Beyond the Pleasure Principle (32 page)

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

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

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

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

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

As a rule, a phobia only emerges after the individual has first been stricken by fear in a particular set of circumstances, for example when he is in the street, or in a train, or on his own. The fear is thereupon shut out, but reappears whenever the protective stratagem cannot be maintained. The phobia mechanism does splendid service as a means of defence, and tends to exhibit marked stability. In many cases – though not in all – the defensive battle is carried a stage further, being henceforth directed against the symptom.

What we have learnt about fear in the context of phobias also remains relevant to obsessional neurosis. It is not difficult to reduce the overall situation characteristic of obsessional neurosis to that characteristic of phobias. Here, the motor driving all subsequent symptom-formation is plainly the ego's fear
vis-á-vis
the super-ego. The hostility of the super-ego constitutes the danger situation that the ego must fight shy of. There is not the least semblance of projection here: the danger is wholly internalized. But if we ask ourselves what the ego is so fearful of suffering at the hands of the super-ego, then we are compelled to conclude that the punishment threatened by the latter is simply a refined version of the punishment of castration. Just as the super-ego is the father in depersonalized form, so too the specific fear of being castrated by him has changed into an indefinite social or consciential fear.
³⁶
But this fear remains latent; the ego keeps it at a safe distance by obediently carrying out whatever commands, prescriptions and penances are imposed upon it. If it is prevented from so doing, then the most extreme discomfiture immediately ensues, which we may reasonably regard as the equivalent of fear, and which patients themselves equate with fear.
We thus arrive at the following conclusion: fear consists in a reaction to a particular danger situation; the ego saves itself from this fear by taking action to withdraw from the situation or avoid it altogether. Now one might be tempted to say that symptoms are produced in order to avoid any fear being generated in the first place – but this does not really get us very far. It is more accurate to say that symptoms are produced in order to avoid the
danger situation
signalled by the fear that has already been generated. In the cases considered so far, however, this danger lay in castration or in something that can be traced back to castration.

If fear is the ego's reaction to danger, then it may seem logical to construe traumatic neurosis - which so often ensues where the individual has survived a life-threatening danger - as a direct result of fear of death or fear for life and limb,
³⁷
thereby disregarding castration and the dependent status of the ego.
³⁸
This indeed is what most of those with clinical experience of the traumatic neuroses of the last war
³⁹
have done, and the triumphant cry has gone up that we now have proof positive that a threat to the self-preservation drive can produce a neurosis without any involvement on the part of sexuality, and without paying the slightest heed to the complex processes posited by psychoanalysis. It really is extremely regrettable that there exists not a single reliable analysis of a traumatic neurosis. Our regrets relate not to the denial of the aetiological importance of sexuality, for any such denial has long since been refuted by the introduction of the concept of narcissism, which places libidinal cathexis of the ego in the same category as object-cathexes and stresses the libidinal nature of the self-preservation drive; rather, we regret this analytical deficit because we have thereby lost a priceless opportunity to gain crucial information about the relationship between fear and symptom-formation. In the light of everything we know about the more straightforward neuroses of everyday life, it seems highly unlikely that any neurosis could be brought about solely by the presence of objective danger, without any involvement on the part of the deeper unconscious layers of the psychic apparatus. However, there is nothing within the unconscious capable of giving substance to our notion of the extinction of life. Whereas castration is
rendered imaginable to us by our daily experience of being separated from the contents of our bowels, and by the loss of the maternal breast that we experience when weaned, experiences akin to death have never happened to us, or else – like fainting-fits – have left no identifiable trace. I therefore hold to the supposition that the fear of death has to be understood as an analogue of the fear of castration, and that the situation to which the ego reacts is that of being abandoned by its guardian the super-ego – that is, by the forces that rule our destiny – and hence deprived for ever of the shield safeguarding it from dangers all and sundry.
⁴⁰
It also needs to be borne in mind that in experiences leading to traumatic neurosis the barrier that normally provides protection against external stimuli is breached, and excessive quanta of excitation descend upon the psychic apparatus; this means that here we encounter a
second
possibility, namely that fear is not only
signalled
as an affect, but is also
created anew
out of the economic conditions of the situation.

In asserting just now that the ego becomes habituated to the notion of castration by regularly experiencing object-loss, we have arrived at a new concept of fear. Whereas hitherto we have regarded fear as a signal of affect indicating danger, it now appears to us – since it so often involves the danger of castration – to constitute reaction to a loss, a separation. While numerous considerations might instantly seem to gainsay this conclusion, we none the less cannot help being struck by a most remarkable similarity: birth constitutes the first experience of fear, at any rate for human beings, and in objective terms signifies separation from the mother; it might therefore be likened to castration of the mother (based on the equation ‘child = penis’). Now it would be highly gratifying if fear were subsequently to be repeated as a symbol of separation every time an actual separation occurred; unfortunately, however, we cannot build an argument on this similarity given the fact that birth is of course not
subjectively
experienced as separation from the mother, the thoroughly narcissistic foetus being altogether unaware of the mother as object. A further objection can also be raised namely that the affective reactions to separation are well known to
us, and that we experience them as pain and sorrow, not as fear. At the same time, however, we are mindful that in our discussion of sorrow we were at a loss to understand why it should be so painful.
⁴¹

It is time for us to pause for thought. What we are looking for is plainly some decisive insight that will reveal to us the whole nature of fear, a clear perspective on the problem that will neatly separate truth from error. But that is difficult to achieve; fear is not easy to pin down. So far we have managed to come up with nothing but contradictory possibilities, none of which could be preferred over any other except on the basis of prejudice. I suggest that we now take a different approach: let us impartially rehearse all our arguments on the subject of fear, and in so doing abandon any expectation of arriving at an all-embracing new synthesis.

Fear, then, is first and foremost something that is
felt
. We call it a ‘state of affect’, even though we don't actually know what an affect is. This feeling is blatantly unpleasurable in nature, but that is not a sufficient description of it, for not every form of unpleasure may be termed fear. There are other feelings of an unpleasurable kind, such as tension, pain and sorrow – and fear must accordingly have other characteristics besides this quality of unpleasure. Question: will we ever succeed in understanding the differences between these various unpleasurable states of affect?

None the less there is one thing we
can
deduce from the feeling of fear: its quality of unpleasure appears to have a distinct character of its own (although probable, this is difficult to prove, as there would seem to be nothing very obvious to go on). But quite apart from this special quality of unpleasure that is so difficult to isolate, we also perceive more specific
physical
sensations when fear is present, which we connect with specific organs. Since the physiology of fear is not our concern here, it will be sufficient for us to mention
just one or two representative examples of these sensations, the most frequent and most obvious being those involving the respiratory organs and the heart. They afford us proof that motor innervations, in other words release processes, play a part in the overall phenomenon of fear. Our analysis of the state of fear thus reveals the following features: 1) a specific quality of unpleasure; 2) actions involving release; 3) perception of these actions.