to a move that is understandable as a rejection or a refusal of something unwelcome. A related expression can be found in ‘Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious’: But it seems to point to an important characteristic of unconscious thinking, in which in all probability no process that resembles ‘judging’occurs. In the place of rejection by a judgement, what we find in the unconscious is ‘repression’. Repression may, without doubt, be correctly described as the intermediate stage between a defensive reflex and a condemning judgement. (Freud, 1905b, p. 175)

Bringing together, on the one hand, different components, different formulations, we see Freud trying to link, but also to differentiate, an element belonging to this form of judgement, more closely related to intellectual functions, easily grasped in the idea of condemnation,and, on the other hand, a rougher expression of the rejecting force that he calls, in 1905, ‘defensivereflex’, obviously caused by unpleasure, which modifies itself through evolution and development and, maybe, takes its higher form of expression with the difference between the ideational content and the affective process, which are later mentioned in that same paper. Never again will he use the expression ‘defensive reflex’. Many times, in his early writings, Freud considers repression as an automatic organic process. He will progressively see repression as a psychological force, though never forgetting to refer implicitly or explicitly to that dimension

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of force. In 1925, the only possible solution was to find a concept joining force and meaning: a force which, as basic as it is, has to be connected to something meaningful, a meaning of which we can have no accurate idea unless we join a force to it. But with the introduction of symbolization, this state of things can be modified qualitatively and quantitatively,which alleviates the limitations of repression: ‘With the help of the symbol of negation, thinking frees itself from the restrictions of repression and enriches itself with material that is indispensable for its proper functioning’ (1925a, p. 236). Freud seems to have forgotten his reservations about the limitation of the lifting of repression to the ideational content. But in fact using the word substitution can be interpreted, in many ways, as a form of replacement of the same entity or as an alternative implying a difference. IV Having clarified the link between the intellectual function of judgement, and its relationship to negation and repression, Freud turns now to the analysis of the decision involved in judgement: ‘It affirms or disaffrms the possession by a thing of a particular attribute; and it asserts or disputes that a presentation has an existence in reality’ (ibid., p. 236). It is important to note that Freud chooses a succession to present the two aspects, placing the problem of having to decide the existence or nonexistence of a thing in the later position. We are here in agreement with the investigations of the linguistic approach, but Freud goes one step further, using the acquisitions he stated in the development of his own paper. The psychological understanding will be based on a concept in which movement and meaning cannot be separated but are highly intertwined. He labels the judgement of attribution under the categories of good and bad and translates them into his own theoretical language. ‘Expressedin the language of the oldest - the oral - instinctual impulses, the judgement is “I should like to eat this or I should like to spit it out”’ (ibid., p. 237). Freud maintains his line of approach. Just as he said: ‘To negate something in a judgement, is at bottom to say: “This is something which I should prefer to repress,”’so he now defrnes the situation as such. The judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this or I should like to spit it out’, following a very similar line. By this change, he is now concerned not only with the operation ‘in turning something away, and keeping at a distance, from the conscious’, but with a more complex psychic operation, the actions involved meaning ‘I should like to take this into myself, or it shall be outside me’ (ibid., p. 237). Negation now takes the form of putting something outside me. Moreover, the operation of negation is reinforced by the refusal of admitting it as a part of myself, even the part farthest from consciousness, in what Freud calls the original pleasure ego. The allusion to an intellectual form of judgement is not mentioned here, probably because this operation still belongs to the pleasure principle. Up till now, Freud had considered repression in relation to the choice of

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keeping an image or thought in consciousness or sending it as far away as possible, into the unconscious. The condemnation was related to judgement and the rejection to the movement of sending away. Now he no longer refers to repression but to the oral impulses - the oldest of the impulses, which not only have to decide about keeping in consciousness or repressing a certain content, but make a decision which goes beyond the distinctions that Freud has tried to keep up till now, trying to build some bridges. The judgement becomes: ‘I should like to eat this or I should like to spit it out’ (ibid., p. 237). The present formulation extends the previous one which only spoke of the possibility of conserving something in consciousness, or preferring to repress it. Freud writes a very striking formulation: ‘What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical’ (ibid., p. 237). I think that what Freud implies is that the main task of the psychic apparatus, in the beginning, is to build the original pleasure ego, with the denial of anything which can interfere with the constitution of a nucleus of goodness, absolutely indispensable for the construction of a more complex psychic world, with the inevitable limitations and frustrations which he will have to endure. We remember that, in his paper ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’,he has already spoken of the transition from aplemure ego into a reality ego (191 lb, p. 224). Freud develops his ideas. At first, there is an initial reality ego which has, as its main aim, to distinguish the origins of stimuli. If, when there are causes of unpleasure, he can get rid of them by flight, he determines their location as external. If this attempt brings no relief, the stimuli are considered to be internal. But in Freud’s mind, at the beginning, the external is only external without being endowed with any qualities, except that of being alien to the ego and the bad. There is a modification between the present formulation and some others which look very similar in earlier papers. In ‘Instinctsand their vicissitudes’in the ‘Metapsychology’papers (1915), he says: ‘At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical’(1915a, p. 136; see also notes in the Standard Edition, p. 135). But he adds later in that same paper: ‘Now however, we may note that just as the pair of opposites love-indifference reflects the polarity ego-external world so the second antithesis love-hate reproduces the polarity pleasure- unpleasure which is linked to the first polarity’ (ibid.). In the 1925a paper, the reference to indifference has disappeared, because the emphasis is now on expulsion. So the new separation results in the division between inside and outside. But of this outside, the ego knows nothing, except that he has to keep it as far as he can from his inside. The contradiction here is that the constitution of an inside has meaning by its reference to an opposite, but here, the external is only the necessary operation to allow the possibility of introjection with a radical attempt to insulate it. It is very difficult to grasp what Freud is saying, because it is hardly conceivable to accept that the

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bad, the alien to the ego and the external are identical, without any possibility of locating them. One way to make this thought more acceptable is to link it to an object. This is what is usually done in different theoretical systems. The Kleinians have also leaned on Freud’s model, transforming the taking in and the spitting out as being susceptible to be labelled as forms of introjection and projection, referring both to the primary object, deriving all sorts of conflicts of this primitive situation. Freud seems to come back to his persistent concept: the idea of a closed system. In a note, which caught Winnicott’s attention, he had stated precisely, in 1910, that such a closed system is a fiction and is only possible taking into consideration the care the infant receives from the mother (191 lb, pp. 220-1). Many criticisms have been raised against this conception. What is important to consider is not so much the postulate of the nonexistence of the object as the idea that the main function of the object - naturally in the usual conditions of mothering - is to protect the child and preserve the illusion that he can encompass his living experiences by including them, for a while, in a content felt to be identical to him,governed by pleasure, enhancing the beginning of selfawareness, and identification with what he takes in and finds good. We are not so far from Winnicott’s goodenough mother or his notion of the subjective object. As I have underlined before, Freud’s main concern is the building of the original pleasure ego. What goes against it is described by Freud as spitting out, and this is why I prefer the term excorporation to projection to designate the situation. But this is only half of the story, as we have to deal with the other sorts of decision, in other words the real existence of something which exists as a representation in the mind. We see here that the external, which in the previous instance was excluded as being identical to the bad and the alien to the ego, has to be considered otherwise. Freud has never lost sight of the indispensable step of being able to find a way of satisfying the desire in the external world. This is the task of the final reality-ego. But to be able to perform this, the governance of the pleasure principle must be overcome: ‘The antithesis between subjective and objective does not exist from the first. It only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived by reproducing a presentation without the external having still to be there’ (1925a, p. 237). In other words, in spite of believing that reality testing is directly related to perception - which in this case would not need any testing - reality has to start from the evaluation of representation. Again, once more, priority is given - as a starting point - to the inner world put under scrutiny. Reality testing has less the task of finding an object ‘but to refind such an object to convince oneself that it is still there’ (ibid., p. 237). How can this evolution take place? Here comes one of the most mysterious sentences Freud ever wrote: ‘But it is evident that a

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precondition for the setting of reality testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought up real satisfaction’ (ibid., p. 238). How could these objects have been lost? The only way for me to understand that sentence is Freud’simplicit formulation that, under the governance of the pleasure principle, the act of taking in the good and getting rid of the bad is accomplished in a situation of non-separateness:the food that I take in becomes me just as I become what is good. This situation comes to an end with separation. Only thus will I be forced to realize the independent existence of the object. Hence the loss. For Freud, it is a momentous mutation towards the final reality ego. With this step, the distinction between inside and outside finally occurs. The outside, which now includes all objects, good as well as bad, because of the occurrence of separation, induces one to find once more those objects which have already existed, but only in the form of representations previously introjected (and repressed). The first move of expulsion has led to a distinction between me and not-me. The not-me is no longer a space of nonexistence, some of the object it contains serving for the satisfaction which was sought by the original pleasure ego. Most of the time, the search for such objects is guided unconsciously. v. Freud comes back once more to judgement. But he sees it now - it is more correct to say once more - as the intellectual action which decided to put an end to the postponement due to thought and moves from thinking to action: one could say the transformation of an intellectual action to an acting action. It is a preparation to act in such a way that pleasure can find an issue which can bring real satisfaction. This idea was already present in Freud’s Project (1895, pp. 330-1) and resurfaces here. The technique of thinking has its origin in the palpating activity at the sensory end of the psychic apparatus. Freud returns here to an idea expressed in his 1910 paper, ‘Two Principles of Mental Functioning’.Freud here recalls his idea: perception is not a passive attitude; it affirms or disaffirms the possession of attributes also. Freud considers it to be an experimental action. VI.We now come to the conclusion of this sophisticated development: ‘The study of judgement affords us, perhaps for the first time, an insight into the origin of an intellectual function from the interplay of the primary instinctual impulses’ (1925a, p. 239). Judging is a development, with specific aims, of the first moves, governed under the pleasure principle, of what could be included in and what had to be excluded from the ego. But we have seen that judging takes part in that activity. Freud sum it up as follows: ‘Affirmation - as a substitute formation - belongs to Eros; negation - the successor to expulsion - belongs to the instinct of destruction’ (ibid., p. 239). Freud is here using ideas that can only be understood in a conceptual frame. Eros also stands for unification; affirmation is its substitute. Not quite the same holds for the instinct of destruction, of which negation is a successor, which raises the question

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of an evolution between the destructive, as a manifestation of an instinct, and negation, which belongs to intellectual judgement, as has been observed by Hippolyte. In conclusion, Freud wishes to specify the place of negation. But maybe his asides are more important than has been noticed. For instance, when he mentions negativism as an expression of the general wish to negate, and sees in it signs of a defusion of instincts that has taken place through the withdrawal of the libidinal components, we may think, even if we are generally never confronted with this type of patient, of what happens to the model as proposed above. The withdrawal of the libidinal components cannot remain unaffected by the defusion of the negative features. In this situation, it is not enough to equate the bad, the alien to the ego and the external. In some early mother-child relationships, the task of ensuring a pleasurable ego is certainly at risk as the ignorance and expulsion of these different features becomes impossible. It is as if the subject is forced to invest, not only the bad objects but the object of the object (which is not himself), which prevents him from constituting this nuclear self, as if the result was a selfsacrifice of one’sown pleasurable ego to the object which is supposed to be, in a mother’s mind; what I called the object of the object. We can relate other examples of distortions of the function of negation named disavowal (Freud, 1927, p. 154), the consequences of which he will develop later - in fact, in his last unfinished paper, ‘The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’, considering the case of a boy seeking instinctual satisfaction and frightened by some experiences which run the risk of punishment, a decision to continue or to give up must be taken, giving birth to a conflict. ‘But in fact the child takes neither course or rather he takes both simultaneously which comes to the same thing’ (Freud, 1933, p. 234). The result is a splitting of the ego. In general, there are few examples in the literature following the same line. In the end, at least, we come across the big question which has been lost in the development: the lack of a definition of the function of symbolization. Returning to the analytic experience to close the paper, he says: ‘Thereis no stronger evidence that we have succeeded in our efforts to uncover the unconscious than when the patient reacts to it with the word “I didn’t think that” or “I didn’t (ever) think of that”’ (1925a, p. 239). He had the same thoughts rereading his account of his first analysed case, Dora, in a re-edition appearing two years before in the paper on Negation (p. 57/1). (1905a, p. 57, footnote [added in 19231 2). He repeats the same words two years before his death, in ‘Constructionsin analysis’ (1937, p. 263). Still, before ending the paper, Freud comes back to the idea that struck him earlier: the creation of the symbol of negation endowing ‘thinkingwith a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression’ (1925a, p. 239).

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Could we not think that the symbolization process itself could also be connected with the interplay of negation and affirmation?The paper leaves the question open. It will be a matter of concern for the psychoanalysts of future generations.

Further ideas on the topic We can suppose that, when Freud wrote his paper on ‘Negation’,he had in the back of his mind two ideas. The first one was to illustrate how intellectual functions may be seen as having their origins grounded in the most primitive activity as he understood it: the drives. Conversely, in the second idea, which is less explicitly stated, he seems to infer that it is the evolution and development of these basic forms of activity that give birth to intellectual functions. Having written shortly before his ‘Note on the mystic writing pad’ (192513) which deals with the different imprinting of memory traces, he refers mainly to the instances of the first topographical model Cs-Pcs Ucs (in connection with the protective shield). In ‘Negation’, the paper is more ambitious, as it extends its field to thinking, whereas the previous one was concerned only with memory. He considers what is located beyond the unconscious (now seen only as a psychic quality), the id as an agency essentially constituted by the drives and their relations to the intellect. I think that Freud wanted to emphasize the notion of force which is alluded to in the term impulse. But it is important to remember that, for Freud, most of the impulses were unconscious. So the real challenge was to conceive the chain of psychical events which connected these impulses to thinking activity. One of the most important steps in this chain of events is the acquisition of the symbol of negation. Freud had struggled with the problem of symbolization from the beginning of his work. He relies on the classical notion of substitution but thinks that such an activity is tightly linked with the unconscious. Therefore, his emphasis is on dreams. He considered it as a universal language ignoring grammar, in its most generalized form. In fact, in this context, symbolization is very close to representation (representation of an act by another one, of an object by another one), or by a transformation from one form of psychic activity to another (thoughts being visualized in images). But in ‘Negation’,it seems that he is thinking of something else, which is closer to the traditional use of symbolization. In a letter to Ferenczi, he writes that the symbolic function seems to be the beginning of the formation of concepts of the undifferentiated unconscious, some kind of primitive abstraction ( 3 June 1911). In the expression ‘undifferentiated unconscious’ we can see a forerunner of what he will conceptualize later as the id. So, even if Freud has found symbolization in the most archaic structures of the mind, he is aware that what needs to be explained is this ‘primitiveabstraction’. But if we focus our attention only on ‘Negation’,there will be a temptation to

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overlook this primitive abstraction and to think that hypotheses about drive activity, as sketched in the 1925 paper, even with the inclusion of objects, may account for it. In the literature which followed Freud’s work, we can distinguish two types of contributions. In a first phase, there has been a belief that if we know better what we suppose to be the earliest steps of psychic functioning, we could understand this symbolic step. In a further move, new concepts needed to be added to enlighten the consequences of this so-called primitive abstraction. Freud was mainly concerned with presenting a general model that was more or less independent of the type of patients in analysis. He was not aware that his model could be valid only for these patients for whom psychoanalysis was indicated. Melanie Klein makes a symmetrical, though opposite, mistake. Drawing her thoughts from a very disturbed, inhibited; and even retarded child, she presents a general theory on the formation of symbols. Though she makes extensive use of the concepts of introjection and projection in her work, surprisingly they are not mentioned here as the starting point of her elaboration. Instead of an interplay between taking in and spitting out, standing for affirmation and negation, her entire view is oriented to the struggle against destructive threats. For the majority of non-Kleiniananalysts, in ordinary circumstances,the basic fantasies are bound to the wish to renew the experiences of satisfaction. The memory traces are transformed, but the final aim is always related to an avoidance of unpleasure and a search for pleasure. We still try to guess how to discover the existence of processes of symbolization before language. When Klein writes her paper on symbol-formation(1930), she proceeds to another formulation of Freud’sconstruction. She supposes that sadism is at its peak in the desire for devouring the breast in the oral phase. An enormous anxiety is raised, on this occasion, from two sources: the child’s own sadism that he projects onto his parents as the fear of a retaliation of these attacks by these primary objects. This primary defence is extremely violent; she states it as fundamentally different from repression. The defence is twofold: against the child’s sadism, the reaction is expulsion and towards the object, destruction is at work. We find here the same idea as in Freud in the intervention of expulsion, but it is accompanied by destruction of the object, an object which is still non-existent for Freud. Klein then also considers symbolization. She limits her description to a displacement on other new objects, without going into any detail on how it takes place, though its importance is underlined as the basic activity of the child to the external world and reality. One can only be struck by the fact that the devouring function of orality does not include, in the paper, what is usually called the good breast, as if symbol-formationwas dissociated from the experience of satisfaction. Nothing is mentioned about the drive to take in and conserve

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the positive aspects of the oral experience. Melanie Klein recalls that she has presented the view that symbolism is the basis of all sublimation,because it is from symbolic assimilation that libidinal fantasies occur. But in 1930, she thinks anxiety is the cause of the assimilation, establishing ‘new equations’. So for her, destruction is the most primitive form and libidinal relationships mysteriously happen to be created from displacement of anxiety. Nowhere do we find any allusion to Freud’s concern about the primitive forms of abstraction. The only indication about this aside, which was never to be developed by him, is in his ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ (1905b). There is one point on which Freud and Klein may meet. Though she does not make any mention of object loss in her 1930 paper, coming back to the topic during the Freud-Klein Controversies (1 941 -45), she recalls her initial idea and adds some interesting remarks: the displacement to new objects helps the diminution of feelings related to the loss of primary objects. I believe that, when Freud had the idea of primitive abstraction, he was thinking of a stage occurring after the loss of the object which once brought satisfaction. Still, the abstraction relates to an activity which has the function of substituting the satisfaction by libidinal fantasies,which can connect some of the memory traces of satisfaction with representations, either of the primary objects or the satisfaction they provided. Abstraction is an extraction through thinking of features objects are supposed to share, which define concepts. The main difference between Freud’s ideas and other classical notions is that, though ‘abstract’,the inferences are based on expectations of desire and gratification. Therefore the idea is of refrnding an object instead of finding it. The ‘refrnding’is a construction which only serves to show how the gratification can become real. The abstraction process in Freud is represented in his thinking by the idea that a reversal, which expresses a nonoccurrence, in that case negation, can still fulfii the fantasy as well thanks to the use of the symbolic function, which allows its admission into consciousness. Never in Klein do we find this kind of reasoning. In spite of the new paths she opened, there was a feeling of an incomplete explanation. Segal comes back to the topic of symbolization in several papers. She proposes a distinction between symbolrformation as witnessed in symbolic equations - which seem to be very close to Klein’s description in her own terms, based on concrete thinking in which there seems to be no difference between the symbol and the thing symbolized in a concrete way and the symbolic function. Unlike in symbol-formation,in the symbolic function, the symbol represents the thing symbolized and is not confused with it. This implies also the existence of a subject, distinct from its object, performing a representation, which is needed for true symbolism. So, representation,which was mentioned in Freud’s elaboration on negation but excluded from Klein, comes back. But here, representation is almost entirely

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equivalent to phantasy. In this situation, a tripartite relationship is built: the symbol, the object it symbolizes and the person for whom the symbol is the symbol of the object. Segal writes: ‘In the absence of a person, there can be no symbol’ (1981). In the case of object formations, the ego is confused with the object. We find, also in Segal, the idea that symbolization helps the internal communication with oneself. Segal’s developments clearly indicate that symbolic equations belong to the schizoid-paranoidphase as the symbolic function is more related to the depressive position. But this theoretical construction still depends on central hypotheses such as projective identiftcation, where it is taken for granted that the infant projects into the mother’s body parts of his ego, in order not only to get rid of parts of the self but also to possess and control the mother as the object present from the beginning. Still, in the next generation of Kleinians, there is a renewal of interest in topics related to negation, as in Bion’s work, in which he determines the great psychic dilemma: to accept the frustration and modify it or to evade it by evacuating the inassimilable elements: the beta elements. We find in Bion this interest in the ‘primitive abstractions’that caught Freud’s attention. Bion builds a model to help us to understand how he figures it. We shall limit our examination of Bion’s complex theory to the points that are related to negation. If Bion adopts the Kleinian view that the breast is felt as bad because an awareness of it manifests itself during the lack of satisfaction created by the need to be nurtured, he brings a new view in the capacity of reverie of the mother communication as an expression of her love, favouring his potentiality to modify frustration, rather than to evade it by evacuation as the reverie includes other objects which are dear to her and loved. This helps the building of alpha elements against the beta elements, which are destined to evacuation in order to unburden the psyche, supporting an omnipotent fantasy of evasive projective identification. On the contrary, the sense of reverie becomes open to the reception of any object. In this way, the introjection of a good breast as a psychic quality is not a single process but a complex and indirect one which is conveyed. The alpha function, so necessary for the tranformation of emotional experiences, has its source in the mother’s alpha function. Bion divides the thinking process into thoughts and thoughts emerging from an apparatus to think the thoughts. Bion says, without giving many details, that sooner or later the desired breast will give birth to the idea of a missing breast, as a result of the action of alpha elements. In other words, the mind can only be created with the collaboration of another mind. What Bion is talking about is not only related to introjection but also to receptivity. From Bion’s writing, we can infer a difference between a ‘no thing’ as a thought related to an absence of a thing, leading to the awareness that it can only be recognized through an operation of thought, and ‘nothing’as referring to something which cannot be thought and only evokes a hole in the mind created by the evacuation of frustration, related to the feeling of ‘non-existence’or ‘no emotion’.

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The greatest achievement for Bion is to reach ‘negativecapability’, a term which he derived from the poet John Keats’s correspondence. Keats defines it as a state of mind in which a man ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons’. So we see here that negative capability can also be understood as a product of symbolization,the linking function not having to end in a premature closure of the question. Bion was later to postulate a new concept to enlarge the operations of thinking. He added to the well-known concepts of love and hate a third one, of equal importance, K (for knowledge). He completed this last concept with its opposite, -K, in which we find a return of the negative. He was already interested in the question and had described attacks on linking. Now he is speaking of patients who systematically destroy the analyst’s attempts at interpretations. He relies there on Klein’s idea of envy. -K function is undissociable from a feeling of superiority trying to destroy any new development in the personality. A very interesting hypothesis is put forward about -K. Bion supposes that a child experiences a fear of dying, splits it off and projects this feeling into the breast which is felt to have removed the good and valuable element it contained. Associated with -K, the worthless residue is forced back to the infant. But in this secondary operation, it is far more than the fear of dying projected which is forced back. ‘Indeed it is as if virtually the whole personality was evacuated by the infant’ (1962). The predominant characteristic feature is ‘lack’. Lacan was also interested in the relationship between negation and symbolization. Unlike Bion, he does not start with emotional experience, but bases his thinking on the signifier. The principal matter is the becoming of the subject which can only be located in the symbolic order in its relationship to the signifier. For Lacan, the becoming of the subject has to go through its relationship to the other of the unconscious discourse and in reference to the symbolic order governed by the ‘Nameof the father’.Lacan illustrates his ideas by a reference to the Schreber case. Freud corrects himself in his commentary of the Schreber case: ‘It was incorrect to say that the perception which was suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth, as we now see, that which abolished internally returns from without’ (Freud, 191lc, p. 71). Lacan (1 966)understood this distinction considering that Freud’s distinction alluded to the fact that when he spoke of abolition, he meant that the psychical content could not be included in the symbolic processes as they are organized in the repression of neurotics. So it could not be part of any chain of signifers; it stood outside meaning and was not susceptible to being interpreted. This is why he proposed the term forecZosure to differentiate it from repression. In recent literature, the unfamiliarity of Lacan’s translation has been replaced by rejection; another approximate term is repudiation. In Winnicott’s work (1971), we find a permanent concern with trying to define an intermediary space between the internal and the external. We can

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see here that Winnicott does not agree with Melanie Klein about the overwhelming realm of the internal world. He tries to describe the infant’s journey from the purely subjective to objectivity, considering that the transitional object is what we see of this journey of progress towards experiencing. In Winnicott, the transitional object is the symbol of the union - one would better say re-union - of the baby and the mother (or part of it). It is worth quoting him: It is at the place in space and time where and when the mother is in transition from being (in the baby’s mind) merged with the infant and alternatively being experienced as an object to be perceived rather than conceived of. The use of an object symbolizes the union of the two now separate things, baby and mother, at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness (Winnicott, 1971, emphasis in original, p. 114)

Winnicott speaks of a potential space. What he has in mind is also the process of symbolization, which he links closely to separation. He arrives at the paradox of writing that, thanks to the possibility of creating this place, that separation can be seen not as a separation but as a form of union (ibid., pp. 97-8). We see that Winnicott tries to answer the question raised by Freud’s idea of the nonexistence of an object in the beginning, and Melanie Klein’s claim to the contrary. But Winnicott has also helped more directly with negation and he describes it in normality and in pathology. When trying to define a characteristic of the transitional object, he says: ‘The object is and is not the breast’, so overcoming the traditional opposition. But he is also interested, as he expresses it in the last version of his paper on ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’,in the pathological aspects of negation when a traumatic separation, which lasts too long, leads to a decathexis of the object. For some patients, the bad thing, whether present or absent, is negative in two ways, as bad and as nonexistent. Speaking of a patient who had a former unhappy experience with another analyst, he quotes her saying: ‘The negative of him is more important than the positive of you.’ Winnicott characterizes this patient for whom ‘the real thing is the thing that is not here’. Even symbolization loses its power of stabilizing relationships in the mind, as these patients come, after their traumatic experiences, ‘todoubt the reality of the thing that they were symbolizing’ (emphasis in original). He summarizes his statement by saying that they are mainly interested in the negative side of relationships,showing how much they are impregnated with negative phenomena, their mind being mainly concerned with death, absence or amnesia. I shall close this chapter with some personal remarks and a summary of my own contribution. In psychoanalytical theory, it is common to use the term ‘negative’in its adjectival form (negative transference, negative therapeutic reaction, etc.); here, we are dealing with the substantive in connection with its conceptual

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content. The work of the negative is an expression of Hegel, who did not develop it extensively. So the links between it in Hegelian philosophy and its application to psychoanalysis are very remote, except via Jacques Lacan. In Freud, there is an implicit use of the negative in his theory: the Unconscious is a typical example, for it does not satisfy itself in describing what, in the psychic, is not conscious, but addresses an organization of the psyche. Later, when Freud gave up the unconscious as an instance, in order to have it replaced by the id, he emphasized the idea that almost everything we know about the Id is of a ‘negativecharacter’ compared to the ego (Freud, 1933, p. 73). These scattered observations may show that Freud was seeking some kind of rationality to negative features, but did not go beyond mere parallels. At the origin of the Freudian theory, it is such a structural connection that defines the neurosis as a ‘negative of the perversion’ (Freud, 1905c, p. 165). More generally speaking, the idea of representation may also be understood from this point of view, compared to the perception it is opposed to. The absence of the object, devoid of the qualities which are known through the senses, and present in the mind without the attributes by which we get to know them in reality, can conceive representations as negative of perceptions in the way we speak of the negative of a photograph. A fortiori, repression, suppressing representations from consciousness and forbidding the spelling out of thoughts, maintaining them in the unconscious in which they can keep a kind of activity, can also be part of the same field of processes. Considered in perspective with desire, identification has an analogous function in the mixture of substitution and reversal that one of its meaning conveys. I have recalled these notions to show that they suffice to invalidate all idea of the negative as enclosed in the limits of pathological negativism and show that very general concepts of the psychic life, whether normal or pathological, may be interpreted in a very fruitful way if seen from this point of view. Nevertheless, with Freud’s last theory of drives, the part attributed to destructive drives allows a content that may be directly linked to the work of the negative, within the undermining activity put to work inside the psyche in order to oppose the wall of resistance, by way of the obstinacy of the compulsion to repeat, the clinging onto childhood conflicts and the nonresolution of the transference neurosis. The latter takes the form of the solidification of a ‘no-relation reiationship’, all those characteristics being grounded in the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’. This tendency, in Freud’s thinking, is stressed by his agreement with the concept of the death instinct and with its quasicompulsory reference to primary masochism. We have seen how the different schools of thought have interpreted Freud’s first observations, each reinterpreting Freud’s theory. My proposal was to gather some of the defence mechanisms presented by Freud: ‘repression’is offered as playing the role of a general model for the activity of

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defence. Sometimes, Freud emphasizes its own specificity. As we have seen, its main task is to prevent the emergence of unpleasure. Later on, he described ‘splitting’or ‘disavowal’as more specifically related to perception (hence its incidence upon reality). Freud was to extend the notion of splitting set out for the first time in his paper on ‘Fetishism’in his ‘Outline’, where feelings of fragmentation of the ego were understood through the same mechanism. The most extreme form he considers was ‘foreclosure’or radical rejection that tries to push away the consequences of the drive manifestationsto a point where the existence of the danger of satisfying them against the teachings of reality is denied. But what has been denied in the outside comes back to the psychic world by the outside, as in the example of hallucinations. So the paper on ‘Negation’ completes the picture but can be seen as applying in general to language constructions, once they are referred to their unconscious roots. Why do I propose to gather these separate forms in the expression of the ‘work of the negative’?Because I think they are, at the same time and for many of them, necessary for the building of the psychic world, and offer a view of different ways of dealing with the unacceptable. There is an implicit idea to this choice. I suppose that, at the deepest level, psychic activity always manifests itself as forces in excess. It is therefore necessary to bind the forces, to transform them and give them a form which can be accepted by the goals assigned to the mind, which implies reducing the forces through defence. The basic choice is an obligation to decide with a yes or no. But we can also observe that the transformation of the surrounding environment by cultural products implies some sort of negation of its naturalness. This is why it is true to consider that sublimation may belong to the same category. It is difficult to separate completely the different ways of the representational world and, in the end, the ‘negation’, which is a form necessary to the structuring of language, the field of which not only oversteps the pathologicalbut also covers the cultural.My proposal is to gather these diverse forms as basic testimonies of the work of the negative; their common ground is to bear an obligation of decision made by yes or no. It is possible to add others to them, such as Melanie Klein’s projective identitication, which can be included in the same category, but I find it more questionable, at least in the way she describes it. I feel myself more in agreement with Bion’sdescription,with his addition of 4,because he not only considers, like Winnicott, the persecutory consequences of the mechanism, but comes to imagine the evacuation of the whole personality, just permitting the survival of the new relationship of stripped objects. It should be our task in the future to try to understand better the relationships between these different mechanisms which have something in common. It is easily understood that splitting, disavowal, foreclosure, more often prevail in the structures for which destructiveness is predominant, in order to account for their structural organization, echoing libido vicissitudes which are hard to grasp, as narcissism seems to dominate the horizon.

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All this leads us to a reconsideration of Freud’s death instinct. I proposed reformulating this concept as ‘negative narcissism’, that is a narcissism not trying to reach Oneness - as is the case of narcissism in a Freudian view - but aspiring to the zero level, as the psyche, in the last instance, yearns for its own annihilation, once the other solutions have failed. Therefore the negative is not understood here as the reverse of the positive, but as an aspiration to nothingness. Such an acceptance would allow the interpretation of certain aspects of contemporary clinical manifestations: states of void and decathexis, feeling of futility, tendency to no-commitment, and what I call subjective disinvolvement. We frequently witness attacks on the functioning of basic impulses as in eating disorders, where the more one tries to ftll the inner feeling of vacuity the more one finds oneself empty. I suppose that in some suicidal impulses an analogous mechanism is at play. likewise in drug addictions. None of those aspects are satisfactorilyexplained by the already existing theories. A basic approach of psychism could be found in the transformation of drives into objects. That is to say, the relationship to objects cannot be limited to the transformations the existing objects have undergone (whether internal or external), but should deal with the inner world capacity to create objects from functions related to drives, increasing the complexity of the inner world. This is the ‘objectalizing function’ contributing to the progressive richness of growth. In an opposite way, and as a result of mysterious consequences of bad management, the destructive instinct would gain the upper hand. It would not be limited to the patent manifestations of destructivity, but would act as a ‘disobjectalizingfunction’,which aims at the reverse result. It undoes the previous objectalizing work in such a way that objects are now deprived of their quality of uniqueness or irreplaceabilityfor the subject. The application of these ideas has allowed a reconsideration of concept of primary masochism and negative therapeutic reaction seen from the perspective of the part narcissism plays in its closing effects where alterity is occulted. A privileged field of research concerns the work of the negative in the hallucinatory, because the latter is at the basis of a primordial hypothesis in Freud about the role of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment.Negative hallucination was frequently met in early psychoanalysis but later vanished from Freudian literature, although it proves to be a very rich concept, heuristically speaking. I have proposed using this concept for a general model which accounts for its positive and pathological effects. When the separation occurs between mother and baby, leaving the latter by himself, the mother’s representation may be suspended and replaced by many substitutes. But its precondition is the introjected construction of a framing structure [structure encadrantel, which is analogous to the mother’s arm in holding the baby. All the sense perceptions of the mother can be upheld if a trace remains of being

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cathected by her. This framing structure can tolerate even the absence of representation because it holds the psychic space, like Bion’s container. As long as the framing structure ‘holds’the mind, the negative hallucination of the mother can be replaced by hallucinatory wish-fulfilmentof fantasy. But if the child can’t keep the feeling of being cathected by the mother, the frame becomes unable to host the substitute representation. His own feeling of existence seems to follow the disappearance of the object. Sometimes when the analytic situation does not directly evoke this threat of non-existence, another mechanism appears which makes analytic work very difficult. What happens is a negative hallucination of thinking processes which manifests itself by the dissociation between the words already uttered by the patient and their meaning. This mechanism does not belong to repression, as even when recalled, there is a non-recognition of what has been said, as if it was the last defence before letting the feelings of non-existence happen. In conclusion, we shall only mention the outcome of sublimation as a positive outcome of the transformation of subjective experiences which can even be negated with profitable substitution.

References Bion W R (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann. Bion W R (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock. Culioli A (1988) La negation: marqueurs et opirations. In Pour une linguistique de I’knonciation, 1990. Freud S (1895) Project for a Scientific Psychology. In SE 1. Freud S (1900) Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4. Freud S (1901) On Dreams. SE 5. Freud S (1905a [ 19011) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. SE 7. Freud S (1905b) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. SE 8. Freud S (1905~)Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. SE 7. Freud S (1910) The Antithetical Meaning of Primitive Words. SE 11. Freud S (1911a) The Correspondence of S. Freud and S. Ferenczi. Vol. 1.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Freud S (1911b) Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. SE 12. Freud S (1911~)Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia. SE 12. Freud S (1915a) Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. SE 14. Freud S (1915b) Repression. SE 14. Freud S (191%) Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. SE 14. Freud S (1915d) Unconscious. SE 14. Freud S (1925a) Negation. SE 19. Freud S (1925b) Note on the Mystic Writing Pad. SE 19. Freud S (1927) Fetishism. SE 21. Freud S (1933) Dissection of the Personality. SE 22. Freud S (1937) Constructions in Analysis. SE 23. Green A (1997) The intuition of the negative in ‘Playing and Reality’. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 78.

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Green A (1998) The primordial mind and the work of the negative. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 79: 649-65. Green A (1999) The Work of the Negative. Tr. A Weller. Free Association Books. Heimann P (1952) Certain functions of internal relation in early infancy. In M Klein et al., Developments in Psychoanalysis, p. 144. Hippolyte J (1956) Commentaire sur la Verneinung de Freud. La Psychanalyse, vol. 1. Reproduced in Ecrits. Paris: Le Seuil, 1966, pp. 879-88. Klein M (1930) The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego. In Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press. Lacan J (1966) Introduction et discussion du commentaire de J. Hippolyte sur la Verneinung. In Lacan’sEcrits. Paris: Le Seuil. Segal H (1957) Notes on symbol formation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 38; and in H Segal(1978) On symbolism. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 59. Segal H (1981) Symbolism. In E Spillius (ed.), Drama, Phantasy and Art. New Library of Psychoanalysis, p. 39. Tuckett D (general editor) (1991) The Freud-Klein controversies 1941-1945. Ed. P King, R Steiner. London: Routledge (with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London). Winnicott DW (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

16 ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’

DONALD CAMPBELL

Introduction Around Christmas 1937, Freud returned to the subjects of splitting and disavowal and, with the addition of clinical material, wrote an unfinished paper, ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1938b). This was the last paper he wrote in Vienna. Strachey thought this draft could be considered a sequel to Freud’s paper ‘Fetishism’ (1927). Although Freud himself wondered if this paper was a repetition of ‘something long familiar and obvious’,he was inclined to think it was about ‘somethingentirely new and puzzling’. Why did he return to this subject in the last paper he wrote in Vienna?What was it that he discovered and why was it puzzling?

Summary of key concepts Freud builds this short, tightly written paper around a brief account of the development of a castration complex in a boy between the ages of three and four, which is defended against by the adoption of a fetish. At first Freud stresses that it is not the sight of the female genital, nor the threat of castration by the father as punishment for masturbation, that has a decisive influence on the boy, but the associative link between the two in the child’s mind. The threat of castration revives the memory of the earlier view of the female’spenis-less state, which had originally been regarded as harmless, but is now recalled as ‘confirmation’ that the threat could be realized. In the child’s mind, castration has become ‘an almost intolerable real danger’. Castration anxiety is one expression of the fundamental and ongoing ‘conflictbetween the demand by the instinct and the prohibition by reality’. In normal development, the boy eventually surrenders to the overwhelming anxiety arising from the danger posed by castration and gives up the pleasure of masturbation.

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However, Freud’s little boy finds another way out of the conflict. The boy adopts an ingenious two-part solution by, on the one hand, rejecting reality and its prohibitive power, and, on the other hand, accepting reality and defending against the fear of danger by converting it into a pathological symptom. However, this contradiction can only be sustained by creating a split in the ego in such a way that these opposing views continue to coexist without undermining each other. The symptom was the creation, in his mind, of a substitute for the missing penis, that is, a fetish. By disavowing reality and endowing the female with a substitute for the missing penis, the boy surmounted what he had considered evidence for the reality of castration and, thereby, saved his own penis. As long as he did not have to recognize that a female had ‘lost’her penis, he was spared the thought that he could lose his. Disbelief in the threat of castration was essential for the boy to continue masturbating without anxiety. Freud points out that the hallucination of a penis (represented by the fetish) where there was none is not very different from the turning away from reality in psychosis. However, he emphasized that the boy displaced the value of the penis onto another part of his body and a new symptom emerged, namely anxiety about having either of his little toes touched. Although the boy’s penis was thus protected from the father, assisted by regression to the oral phase of development, the boy became frightened of being eaten by his father. Freud recognized immediately the strain this solution puts on the synthetic function of the ego, which, he added, can only operate under certain conditions. As we will see later, psychoanalytic writers returned to this issue.

The roots of the ideas in Freud’s earlier writing Lustman (1977) has noted that Freud used the term ‘splitting’in four different ways as he developed his ideas about the subject: (1) the phenomenon of dissociation as manifest by ‘splittingof consciousness’in the hysteric (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95), (2) the persistent self-reproaches of the melancholic (Freud, 1917), (3) the concurrent and contradictory psychic orientation of the fetishist, of which ‘Splittingof the Ego in the Process of Defence’(1938b) is the definitive exposition, and (4) the normal ‘spectator’hidden within the psychotic which he returns to in his last major work, A n Outline ofPsych0analysis (1938a). Lustman remarks that Freud consistently ‘searched for an underlying process (an identifiable, replicable mode of organizing mental contents) which facilitated some dominant purpose (essentially defence) and which therefore resulted in behaviour reconcilable only if one posited the creation of separate, contradictory groups of mental representations within the psychic apparatus’(1 977, p. 119).

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Dissociation: the splitting of consciousness in the hysteric Freud first used the term splitting in ‘Studiesin Hysteria’ (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95) as ‘present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria, and that a tendency to such dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term “hypnoid”) is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis’ (ibid., p. 12). Anna 0 provided a striking clinical example of a patient who ‘was split into two personalities of which one was mentally normal and the other insane’ (ibid., p. 45). Anna 0 ’ s two states of consciousness persisted side by side with the normal primary mental state unaffected by the secondary one unless the secondary state ‘acted as a stimulus ”in the unconscious”’(ibid., p. 45). Another example of splitting is provided by Anna 0’s comment that even when the secondary state intruded into the first one ‘a clear-sighted and calm observer sat, as she put it, in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business’(ibid., p. 46). Freud refers to this phenomenon later (1938a) as the presence of a ‘spectator’in the mind during a psychotic state. Freud also noted the similarity between splitting that occurs in mental illness and that which occurs in dreams (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95, p. 13; Freud, 1900,p. 91). Freud’s insights arising from his analysis of Lucy R locate the conflict between the ego and an unacceptable idea. ‘It turns out to be the sine qua non for the acquisition of hysteria that an incompatibility should develop between the ego and some idea presented to it’ (Breuer and Freud, 1893-95, p. 122). The hysterical defence, that is the conversion of this conflict into somatic symptoms by repression of the unacceptable idea, was another example of the defensive use of splitting. Here Freud makes the point that this splitting of consciousness in hysteria was often introduced by a conscious and deliberate act, which is subsequently repressed and buried under later symptoms. In the case of Katherina, Freud demonstrated the link between an adolescent girl’s incestuous trauma with her father and a splitting of consciousness in an hysteric defence. A trauma in adolescence is sufficient to provoke an hysteric defence, sometimes after an ‘incubation’ period. However, disturbing events from a pre-sexual period may not produce a traumatic effect in the victim until the child acquires sexual knowledge or progresses into later developmental stages. Freud also refers to the normal process of splitting in adolescence. Each case study led to further developments in Freud’s understanding of splitting. In Fraulein Elisabeth von R.’s case the repression of the unacceptable idea of being in love with her dead sister’shusband gave rise to an increase in hysterical pain, which confirmed Freud’s view of splitting of consciousness as a defence mechanism. His efforts to bring these incompatible thoughts into her consciousness were met with increased resistance, and led Freud to view this increase in psychical pain as the


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motivation for the splitting of consciousness. The mechanism of conversion enabled Friiulein Elisabeth von R. to replace mental pain, stimulated by the unacceptable idea, with physical pain. As Freud clearly states, ‘The motive for splitting of consciousness was that of defence’ (1893-95, p. 166). Freud also identified this type of splitting in individuals suffering from childhood trauma (1939[1934-381), pp. 77-8). Later, in ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ (1910), Freud reinforced this dynamic view that the defence of splitting is a solution to conflict between incompatible ideas, and not the result of an inherently weak ego capacity for synthesis. The case of Frau Cacilie M. led Freud back to Darwin’s view that physiological reactions may well be the source of the hysteric’s somatic expression. In The Expression of the Emotions (1872) Darwin maintained that sensations and innervations represented actions that originally had meaning or purpose. For instance, the figure of speech ‘swallowing something’, meaning taking an insult without reply, would express the physiological reaction in the pharynx when we refrain from speaking, as we do when we do not respond to an insult. So, rather than considering that the hysteric’s somatic reactions are created by symbolization, Freud speculates that the choice of the hysteric’s somatic expression represented the physiological reaction that occurs in response to a particular trauma. Dissociation present in hysteria during hypnoid states would be an example of the splitting off of ego nuclei or separate psyche groups from the rest of the psyche, which remained integrated. This type of splitting, a consequence of repression, was an unconscious phenomenon also linked to post-hypnotic suggestion, fugue states, multiple personalities, and the splitting of consciousness in the hysteric.

Splitting of representations of objects In ‘Instinctsand Their Vicissitudes’(1915) Freud builds a model of mental life which features splitting. In the beginning, the ego is, to a very limited extent, capable of satisfying its needs. During this phase of development, the ego is equated with what is pleasurable and the external world is a matter of indifference. However, self-gratification and delay of pain through hallucination soon breaks down and the ego cannot escape feeling internal stimuli as unpleasurable. Further development now occurs as the ego realizes that, in spite of all its efforts, it cannot survive without appropriate responses from objects in the external world. When objects respond to the infant’s needs in satisfactory ways, the external world is no longer an object of indifference but becomes a source of pleasure. In so far as the objects which are presented to it [the ego] are sources of pleasure, it takes them into itself, ‘introjects’them (to use Ferenczi’s [1909] term); and on the other hand, it expels whatever within itself becomes a cause of unpleasure ... the external world is divided into a part that is pleasurable, which it has incorporated

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into itself, and a remainder that is extraneous to it. It has separated off a part of its own self, which it projects into the external world and feels as hostile. After this new arrangement, the two polarities coincide once more: the ego-subject coincides with pleasure, and the external world with unpleasure (with what was earlier indifference). (Freud, 1915, p. 136)

Although Freud does not mention splitting in his description of the emergence of the reality-ego from the pleasure-ego, the phenomenon of splitting is represented by the division of the external world into what is pleasurable and what is not pleasurable, and by the separation off from a part of the self that is unpleasurable. Splitting precedes introjection and projection. In this passage, Freud introduces a process by which all experiences are initially split by the infant into good memories, which are internalized, and bad ones, which are projected onto objects outside the self. Fairbairn (1941, 1954) and KIein (1946) have built on Freud’s observation to develop theories of infantile development and object relations. Segal (1964), following Klein, views splitting as developmentally earlier than repression and the process which makes repression, or ‘horizontalsplitting’(Kohut, 197l), possible. Splitting of the representation of the object features in Freud’sstudy of the mourning of one who is loved and hated. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Freud recognized the melancholic’s use of splitting to preserve positive aspects of an ambivalently cathected object in the other, while identifying negative aspects of the same object with itself. In the melancholic, anxieties associated with loss and separation are defended against by splitting off unacceptable affects aroused by the lost object. This process of splitting occurs within the ego and is reinforced by identifications. This view is developed more specifically in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923a) where Freud sees splitting as a defensive consequence of conflicts between various identifications within the ego: If they [identifications]obtain the upper hand and become too numerous, unduly powerful and incompatible with one another, a pathological outcome will not be far off.It may come to a disruption of the ego in consequence of the different identifications becoming cut off from one another by resistances. Perhaps the secret of cases described as ‘multiple personality’ is that the different identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn. Even when things do not go as far as this, there remains the question of conflicts between the various identifications into which the ego comes apart, conflicts which cannot after all be described as entirely pathological. (Freud, 1923a, pp. 30 ff)

Originally, Freud saw repression as the principal force in maintaining splits. Lichtenberg and Slap (1973) note that with the introduction of the structural model Freud’sinterest shifted from topographic splitting of consciousness, as exemplified in hysterical dissociation, to splitting of the ego, as in the fetish. In ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’ (1924) Freud observed that the ego escapes repression by splitting, ‘by effecting a cleavage or division of


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itself. In this way the inconsistencies, eccentricities and follies of men would appear in a similar light to their sexual perversion, through the acceptance of which they spare themselves repressions’ (1924, pp. 152-3). Freud’s change of focus was accompanied by a shift from repression to a second defence, which he called ‘disavowal’, to describe the reaction of children to observations of anatomical differences between the sexes.

Disavowal Freud used the term Verleugung in his discussion of castration in his 1923b paper ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’ when he observed that when children are confronted by the absence of a penis in a girl ‘They disavow (leugnung) the fact and believe that they do see a penis, all the same’(Freud, 1923b, pp. 143-4). Verleugnung is sometimes translated into English as ‘denial’,but I prefer to use the word ‘disavowal’because Freud refers to it as primarily an unconscious phenomenon, whereas denial is usually associated with a conscious mental activity. Only later do children believe that the absence of the penis is evidence of castration. Although Freud thought disavowal was neither uncommon nor dangerous in young boys and girls, he noted that its presence in adults represented the beginning of psychosis, in as much as external reality is disavowed (Freud, 1924). However, it is not simply the perception of the lack of a penis that is disavowed. Disavowal functions as a solution to the child’s castration anxiety or castration complex. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) suggest that the act of disavowal represents the convergence in the child’s sexual theory of two conditions; the need to account for the anatomical difference between the sexes, on the one hand, while confirming the castration threat posed by the father, on the other (p. 120). It was not until Freud studied the fetish that he found the adult psychopathology that illustrated the clinical phenomenon of disavowal. ‘Fetishism’ (1 927) represented an important breakthrough in Freud’s understanding of how splits were maintained within the ego. The castration anxiety aroused by the perception of the woman’s penis-less state is repressed. However, Freud used the term ‘disavow’ to describe the experience of knowing and not knowing, that is, a compromise between reality and wish. The idea that the woman is castrated is disavowed and ‘the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of a substitute ... [that] remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it’ (Freud, 1927, p. 154). The fetishist replaces preoccupation with the absence of a penis with fixation on an animate or inanimate object that ‘provides’the woman with a phantom penis. Freud had identified the whys and wherefores of the disavowal of reality, but in ‘Fetishism’he appears to be more concerned with Understanding bow the disavowal was maintained. In order to do this, Freud shifted his attention from conscious processes to unconscious ones. Freud recognized

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the vital role that the fetish played in maintaining a split in the ego. By displacing onto the fetish the female phallus the boy expected to find, the fantasy that the woman has a penis, albeit one that is created by the boy, is maintained and the disavowal of her penisless state is preserved. Just how do disavowal and a fetish function to enable the boy to survive the emotional trauma at the sight of the woman’s lack of a penis and to recover his psychic equilibrium?The recovery is based on the boy’s capacity to return to his pre-traumaticsexual excitement in relation to the pre-oedipal fantasy of the phallic woman. The frrst step is disavowal, which is, initially, an emergency and stop-gap response to trauma. However, disavowal is a vulnerable defence because conscious awareness of the nature of the woman’s genitals exists, parallel to but unaffected by the unconscious rejection of that reality. The formation of a fetish appears critical to shifting cathexis from disavowal of reality to the investment in a new object - the fetish as a substitute female penis. The second step, the act of creating a fetish (Campbell, 1989), enables the boy to exercise an active role in response to the passive experience of the traumatic realization. Katan (1964) makes the important point that ‘the presence of the fetish is the sign that he has succeeded in recapturing the original state in which his sexual function was not yet threatened’ (p. 240). Once the fetish is established,the third step, its continuous cathexis, helps to maintain the disavowal. But, this was not to be Freud’s last word on the subject of splitting of the ego.

The fate of the ideas in Freud’s later writing Shortly after he arrived in London in June 1938, six months after setting aside an unfinished draft of ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’, Freud began ‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’(1938a). This masterful review of the psychoanalytic enterprise that he had created, which Strachey referred to as ‘a “refresher course” for advanced students’ (Strachey, 1940, p. 143), was interrupted by a serious operation on his cancerous jaw. Freud never took it up again.

The normal ‘spectator’hidden in the psychotic In Chapter 8 of ‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’(1938a), Freud returned to a familiar difficulty in understanding the splitting of the ego and its disavowal of aspects of reality in fetishism. While the ego may respond to internal demands by repression, it may defend against pressures from the external world by disavowing the perceptions that convey an aspect of reality that is disturbing. In the latter case, if a detachment from reality becomes the dominant mode of responding to conflict, a ‘necessary precondition of


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psychosis is present’. In the fetishist, there is a persistence of contradictory perceptions, namely a disavowal of the perception of the female’spenis-less state, on the one hand, and the recognition of the fact that the woman has no penis, on the other hand. Freud understands that these contradictory perceptions can continue side by side without influencing each other as evidence of a split in the ego. In this way disavowal defends against a complete psychotic takeover of the personality. Nevertheless, disavowal is always a half-measure and, ultimately, an unsuccessful detachment from reality. In ‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’ (1938a), Freud extends the use of splitting to understand the existence of contradictory psychical groups from fetishism to neurosis and psychosis. In the fetish, splitting off and disavowing the unacceptable perception of the woman’s penis-less state fend off anxieties associated with castration. In the neurosis, Freud described ‘two different attitudes ... one of these ... belongs to the ego and the contrary one, which is repressed, belongs to the id’ (Freud, 1938a, p. 204). In psychosis, Freud maintained that the withdrawal from reality is never complete. It was Anna 0 mreuer and Freud, 1893-95) who first alerted Freud to a part of the mind that calmly observed ‘all the mad business’ (p. 45). He learned from patients after recovery from a psychotic breakdown that ‘at the time in some corner of their mind (as they put it) there was a normal person hidden, who, like a detached spectator, watched the hubbub of illness go past him’(Freud, 1938a, p. 202). Freud understood this as further evidence of the presence of splitting of the self as an organizing principle in mental life.

Contributions since Freud Since Freud’s groundbreaking insights into the nature of splitting in the ego and disavowal, psychoanalytic writers have turned to aspects of pre-genital phases of development to extend Freud’s views of the nature and function of the fetish. Bak (1953) emphasizes the pre-genital identification with the phallic mother, in the emergence of a fetish. ‘Separationfrom the mother is experienced as an equal, if not greater, danger than loss of the penis’ (p. 286). Freud emphasized that it is the absence of the penis in the mother that is particularly traumatic for the son implying, as Aarons (1975) points out, that mother’s imperfection reinforces the unreliability of the object relationship. ‘In other words, it is the precarious nature of the relationship with the mother that is the precondition for the trauma which occurs later, at the time of impact of castration anxiety’(1975, p. 201). According to Bak, separation anxiety and castration anxiety are overcome by a bisexual fetishistic compromise. The boy retains his mother without surrendering to the threat of castration by endowing his mother with a penis. The male genital, attributed to both genders, is the only acceptable reality.

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Greenacre (1953, 1955, 1960, 1968) observed two periods that were formative in the development of a fetish; pre-genital (like Bak) and genital. During the first period, the first eighteen months of life, disturbances in mother-child relations may affect the child‘s capacity to distinguish self from non-self, undermine primary identifications, and disturb ego development. Pre-genital emotional or physical separation from mother undermine the child’s ability to retrieve mother and, in turn, intensify the motivation to identify with her. Subsequent weakness in the ego would contribute to the magnitude of later castration trauma during the second critical period between three and four years of age. Early identification now includes her illusory penis that increases fears of loss of his penis, just as he endured earlier anxieties about losing mother. Aarons (1975) noted that early and later identifications with a castrated mother weaken the boy’s cathexis of his penis and his capacity to integrate it into an image of his masculine body. Early loss of the mother may be revived by the boy’s experience of her genital loss. ‘His own penis, as it were, became for him the inaccessible mother, and subject to loss’ (1975, p. 203). This dual function of the fetish, to defend against loss of mother, on the one hand, and castration anxiety, on the other hand, maintains a union of mother and son. ‘For the fetishist, to relinquish the belief in the fantasy of mother’s penis is to jeopardize his own identity, fused as it is with hers; and, perhaps, this is the reason why some cases of fetishism may be considered a defence against psychosis’ (Aarons, 1975, p. 202). The reader will have noticed that Freud did not consider the fetish in the context of the girl’s development. Most psychoanalytic writers have concentrated on the role and function of the fetish for the boy. However, there are notable exceptions. For instance, in his paper ‘Fearof Castration in Women’, Rado (1933) maintained that women whose body image incorporated an imaginary penis could experience castration anxiety. Grossman’s (1995) paper ‘A Woman with a Nipple Fetish’ was written as an illustration of castration anxiety in association to the displacement of the woman’s fantasied penis on to her nipple. However, Spiegel (1967) was uncertain about her evidence of a fetish in a woman patient. She noted that her clinical account of a female patient’s fetishistic use of a shoestring deviated from Freud’s (1927) definition of a fetish in two respects: ‘In contrast to the supposedly habitual attainment of orgasm through a fetish, it is not certain whether the patient did or did not have an orgasm with her fetish. Second, an unusual stress on its defensive aspect, i.e. undoing, seems to distinguish it from the classical fetish’ (p. 402). Waites’s (1982) study of a homosexual woman patient’schildhood fetish, the mother’s soiled menstrual pad, illustrated the development of a fetish out of a transitional object. Greenacre (1 969) has identified important distinctions between Winnicott’s(1953) transitional object and an infantile fetish. Winnicott views the transitional object as the infant’s first creation, which has attributes of


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mother and infant, but is external to both. Separation anxiety motivates the infant to freely create an object that is under the infant’s total control and functions to ‘convoy’ the child through its separation from mother. The transitional object is a normal phenomenon and develops where there is ‘good-enough’mothering. It represents not only the mother’s breast and body, but the total maternal environment. Winnicott saw the transitional object as a versatile illusionary support to a variety of new experiences because of the object’s link to earlier experiences. The transitional object tends to fade out during latency, or is reduced to a memento, converted into a toy, or workable coherent fantasy, like a bedtime comfort or a part of daytime play. The infantile fetish, on the other hand, is motivated by severe castration anxieties and represents an illusory penis to defend against fear of the female genitals. It is the product of a need for reparation because of the persistence of the delusion of defect in the maternal body. Although an infantile fetish may grow out of a transitional object, Greenacre points out that unlike the transitional object, the fetish is not versatile, but is a concrete form of defence, which relies upon disavowal, magic and sadistic fantasies, and tends to be incorporated permanently. She notes that the fetish develops in the context of a not ‘good-enough’mother who is unable to process her infant’s rage and where individuation has been delayed or incompletely achieved. The infantile fetish, which may be imposed by the mother, or even based upon her own use of a fetish, represents a feeding function, a replacement for a breast/penis in which the breast predominates. The transitional object is an illusion and remains so. The infantile fetish is a fixed delusion. While the transitional object helps the child negotiate separation anxieties in order to progress developmentally,the infantile fetish reinforces regression and oral furation as a solution to castration anxiety. The adoption of a fetish enables development to proceed, but at the cost of dependence upon disavowal and a delusional object. Freud recognized that splitting as a defence occurs in normal development. Other theorists place splitting at the centre of the infant’s emerging ego. Klein viewed splitting and projective identification as the fundamental defences underpinning the paranoid-schizoid position at the beginning of life. Fairbairn saw the ego as essentially schizoid because it contained normal and pathological splits. Winnicott’s ‘true’and ‘false’selves are also examples of early splitting in the personality. However, in the paper under discussion, Freud specifically identified splitting with disavowal as a later defensive response to castration anxiety, a consequence of retrospective meaning attributed to the woman’s penis-less state. Stewart (1970) has observed an additional meaning that is often overlooked, namely, the boy’s view of the absence of a penis as the result of destructive aggression, i.e. castration. This perception is likely to arouse anxieties in the boy, not only about the other’s (his father’s) aggression, but

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about his own aggression and the destruction of the female object. In this sense the creation of the fetish is a reparative act and defends against guilt regarding the man’s aggression.

Something familiar and something new Students of Freud have puzzled over his enigmatic comment about this paper, namely that he did not know whether his account of the splitting of the ego revealed ‘something long familiar and obvious or ... something entirely new and puzzling’ (1938a, p. 275). Freud said he was inclined to think it was the latter, but he never told us what that ‘something’was. Earlier I described the way Freud’s treatment of young hysteric women led him to think about defences as utilizing repression to block out unacceptable perceptions, thoughts and affects. However, as we can see in ‘Instinctsand Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), ‘Mourningand Melancholia’ (1917) and ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923a), Freud saw defence as a more psychological process, and conceived of the mind defending itself by acting on representations of self and object via splitting, projection and introjection. What is familiar about ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ is that Freud shows that meaning is attributed to current perceptions on the basis of earlier memories, which, in turn render the representation threatening and may trigger a repression of it. Repression functions by splitting off or removing the word presentation from the object or event and leaving a thing presentation. As Brook (1992) notes, ‘the representation is unchanged ... [but it is] the mind’s linguistic relationship to its representation that is manipulated ...’ (p. 349). The mechanism of splitting was not new. What was new in ‘Fetishism’(1927) and through his case study of a fetishist in ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1938b) was Freud’sdemonstration that the ego reinforced its splitting by adopting a particular ‘attitude’ to its perception, namely by disavowing the perception. By disavowal, Freud meant not an absence or distortion of actual perception, but rather a failure to fully appreciate the significance or implication of what is perceived. When accurate perception itself is warded off or interfered with, it is not denial or disavowal that is involved, but rather avoidance, scotomatization,conversion reaction, negation, or some other defensive operation. A fetishist would readily agree that a woman does not have a penis, and he might be able to give a very precise description of female anatomy. (Trunnell and Holt, 1974, p. 780)

As Brook points out, ‘Splittingof the Ego in the Process of Defence’ was ‘the first articulation of the idea that defence is a matter of how the mind manipulates its attitudes to representation, not something it does to representations themselves’ (Brook, 1992, p. 349). It is the simultaneous rejection, which is unconscious, and acceptance of reality that creates a split in the ego.


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Although Freud repeatedly discussed splitting from as early as 1894, Brook speculates that his introduction of the term ‘splitting of the ego’ suggested that ‘by the end of his life he may have been edging toward viewing it as the foundation of all defence’ (ibid., p. 349). Was this what Freud was referring to as ‘somethingnew and puzzling’? Why did Freud return to the subject of splitting and disavowal to write his last paper in Vienna?From the beginning Freud had recognized the ego’suse of splitting in normal development. One can wonder if Freud was puzzled that, during a period of his life when he was in pain from the cancer in his jaw and knew that his life and the lives of his family and friends were threatened by the Nazis, he chose to write about splitting and disavowal. Max Schur, Freud’s physician, analytic colleague and friend, who was with Freud frequently during his last years, said that Freud did not fear death, but ageing and pain which made it difficult to work. Schur observed in 1937, two years before his death and eight months before Freud wrote ‘Splittingof the Ego in the Process of Defence’,that it was ‘not the old superstitution,the fear of death, which was operant now, but the old wish to “die in harness”’ (Schur, 1972, p. 489). Did Freud realize that beyond fetishism and psychosis there was a reliance upon splitting and, indeed, disavowal to defend against other realistic perceptions, such as the spread of his cancer or the danger of the Nazis that directly threatened his survival, in order to continue to function, in order to carry on living, and in order to write ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’?

References Aarons 2 (1975) Fetish, fact and fantasy: a clinical study of the problems of fetishism. Int. R. Psychoanal. 2: 199-230. Bak RC (1953) Fetishism.j.Am. Psychoanal.Assoc. 1: 285-98. Breuer J, Freud S (1893-5) Studies on Hysteria. SE 2. Brook J (1992) Freud and splitting. Int. R. Psychoanal. 19: 335-50. Campbell D (1989) Charles: a fetishistic solution. In M Laufer, ME Laufer (eds), Developmental Breakdown and Psychoanalytic Treatment in Adolescence: Clinical Studies, pp. 55-73. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Darwin C (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: J. Murray. Fairbairn WRD (1941) A revised psychopathology of the psychoses and neuroses. Int. J. Psychoanal. 22: 250-79. Fairbairn WRD (1954) An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. New York: Basic Books. Ferenczi S (1909) Introjection and transference. In Sex in Psychoanalysis: The Selected Papers of Sandor Ferenczi, Vol 1. (1950), pp. 35-93. NewYork: Basic Books. Freud S (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4 and 5. Freud S (1910) Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. SE 9, 3-58. Freud S (1915) Instincts and TheirVicissitudes.SE 14, 109-40. Freud S (1917) Mourning and Melancholia. SE 14,239-58.

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Freud S (1923a) The Ego and the Id. SE 1 9 , 3 4 6 . Freud S (1923b) The Infantile Genital Organization. SE 19, 141-5. Freud S (1924) The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis. SE 19. Freud S (1927) Fetishism. SE 21,149-57. Freud S (1933[ 19321) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.SE 22. Freud S (1938a) An Outline of Psychoanalysis.SE 23,141-207. Freud S (1938b) Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence. SE 23,271-8. Freud S (1939[ 1934-381) Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. SE 23. Greenacre P (1953) Certain relationships between fetishism and the faulty development of the body image. Psychoanal. Study Child. 8: 79-97. Greenacre P (1955) Further considerations regarding fetishism. Psychoanal. Study Child. 10: 187-94. Greenacre P (1960) Further notes on fetishism. Psychoanal. Study Child. 15. Greenacre P (1968) Perversions: general considerations regarding their genetic and dynamic background. Psychoanal. Study Child. 23. Greenacre P (1969) The fetish and the transitional object. Psychoanal. Study Child. 24. Grossman L (1995) Awoman with a nipple fetish. Psychoanal. Q. 64: 746-8. Katan M (1964) Fetishism, splittingof the ego and denial. Int. J. Psychoanal. 45: 237-45. Klein M (1946) Notes of some schizoid mechanisms. Int. J. Psychoanal. 27: 99-110. Kohut H (1971) The Analysis of the Self. New York: Int. Univ. Press. LaplancheJ, Pontalis J-B (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Lichtenbeg JD, SlaprJv (1973) Notes on the concept of splitting and the defense mechanism of the splitting of representations. J. Am. Psychoanal.Assoc. 21: 772-87. LustmanJ (1977) On splitting. Psychoanal. Study Child. 32: 119-53. Rado S (1933) Fear of castration in women. Psychoanal. Q. 2: 425-75. Schur M. (1972) Freud: Living and Dying. Hogarth Press: London. Segal H (1964) Introduction to the Works of Melanie Klein. New York:Basic Books. Spiegel NT (1967) An infantile fetish and its persistence into young womanhood maturational stages of a fetish. Psychoanal. Study Child 22: 402-25. Strachey J (1940[ 19381) Editor’s Note for ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’. SE 23,273-4. Stewart W (1970) The split in the ego and the mechanism of disavowal. Psychoanal. Q. 39: 1-16. Trunnell E, Holt W (1974) The concept of denial or disavowal.J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 22: 269-84. Waites E (1982) Fixing women: devaluation,idealization, and the female fetish.J . h e r . Psychoanal.Assn. 30: 435-59. Winnicott DW (1953) Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: a study of the first not-me possession. Int. J. Psychoanal. 34: 89-97.

Index

and unconscious phantasy 217-218 attachment theory 68,69,71 autism 149-150

Abel, Karl 254 Abraham, Karl 9,33,127, 131,168, 22 1-222 abstraction, primitive 263-265 acting-out 32, 104, 190, 230 addictions 271 Adler, Alfred 8,207 adolescence homosexuality 24 1 splitting 276 affect trauma theory 3 affects, and external events 118 affirmation 262 aggression, in violent criminals 150 aggressive instinct 8, 145, 207 alpha function 266 Althusser, Louis 24 ambivalence 145, 146 anaclitic attachment 74, 167, 169 anality 15,130-131,183,185,219-221 analysis, analyst see psychoanalysis; psychoanalyst anatomical difference see genital difference AndreasSalome, Lou 9,121,142 animal phobias see phobias Anna 0 31-44,57,276,281 anorexia see eating disorders anxiety, irrational 7 , 6 3 4 4 anxiety hysteria 7,64,119,120,206,221 anxiety neurosis 4, 119, 120,211 anxious attachment 68 apoptosis 153-154 aprescoup (deferred action) 17,21, 117, 206-223,237 and sexuality 2 18

Bachelard, Gaston 24 Balier, Claude 150 Baht, Michael 31 belle indifference 64 Bettelheim, Bruno 22-23 Bion, Wilfred R. 78, 122, 217, 266-267, 270,272 bisexuality Dora 5-6 and hysteria 4 more common in women 244 predisposition 56, 59, 171, 195 WolfMan 212 borderline syndrome 3,42,147-148, 157, 222 breast attack 134,192 bad 266,267 cannibalisticattack 264 equated with penis 245,283 eroticized 195 frustrating 134,158 good 190,264,266 missing 266 primary object 192 and transitional object 268, 283 Breuer,Josef 2-3,31-40,49,57 brother-sister relationships Little Hans 68 Rat Man 178,180 WolfMan 207,208,211

287

288 Cacilie M. 111,277 cannibalism 12, 13, 124,130, 134, 140, 21 1 case studies methodology 14-19 Anna 0 3,31-44,276,281 Cacilie M. 111,277 Dora 5-6,47-60,241-242 Elisabeth von R 276-277 EmmyvonN 110-111 Irma 33 Katharina 4,276 Little Hans 6-7, 61-71 LucyR 276 Michael 81-85 Rat Man 15,177-188 Robert 79-81 Schreber 74,119,189-205 Simon 85-97 WolfMan 75,206-223 case study Little Hans 14 WolfMan 17,75,206-223 castration anxiety/complex/threat/trauma apres-coup 21,217,222 disavowal 279 and fetishism 274-283 Freud's views 14, 18, 243 gender-related 59, 216,247 Little Hans 62,63,64,66,68,69 Michael 84 primal 216,228 Schreber 16 Wolf Man 207,208,209,210,211, 212,219 censorship 13,20,120,165,166,167, 255 Charcot,Jean-Martin 2-3 childhood abuse, wish-fulfilment phantasies 24 childhood neurosis, Wolf Man case 206-207 childhood sexuality 6,207 see also infantile sexuality children autistic 149- 150 earliest sexual objects 74 feelings of sexual inferiority 143 observation 6,61, 74 universal phantasy of intercourse 220 'chimney sweeping',in Anna 0 case 37,39

Freud: A Modern Reader clinical phenomena, observation 102-103,116 compulsions of destiny 143 condemnation 257,259 conscience and ego ideal 167,168,173 moral 231 and superego 12,129 conscious Freud's definition 114 see also Cs system containing object, absence 196,200-202 conversion hysteria 119, 120 Cotard's syndrome 192, 203 cotton-reel game 101, 103, 143, 229 counter-projection 199-200 counter-transference in British psychoanalysis 246 early failures 188 erotic 33,43 in hysteria and borderline syndrome 42 negative feelings 78,83,84,85,86, 130,186,187,242 cruelty eroticized 195 see also sadism; sadomasochism Cs system 118,263 see also conscious; mind cultural ideas, as metaphors 22 daydreams 57 death instinct in anglophone psychoanalysis 142 in autistic children 149- 150 biological aspects 144, 153 as clinical concept 11, 142 and concept of negation 255 discovery/development 99, 100, 101, 106, 107,126,134,143, 144-146 in francophone psychoanalysis 11, 146-147,153-154,157 Kleinian concept 146 manifestation as destructiveness 148 in massacres 152 and narcissism 77, 271 origins 145 and sexuality 10- 11 and superego 134 decathexis 87,268,271 Declerck, Patrick 151- 152 defence, psychological process 284-285

Index defensive reflex 257 deferred action see aprescoup delusional system, Schreber case 16-17, 194-196,202 denial see disavowal Denis, Paul 153-154 depression essential 149 Kleinian view 192 and narcissism 74, 189 and paranoia 16,17,189,193-194 Schreber case 16,17, 190-194, 96, 197,199,200,203,207 understanding 12,140 Wolf Man case 2 14 depth psychology 104 desexualization 77, 170, 173 destructive instinct 18,77, 173, 27 destructiveness in borderline states 147- 148 clinical manifestations 148 and death instinct 65,98, 151, 158 ininfancy 193 Kleinian view 201 and narcissism 87 in Schreber’scase 194,201 Deutsch, Helene 13, 131-134 differences, small 152- 153 disavowal 262,270,279-280,284 disgust, as sign of hysteria 50 dissociation, in the hysteric 276-277 dominance, Schreber case 200 Dora 5-6,4740,241-242 double bind 73 dreams in Dora’s case 51-56 importance 48 in Michael’s case 82,83-84,85 no concept of negation 254-255 in Robert’s case 79-81 and sexuality 5-7 in Simon’scase 85,86 traumatic 143 and the unconscious 120 as universal language 263 in war neuroses 103 in the Wolf Man case 208-209 drives biological nature 118 conflict between 88-89 destructive 269

289 duality 64-65,74 Freud’stheory 8 , 9 relation to intellectual functions 263 transformation into objects 271 eating disorders 232, 271 ego cathexis 74,75 defence mechanisms 166 Freud’sviews 11-12, 166, 270 ideal 75,152,153 libidinal cathexis 88, 89 narcissism 77 need for love 124,125 asobject 7 origin and development 72,96,166 Splitting 75,221,262,274-286 unlovable 134 ego ideal 8,167-169 largely replaced by superego 13-14, 165,171,173 Elisabeth von R 276-277 EmmyvonN 110-111 emotions biological basis 118 unconscious 118 family, ideal modality 152 fanaticism 152-153 fantasy see phantasies father crucially important 19 role in procreation 70 father-daughter relationships 224-233, 236 father-son relationships Loren2 case 180,182,185 Schreber case 199 Wolf Man case 208 feelings, conscious representations 118 female analysts 242 female genitals 53, 57 female sexuality 243-244 Freud’s views 2, 58 feminine, essential dimension of psychoanalytical ‘listening’ 59 feminism 245,246 fetish 275,279-280,281-284 first topographical model see mind First World War, Freud’sreaction to 11, 97,144-145,152

290 fixation 53, 119 Flechsig, Professor 191, 194, 196, 197, 198,199,200,202 foreclosure/rejection/repudiation 267, 270 fragmentation 193 free association 3, 5,6, 33,48, 110, 157, 208 Freud, Sigmund abandonment of neurotica 2 15 analytical technique 14-19,66,177, 186-187,188,256 attitude to philosophical thought 93, 108 attitude to women 242 auteanalysis 113 breaks with Stekel, Adler and Jung 114 case studies 14 collaborationwith Breur 2-3 concept of castration anxiety/complex/threat/trauma 14, 18,243 concept of female sexuality 2,58 concept of narcissism 7-8,74 concept of negation 19-21 concept of obsessionality 183-185 concept of perversion 225 concept of phantasy 17 concept of pleasure 143-144,155 concept of repression 9 concept of splitting 12,20-21,275, 276 concept of transference 5,32,38,56, 186-187,188 concept of the unconscious 109, 110 construction of theoretical models 14 correspondencewith Fliess 4, 5, 24, 113, 117,119,126,215 Darwinianviews 22,169,251,277 definition of the conscious 114 development of ideas 23,24 development of views on Oedipus complex 66 educational agenda 65 implicit use of the negative 269 influences on 110 last years in Vienna 285 metapsychologicalwork 8-13, 93-108,113,119-120 reaction to First World War :1,97, 144-145,152

Freud: A Modern Reader relationship with Hans’sfather 69-70 response to criticism 48, 56 self-analysis 47 theory of drives 8,9 theory of the mind 217,218 use of culture as metaphor 22 views on homosexuality 239-241 work objectified in English translation 22-23 scientific and hermeneutic approaches 22-23 writings ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ 15, 17-18, 59,66,219,224-233 ‘A Note on the Unconscious in PsycheAnalysis’ 114 ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men’ 238 ‘An Outline of PsycheAnalysis’ 2 1, 280-281 ‘AnalysisTerminable and Interminable’ 2 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ 5, 11,72, 98, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108,142-161,220,229 ‘Characterand Anal Eroticism’ 220 ‘Civilizationand its Discontents’ 145 ‘Constructionsin Analysis’ 262 ‘Contributionsto a Discussion on Masturbation’ 113 ‘Dora.Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria’ 47-60 ‘Female Sexuality’ 58,243 ‘Femininity’ 58,243 ‘Fetishism’ 12, 270,274,279-280, 284 ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ 277 ‘Formulationson the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ 166, 215-216,259 ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ 206- 22 3 ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ 14,75,145,168,169 ‘Hysteria’(1888) 56-57 ‘HystericalFantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality’ 57 ‘Inhibitions,Symptoms and Anxiety’ 7,66,67

Index ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ 107,145,185,259,277,284 ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ 254 ‘Jokesand Their Relation to the Unconscious’ 215,257,265 ‘Leonard0 da V i c i and a Memory of His Childhood’ 8,88,129 ‘Metapsychology’ 95 ‘Mosesand Monotheism’ 145 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ 7, 11-13,72,75,124-141,145,168,

186,192,221,278,284 ‘Negation’ 19-20,253-272 ‘New Introductory Lectures’ 14, 126 ’Note on the Mystic Writing Pad’ 263 ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ 15, 177-188 ‘Observationson Transference Love’ 5,42 ‘On Dreams’ 19,254 ‘On the History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement’ 31 ‘On Narcissism’ 7-8, 14, 72-90, 166,173,186 ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism’ 220 ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’ 113 ‘Preparatory Essays for Metapsychology’ 9 ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ 23, 57, 94, 261 ‘Psychologyfor Neurologists’ 112113 ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis’ 113 ‘Remembering,Repeating and Working Through’ 5,104 ‘Repression’ 119 ‘Screen Memories’ 49 ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ 12,274-286 “Studies in Hysteria’ 2, 3, 31, 38, 43, 276, 376 ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ 57 ‘The Analysis of a Phobia in a FiveYear-Old Boy’ 61-71 ‘The Disposition to Obsessional

291 Neurosis’ 220 ‘TheDynamics of Transference’ 5 , 42,60,113 ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ 59, 146,220 ‘TheEgo and the Id’ 8, 12, 14, 72, 75,125,145,165,166,170,185, 221,278,284 ‘TheInfantile Genital Organization’ 66,279 ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ 19, 23,113,120,215 ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’ 278-279 ‘ThePsychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality’ 234-249 ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ 215 ‘TheSplitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ 262 ‘TheUnconscious’ 9-10, 13,93, 108,109-123,165,255 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ 145 ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ 15,51,61,63,105,167, 220,240-241,662 ‘TotemandTaboo’ 8, 113, 145, 169 ‘TwoPrinciples of Mental Functioning’ 261 ‘Types of Onset of Neurosis’ 1 13 ‘Why War?’ 145 Freudian theory, interpretation 22 Gardiner, Muriel 213 gay liberation 245 gaze role in object relations 189-190 role in Schreber’s psychosis 1%- 199 gender 242-244,246 genital difference 63,65,66,70,211, 274-275,279-280 LittleHans 6-7 Green, Andre 76-78,87,147-148 Greenacre, Phyllis 282, 283 group dynamics 169 group members, identification with each other 153 guilt persecutory 136, 140 unconscious 24, 130, 136, 146, 173

292 hallucination,negative 36, 40,86, 148, 271,272 Hans see case studies, ‘Little Hans’ Hartmann, Heinz 142,146 hatred, human propensity for 145 homosexuality as defence against anxiety 244 desire for the father 7, 16 female 18-19,56,234-249 Freud’s views 239-241 legalization 245 in ‘Leonardo’ 129 Little Hans case 67, 70 not a psychiatric disorder 246 WolfMan case 75,211,212,219 hypnoid states, dissociation 277 hypochondriasis,Schreber case 191,192 hysteria amnesia of precipitating causes 182 development 57-58 distinct from borderline syndrome 3, 41-42 earlyaccounts 31-32 erotic transference 42 Freud and Breur‘s work 2-3 linked with primal scene 4 projective identification 34,41 sexualdrama 34 and sexuality 4-5 splitting of consciousness in the 276-277 hysterical conversion 64 id development of concept 263,269 disorganized 166 anddrives 263 genetic contents 172 hated by ego 131 murderous nature 139 negative aspects 2 1, 269 object choice 171 replaced the unconscious 20,269 and repression 21,166,281 and sexuality 246 source of pleasure 143 and superego 125,172, 173,225,231 in topographical model 107, 165, 166, 255 idealization, in narcissism 73 identification

Freud: A Modern Reader adhesive 150 with the child-bearing mother 195 concept 96 with father 182, 183 in hysteria 50 levels 169-170 with lost object 186 narcissistic 75, 131-134, 140 with parents 169-170, 171, 172 illness, organic 148, 149 imagination, as phantasied space 40 impulse destructive 144, 154, 155, 156, 157 Freud’s concept 263 incest taboo, repression 88 infantile sexuality darker side 104, 105, 106 Dora 57 historically determined 104 importance of 47,61,62-63 latent phase 172 Little Hans 6 and neurosis 61,70 repression 61,66 ubiquitous 32 WolfMan 214 inner discourse 103 instincts concept 96 considered ‘unfashionable’ 142 defusion 149- 150,255,262 duality 93 intellectual functions, relation to the drives 263 intellectual judgement 256-258, 261 Internationale Zeitschrift fur htliche Psychoanalyse 114 introjection 12, 129, 139, 140, 221 inversion 240 Jones, Ernest, biography of Freud 93, 94, 97 Jung, Carl G. 8,42-43,207 K and -K 267,270 Katharina 4,276 Kinsey reports 236 Kleinian views death instinct 142 depression 192, 193 guilt 136

Index homosexuality 245 Lacan’s criticism 146 phallic monism 67 projective identification 270 sadism 131 symbol formation 264-265 symbolized primal scene 34,41,42 Kohut, Heinz 142 Kraft-Ebbing, Richard von 36,40 Lacan, Jacques 72,76,146,189,247,253, 267,269 language anddreams 254 importance of 247 structuring 270 leader, role 153, 169 lesbianism see homosexuality, female libidinal cathexis 8, 24, 88,89, 108, 166, 192,232 libidinal impulses 167, 173 libidinal position, never willingly abandoned 127,139 libido involvement in massacres 152 and narcissism 76, 89 oral phase 130 oscillation 237, 270 regression into the ego 11 and self-destruction 23 1-232 withdrawal 73,75,128 Life instinct 93,150 linguistics, concept of negation 253 Little Hans 6-7,61-71 Loewenstein,Rudolph M. 146 Lorenz, Paul see Rat Man love object choice 238-240 hated 129, 131 LucyR 276 MackBrunswick, Ruth 212,213,221-222 mania, as victory 136 manic state 168, 169 manic-depressivepsychosis see melancholia Marty, Pierre 148-149 masochism in Dora’s case 59 erogenous nature 146, 220, 230 ‘infantile’representations 224

293 moral 146,173,230,231,233 and sadism 144,208,210,211,219, 23 1 in tramps 150-151 massacres 152- 153 masturbation Anna 0 case 40, 41 Dora case 52-53,57 and female homosexuality 236 Little Hans case 62,63 punishment 274 punishment for 274-275 Rat Man case 15, 182, 185 WolfMancase 208,211,219 maternal image, ‘purified’ 232 melancholia active and passive aspects 125 case study 132-134 consequence of unconscious hostility 127 double wound 136,139 empty ego 131 fear of death 126 identification 11-13, 192,221 introjection 12,75, 221 and mourning 168 and object loss 128 and obsessional neurosis 221 projection and identification 11- 13 self-limiting 168 and sexual anaesthesia 112, 126 trigger 129 memory chronological overlapping 49 interaction with phantasy 218 and memory-traces 120 metapsychology see Freud, Sigmund, metapsychological work Michael, case study 81-85 mind fvst topographical model (Cs-Pcs Ucs) 9, 13, 185, 217, 218, 263 second topographical model 107,165, 255 structural model 13-14,24,165-174 mirror phase 72,73,76,189-190 mother ‘goodenough’ 283 safeplace 88 substitutes 88,271-272 mother-child relationship 88, 195, 245,

294


narcissism in British and French literature 72 concept 76,100,101 and death instinct 77 Freud’s ideas 7-8,74 maternal 88 and melancholia 166-167 mother and child 76 normal and pathological 74 positive and negative 87 primary and secondary 76 resistance to analysis 77 role in early development 167 of small differences 152 narcissistic personality 76,87 narcissistic rage 142 narcissistic withdrawal 127, 128 Narcissus myth 73, 88 negation double 253-255 in Freud’s work 19-21 linguistic approach 253 and splitting 20-21 as substitute for repression 255, 257 see also Freud, Sigmund, writings, ‘Negation’ negative capability 267 negative therapeutic reaction 24, 102, 130,138,145,146,174,271 neuroses hostile impulses against parents 127 psychogenesis 47

in mourning and melancholia 11,12, 126-130,168 and phantasy 215 object relations internal 7, 11, 12-13,72, 129, 221 theory 168,237,246 obsessional neurosis 15, 119, 120, 156, 173,177-188 and melancholia 221 WolfMancase 206,208,210,211, 220,222 obsessionalcompulsive neurosis 15, 177, 185,187 obsessionality and anal eroticism 15 Freud’stheories 127, 183-185 memory of precipitating causes 182 Oedipus in Colonus 135,140 Oedipus complex in boys and girls 171 in British psychoanalysis 245 development of Freud’s views 32,66, 231,243 identificationwith parents 169-170 Little Hans 7,64 negative 67-69,171 parents’ involvement 236 and phantasy 217,228 repression 172 triangular 171 omnipotence delusions 201 projection 197 operational thinking 149 oral dependence 126 oral impulses 258,259 overdetermination/multiple determination 10. 115

object cathexes 128, 129 abandoned 8, 17,72,75,129,132, 170,171,173 in mania 136 object choice 128, 129 anaclitic or attachment 74 and identification 242 narcissistic 8,72, 88 object loss awareness of 8 andego 193 Klein’s views 265

Pappenheim, Bertha see Anna 0 paranoia 16,119,127,193-194 Paris Psychoanalytic Society 146,150,151 PcsCs system 9, 13, 120, 121 penis envy 58-59,66,242,243 perception 113, 116,261 perversion 225, 240, 246 phallic monism 66-67 phantasies analysis 226 aprescoup 2 17-2 18 construction and development 225,

260,262,282 mother-daughter relationships 232, 236, 243-244 mourning 85,87,96,113,114,128,168 murder 150- I5 1

Index 226,244 Freud's notions 17 and historical truth 2 15 location 40-41 metapsychological status 214 organizing role 2 16 primal 216-217 primary function 2 15 unconscious 214-218 Philoctetes 135- 140 philosophical thought, Freud's attitude to 93,108 phobia of animals 61 defence against anxiety 64 phobias, of animal 7,61-71,206, 207-208,210,211 phobic presentation of borderline patients 147 pleasure Freud's concept 143-144,155 philosophical concept 154 pleasure ego 259,260,278 pleasure principle 103, 120, 121, 143, 145,166 polymorphous perversity 51,240 post-hypnotic suggestion 114 preconscious thoughts 165 see also Pcs-Cs system pre-genital stage 51,62, 185, 208, 220, 281,282 preaedipal phase 18, 19, 58,219, 243, 245,280 pregnancy and childbirth, Hans's curiosity 65,67,70 primal scene conviction of reality 216 effect on masculine and feminine identifications 7 location 41 negation or exclusion 78 phantasy 4, 216,228 WolfMancase 209-210,211 primitive peoples 74, 169 process, primary and secondary 9 projective identification 4, 34,41, 42,43, 122,134,186,187, 193,237,266, 270,283 in borderline syndrome 42 in hysteria 34, 42 psychic apparatus 113

295 psychic reality 32 psychoanalysis of criminals 150- 151 national differences 22, 245-246 psychoanalysts anglophone 8, 19,245-247 degree of inclusion in the patient's world 78 francophone 8-9,11,19,146-147 psychoanalytical theory 95,96,99,100 psychosis as attempt at recovery 75 hidden spectator 276, 280-281 possible analytic treatment 105 psychoanalytical knowledge 116 psychosomatic symptoms 148- 149 psychotic solution, shamelessness 202-203 punishment, phantasies 224-233

R rape 4, 150-151 Rat Man (Paul Lorenz) 15,177-178 rats, symbolic meanings 183 reality, external and internal 121, 214-217 reality ego 259,260,261,278 reality principle 166 reality testing 260-261 recollections versus constructions 210 reconstruction 185, 187 regressive conduct 105 religious obsession see Wolf Man repetition, in treatment 143, 145 repetition compulsion 9, 10, 11, 104, 105, 106, 107,229 representation compulsion 229 representations and perception 269 splitting 277-279 repression and anxiety 7,120 escapes by splitting 278-279 Freud's concept 9,118-1 19 how it functions 284 of infantile sexuality 62,63 and negation 256 role 216 rescue phantasy 238 Ribas, Denys 149-150,153 Ricoeur, Paul 23-24

296 Robert, case study 79-81 sadism against the internalized object 11, 145 in children 264 and death instinct 150 and the ego 131,155 Freud’s theories 144, 184,220 and guilt 130,133,144 Klein’s view 264 andmasochism 144,208,210,211, 219,231 in superego 133 sadomasochism Schreber case 195 WolfMancase 208,210-211,212,219 schizophrenia 121, 166 Schreber, Daniel Paul, case study 16-17, 74,189-205,267 Schur, Max 285 second topographical model see mind seduction by the father 57 phantasy 18,216, 220, 224, 228 Segal, Hanna 265,266,278 self-object relationship, in melancholia 125 self-destructiveness 138 separation anxiety 281 sex anddeath 43 and gender 242-243 sexual behaviour, research 246 sexual choice, formation 235-238 sexual instinct, in opposition to death instinct 107 sexual knowledge 6, 15, 57,65, 178, 182 sexual orientation change with age 246 development 239-240 sexuality contentious issues 234-235 latent in childhood 172 and repetition compulsion 105 and repression 229 as socioculturalconstruct 241 shame, psychotic’sfreedom from 202-203 siblings birth 62,63 rivalry 226,244

Freud: A Modern Reader see also brother-sister relationships;

sister-sister relationships Simon, case study 85-97 sister-sister relationships 132-134 sleep, narcissistic state 72, 167 Sophocles, Philoctetes 13, 135-140 soul apparatus 112 soul murder 194,201,204 Spielrein, Sabina 42-43, 108 spitting out 260, 264 splitting as defence mechanism 139, 186, 193,

196 anddrives 119 ego 75,221,262,274-286 Freud‘s concept 12,20-21,73,105, 275,276 importance in development 283 and narcissistic injury 186 Strachey,James 127, 165, 171,174,206, 214,218,274,280 sublimation 34, 77, 108, 110, 170, 241, 265,270,272 suicidal ideation active and passive 137 Anna 0 37,241 Dora 48,241 and female homosexuality 236,238 in melancholia 124, 125 Michael 81,82,83,85 in Philoctetes 137 Rat Man 177,178,180,181 Robert 79 Schreber 190-191, 197 subjective disinvolvement 27 1 suicide Freud’sviews 125, 127, 133 of Wolf Man’s relatives 206, 2 13, 22 1 suicide bombers 152 Sulloway, Frank 22 superego critical nature 193 development of concept 12,14 English terminology 174 formation 129 harshness 172-173 and id 172 and identification 170-173 murderous 133,134 sadistic 125

Index symbol formation 263-266 symbolization and representation 263 Tausk, Victor 121 theatrical metaphor 41,42 thought apparatus 113 tramps, personalities 150- 151 transference analyst’sexperience 42 in Anna 0 case 31-40 erotic 4 Freud’sawareness of 186-187, 188 Freud’searly thoughts 5, 32, 38, 56 incestuous force 230-231 prototype 31 and punishment phantasy 227 relationship between Freud and Hans’s father 69-70 repetition of violent situations 104 transference cure 36 transitional object 268, 282-283 translation, between unconscious and conscious 116 traumas adolescent 277 childhood 277 fictitious or recollected 31, 32 phantasy 3 physiological reaction 277 traumatic neurosis 103 truth, historical and psychical 2 15 twin, ideal 73,80 Ucs system 9, 13, 114, 120, 121 unconscious clinical basis 111

297 comparison with the repressed 115-1 16 different approaches and sources 110-113 Freud’sconcept 109,110 meanings of the concept 117 and metapsychology 119 relationship with conscious 115, 116 replaced by the id 20-2 1 and repression 166 source 113 theoretical basis 111- 112 United States psychoanalysis 246-247 research into sexual behaviour 246

vagina, awareness of 57,66 vengeance, in Dora’s case 54,55,56,58 violent behaviour 78,79,81,82,83,85 of parents 85-86 violent criminals, defusion of instincts 150 voyeurism 14,240

war see First World War war neuroses 103 Wilson, Edmund, ‘The Wound and the BOW’ 13,134-135 Winnicott, Donald W. 142, 150, 190, 260, 267-268,270,282-283 WolfMan 17,75,206-223 words, antithetical meanings 254-255 working-through 105

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Freud and Psychoanalysis (Pocket Essential series)

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The Penguin Freud Reader

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Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

The Trauma of Freud: Controversies in Psychoanalysis

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Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (Core Cultural Theorists series)

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