Beyond the Pleasure Principle (37 page)

B
Fear: Supplementary Remarks

The affect of fear exhibits certain characteristics the investigation of which promises to bring us further enlightenment. For one thing, fear is unmistakably associated with
expectation
; it is fear of something. For another, it is in the very nature of fear to be
non-specific
and to
have no object
. In proper linguistic usage it even changes its name if it acquires an object, the word ‘fear’ being replaced by the word ‘dread’.
⁷⁰
Furthermore, fear is not only associated with danger but also with neurosis, a topic we have long been struggling to elucidate. The question arises: why aren't
all
fear reactions neurotic, and why do we regard so many of them as normal? It is high time we undertook a thorough appreciation of the difference between objective fear and neurotic fear.

Let us take as our starting point the problem we have just been dealing with. The progress we made consisted in the fact that we went back a stage and concentrated on the danger situation rather than the fear reaction. If we make the same shift with respect to the problem of objective fear, its solution becomes quite straightforward. Objective danger is a danger that we know, and objective fear is fear of such a danger, that is, one that is known. Neurotic fear is fear of a danger that we do not know. Thus we first have to work out what that neurotic danger consists in; and psychoanalysis has shown us that it is a danger posed by the drives. In bringing to consciousness this danger that was previously quite unknown to the ego, we blur the distinction between objective fear and neurotic fear and are thus able to treat the latter as if it were the former.

In the face of objective danger we display two reactions: an affective one, namely a surge of fear, and a practical one, for the purposes of self-protection. It seems likely that the same thing happens in the face of dangers posed by our drives. We are familiar with situations of purposive interplay between the two reactions,
whereby one gives the signal that serves to trigger the other; but we are also familiar with the
counter
-purposive situation of fear-induced paralysis, whereby one reaction proliferates at the expense of the other.

There are certain cases that display a mixture of objective fear and neurotic fear. The danger is known and real, but the fear shown towards it is disproportionate, it is more than we think it ought to be. This excess over and above what is objectively appropriate clearly reveals the neurotic element. But such cases tell us nothing fundamentally new. Psychoanalysis reveals the fact that, linked to the known objective danger, there is an unrecognized danger emanating from the drives.

We can make further progress if we do more than step back just one stage from fear to danger and go on to ask what constitutes the real
core
of the danger situation, its most significant element. Clearly it is the process whereby we assess our own strength in relation to the magnitude of the danger, and acknowledge our helplessness in the face of it –physical helplessness in the case of objective danger, psychic helplessness in the case of danger emanating from our drives. In making this judgement we are guided by the actual experiences we have been through in the past; whether the judgement is right or wrong is immaterial to the outcome. Let us use the term ‘traumatic’ to designate this situation in which we experience a sense of helplessness; we then have good grounds for drawing a distinction between the
traumatic situation
and the
danger situation
.

Now it marks an important advance in our powers of self-preservation when this sort of traumatic situation of helplessness is not just passively awaited, but actively foreseen and expected. The situation that offers the requisite conditions for such expectation may be termed the ‘danger situation’, for it is here that the fear signal is given out. What this signal says is that I am expecting a situation of helplessness to arise, or else that I am reminded by the current situation of one of my previous traumatic experiences. I therefore
anticipate
the trauma, and so long as there is still time to ward it off I seek to behave as if it were already present. Fear is therefore on the one hand the
expectation
of future trauma, and on
the other a
repetition
of past trauma in a mild form. The two characteristics of fear that attracted our attention thus have different origins. Its association with expectation appertains to the danger situation, whereas its non-specificness and lack of an object appertain to the traumatic situation of helplessness, itself anticipated in the danger situation.

Having set forth this sequence ‘fear – danger – helplessness (trauma)’, we can now summarize the position as follows. A danger situation is a situation of helplessness that we simultaneously recognize, remember and expect; fear is the original reaction to helplessness in the trauma that is then subsequently reproduced in the danger situation as a signal calling for help; the ego, having experienced the trauma passively, now actively repeats a reproduction of it in diluted form, in the hope of being able to keep control of the way it evolves. We know that children behave in precisely this way with respect to all the experiences they find distressing, in that they reproduce them in their play; by thus moving from a passive to an active role they seek to assert control in psychic terms over the experiences that life brings them.
⁷¹
If this is what ‘abreacting the trauma’ is supposed to mean, then we can't really raise any further objections to it.
⁷²
The really crucial matter, however, is the initial displacement of the fear reaction from the
presence
of the situation of helplessness in which it originated, to the
expectation
of such a situation, that is, the danger situation. Thereafter ensue the various further displacements from the danger to the
determinant
of the danger, that is, loss of the object, and the modified forms of such loss mentioned earlier.
⁷³

The undesirable consequence of ‘spoiling’ a young child is that the danger of object-loss – the object being the means of protection against any and every situation of helplessness – becomes unduly magnified in comparison to all the other dangers. The individual is thereby encouraged to
remain
in the state of childhood, which is characterized by motor and psychic helplessness.

We have not so far had occasion to view objective fear any differently from the way we view neurotic fear. We know what the distinction between them is: an objective danger is one posed by an
external object; a neurotic danger arises from demands made by the individual's own drives. In so far as these demands on the part of the drive are objectively real, neurotic fear, too, can be regarded as having an objective basis. We have seen that if fear and neurosis appear to be particularly intimately connected, this is simply because the ego uses the fear reaction to defend itself against dangers posed by the drives just as it does against external, objective dangers – but due to a certain imperfectness of our psychic apparatus the particular thrust of this defensive activity leads ultimately to neurosis. We have also come to the conclusion that the demands of the drives often pose an (internal) danger only because their gratification would give rise to an external danger, in other words because the
internal
danger represents an
external
one.

Equally, on the other hand, the external (objective) danger has to have been internalized in some way if it is to be of any significance to the ego; it has to have been recognized as bearing a relationship to a previously experienced situation of helplessness.
⁷⁴
Human beings seem to have been endowed with little or no instinctive awareness of dangers that threaten from without. Young children constantly do things that endanger their life, and for that very reason cannot do without their protective object. In our relationship to a traumatic situation, where we find ourselves helpless, there is a convergence of external danger and internal danger of objective danger, and the demands of a drive. No matter if in one case the ego experiences a pain that never ceases, while in another it experiences a build-up of need that can find no gratification: in both cases the economic situation is the same, and the subject's motor helplessness manifests itself in psychic helplessness.

The puzzling phobias of early childhood deserve further mention here. We found that some of them – fear of strangers, of darkness, of being alone – can be understood as reactions to the danger of object-loss. In other cases – fear of small animals, storms etc. – an answer to the conundrum might lie in the argument that they are the attenuated remnants of a congenital alertness to objective dangers, an alertness that is so strongly developed in other animals. The only part of this archaic inheritance that remains purposive for
human beings is that relating to object-loss. Where these particular childhood phobias become fixated, increase in intensity and endure into later life, psychoanalysis clearly demonstrates that their content has let itself be coloured by the demands of the subjects' drives, and thus stands for internal dangers as well as external ones.

C
Fear, Pain, and Sorrow

So little is currently known about the psychology of emotional processes that the remarks offered in all diffidence here deserve to be judged in a spirit of extreme tolerance. The problem, as we see it, arises out of our assertion that fear comes to be a reaction to the danger of object-loss. Now we already know of one such reaction to object-loss, namely sorrow. The question is: when does the one reaction set in, and when the other? We have already dealt with sorrow at some length in a previous context,
⁷⁵
but one feature of it defied all understanding: its particularly painful nature. At the same time, it seems altogether understandable to us that separation from one's object should be painful. The problem thus becomes even more complicated: when does separation from an object produce fear, when does it produce sorrow, and when – if at all – does it produce only pain?

Let us admit straight away that there is no prospect of our providing answers to these questions. The best we can do is to draw some distinctions and offer some suggestions.

As our starting point, let us again take the one situation that we think we understand, namely that of the baby who finds himself confronted by a stranger instead of his mother, and thereupon displays the fear that we have thus far interpreted solely by reference to the danger of object-loss. But this fear is probably rather more complicated and merits closer examination. While there can be no doubting the baby's fear, his facial expression and his reaction of crying suggest that he is also feeling pain. It seems that various things that he will later differentiate from each other are at this stage all merged into one. He cannot yet tell the difference between
temporary absence and permanent loss; if he fails just once to catch sight of his mother, he behaves as if he were never going to see her again, and only when repeated experiences to the contrary have brought him solace does he learn that such disappearances on the part of his mother are generally followed by her reappearance. His mother fosters this crucial insight by playing the familiar game of hiding her face from him, then, to his great delight, uncovering it again. This enables him to feel pangs of longing, as it were, that are not attended by despair.

Because he misunderstands it, the situation whereby he is distressed at his mother's absence is not a danger situation but a traumatic one. Or to put it more precisely: it is a traumatic one if at that particular moment he happens to be feeling a need that his mother is meant to gratify; if no such need is present, then it becomes a danger situation. The first fear-determinant that the ego itself introduces is accordingly loss of perception of the object, which it equates with loss of the object itself. There is no question of loss of love at this stage. Later on, experience teaches the child that his object can be present, but angry with him, and loss of the object's love then becomes the new and far more constant danger and fear-determinant.

The traumatic situation of distress at the mother's absence differs in one crucial respect from the traumatic situation of birth: at that point there was no object, and hence no possibility of distress at its absence; the only reaction that could arise was fear. In the meantime, however, repeated instances of gratification have made the mother the child's object, and whenever he experiences need this object undergoes intense cathexis that can be described as ‘longing’. It is to this new development that we can relate the reaction of pain. Thus pain is properly speaking the reaction to object-loss, while fear is the reaction to the danger attendant on this loss and, by extension, to the danger of object-loss itself.

Pain, too, is something we know very little about. All we know for certain is that pain occurs – at any rate primarily and as a general rule – when a stimulus attacks somewhere on the periphery, penetrates the apparatus forming the protective barrier, and then produces
just the same effect as if it were a continuous stimulus emanating from the drives – a process altogether proof against the muscle actions that are otherwise effective in removing the relevant part of the body from the stimulus attacking it.
⁷⁶
The situation is no different if the pain stems from an internal organ rather than from a point on the surface of the skin; all that has happened is that a part of the inner periphery has taken the place of the outer one. There are clearly occasions when children experience pain quite independently of their experiencing need. But the circumstances that give rise to this kind of pain seem to bear very little resemblance to object-loss. Furthermore, peripheral stimulation – that defining feature of pain – is entirely absent from the situation of longing experienced by a child. And yet it cannot be wholly without rhyme or reason that language has coined the notion of inner, psychic pain, and treats the sensations caused by object-loss as being identical in all respects to physical pain.

Physical pain gives rise to an intense cathexis of the painful part of the body; this cathexis, which we may term narcissistic, grows ever more intense, and has an ‘emptying’ effect on the ego.
⁷⁷
It is well known that when we suffer pain in our internal organs, we apprehend three-dimensional and other images or notions of parts of the body that never otherwise figure in our conscious mind at all. Moreover, the fact that the cathexis is concentrated on the
psychic representamen
of the painful part of the body explains the remarkable fact that if the psyche's attention is distracted by another interest of some sort, even the most intense physical pain simply does not materialize (it would
not
be correct in this context to say that it ‘remains unconscious’). It seems to be precisely in
this
point that the analogy resides that allows the sensation of pain to be carried over into the psychic realm. The intense, ever-increasing cathexis of the absent (lost) object generated by the child's unassuageable longing creates exactly the same economic conditions as does the pain-generated cathexis of an injured part of the body, and thus makes it possible for the absence of the usual prerequisite of physical pain – an attack somewhere on the periphery – to be disregarded. The transition from physical pain to psychic pain corresponds to the
change from narcissistic cathexis to object-cathexis. The subject's
notion
of his object, highly cathected by his needs, plays the same role as a part of the body cathected by an increase in stimulus. The continuous nature of the cathexis process and its insusceptibility to inhibition combine to produce the same state of psychic helplessness. If the resulting sensation of unpleasure shows the specific characteristics of pain (characteristics that do not permit of any more precise definition), instead of manifesting itself in the form of a fear reaction, then it seems reasonable to attribute this to a circumstance that we have made too little use of in our interpretations thus far: the fact that these processes leading to the sensation of unpleasure are enacted at a very elevated level of cathexis and annexion.

A further emotional reaction to object-loss is familiar to us, namely sorrow – but its explanation no longer presents any difficulties: the sorrowing process is triggered by the ‘reality-test’, which categorically insists that since our object no longer exists, we must separate ourselves from it;
⁷⁸
the task of the sorrowing process is to carry out this withdrawal from the object in all those situations where the object was the focus of intense cathexis. The painful nature of this separation fully accords with our explanation, given the intense cathexis – caused by unassuageable longing – that occurs during the reproduction of the various situations in which the subject has to undo the ties that bound him to his object.

(1926)