Freud - Complete Works (403 page)
We have learnt from the analysis
of many neurotic women that they go through an early age in which
they envy their brothers their sign of masculinity and feel at a
disadvantage and humiliated because of the lack of it (actually
because of its diminished size) in themselves. We include this
‘envy for the penis’ in the ‘castration
complex’. If we understand ‘masculine’ as
including the idea of wishing to be masculine, then the designation
‘masculine protest’ fits this behaviour; the phrase was
coined by Adler with the intention of proclaiming this factor as
being responsible for neurosis in general. During this phase,
little girls often make no secret of their envy, nor of the
hostility towards their favoured brothers which arises from it.
They even try to urinate standing upright like their brothers in
order to prove the equality which they lay claim to. In the case
already described in which the woman used to show uncontrolled
aggression after intercourse towards her husband, whom otherwise
she loved, I was able to establish that this phase had existed
before that of object-choice. Only later was the little
girl’s libido directed towards her father, and then, instead
of wanting to have a penis, she wanted - a child.²
¹
Ploss and Bartels (1891, 1, xii) and
Dulaure (1905, 142).
²
Cf. ‘On Transformations of Instinct
as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (1917
c
).
The Taboo Of Virginity
2360
I should not be surprised if in
other cases the order in which these impulses occurred were
reversed and this part of the castration complex only became
effective after a choice of object had been successfully made. But
the masculine phase in the girl in which she envies the boy for his
penis is in any case developmentally the earlier, and it is closer
to the original narcissism than it is to object-love.
Some time ago I chanced to have
an opportunity of obtaining insight into a dream of a newly-married
woman which was recognizable as a reaction to the loss of her
virginity. It betrayed spontaneously the woman’s wish to
castrate her young husband and to keep his penis for herself.
Certainly there was also room for the more innocent interpretation
that what she wished for was the prolongation and repetition of the
act, but several details of the dream did not fit into this meaning
and the character as well as the subsequent behaviour of the woman
who had the dream gave evidence in favour of the more serious view.
Behind this envy for the penis, there comes to light the
woman’s hostile bitterness against the man, which never
completely disappears in the relations between the sexes, and which
is clearly indicated in the strivings and in the literary
productions of ‘emancipated’ women. In a
palaeo-biological speculation, Ferenczi has traced back this
hostility of women - I do not know if he is the first to do so - to
the period in time when the sexes became differentiated. At first,
in his opinion, copulation took place between two similar
individuals, one of which, however, developed into the stronger and
forced the weaker one to submit to sexual union. The feelings of
bitterness arising from this subjection still persist in the
present-day disposition of women. I do not think there is any harm
in employing such speculations, so long as one avoids setting too
much value on them.
The Taboo Of Virginity
2361
After this enumeration of the
motives for the paradoxical reaction of women to defloration,
traces of which persist in frigidity, we may sum up by saying that
a woman’s
immature sexuality
, is discharged on to the
man who first makes her acquainted with the sexual act. This being
so, the taboo of virginity is reasonable enough and we can
understand the rule which decrees that precisely the man who is to
enter upon a life shared with this woman shall avoid these dangers.
At higher stages of civilization the importance attributed to this
danger diminishes in face of her promise of bondage and no doubt of
other motives and inducements; virginity is looked upon as a
possession which the husband is not called upon to renounce. But
analysis of disturbed marriages teaches us that the motives which
seek to drive a woman to take vengeance for her defloration are not
completely extinguished even in the mental life of civilized women.
I think it must strike the observer in how uncommonly large a
number of cases the woman remains frigid and feels unhappy in a
first marriage, whereas after it has been dissolved she becomes a
tender wife, able to make her second husband happy. The archaic
reaction has, so to speak, exhausted itself on the first
object.
The taboo of virginity, however,
even apart from this has not died out in our civilized existence.
It is known to the popular mind and writers have on occasion made
use of this material. A comedy by Anzengruber shows how a simple
peasant lad is deterred from marrying his intended bride be cause
she is ‘a wench who’ll cost her first his life’.
For this reason he agrees to her marrying another man and is ready
to take her when she is a widow and no longer dangerous. The title
of the play,
Das Jungferngift
[‘Virgin’s
Venom’], reminds us of the habit of snake-charmers, who make
poisonous snakes first bite a piece of cloth in order to handle
them afterwards without danger.¹
¹
A masterly short story by Arthur Schnitzler
(
Das Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbogh
) [‘The
Fate of Freiherr von Leisenbogh’] deserves to be included
here, in spite of the rather different situation. The lover of an
actress who is very experienced in love is dying as the result of
an accident. He creates a sort of new virginity for her, by putting
a curse of death on the man who is the first to possess her after
himself. For a time the woman with this taboo upon her does not
venture on any love-affair. However, after she has fallen in love
with a singer, she hits on the solution of first granting a night
to the Freiherr von Leisenbogh, who has been pursuing her for
years. And the curse falls on him: he has a stroke as soon as he
learns the motive behind his unexpected good fortune in
love.
The Taboo Of Virginity
2362
The taboo of virginity and
something of its motivation has been depicted most powerfully of
all in a well-known dramatic character, that of Judith in
Hebbel’s tragedy
Judith und Holofernes
. Judith is one
of those women whose virginity is protected by a taboo. Her first
husband was paralysed on the bridal night by a mysterious anxiety,
and never again dared to touch her, ‘My beauty is like
belladonna,’ she says. ‘Enjoyment of it brings madness
and death.’ When the Assyrian general is besieging her city,
she conceives the plan of seducing him by her beauty and of
destroying him, thus employing a patriotic motive to conceal a
sexual one. After she has been deflowered by this powerful man, who
boasts of his strength and ruthlessness, she finds the strength in
her fury to strike off his head, and thus becomes the liberator of
her people. Beheading is well known to us as a symbolic substitute
for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the
man who has deflowered her, which was just the wish of the
newly-married woman expressed in the dream I reported. It is clear
that Hebbel has intentionally sexualized the patriotic narrative
from the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, for there Judith is able
to boast after her return that she has not been defiled, nor is
there in the Biblical text any mention of her uncanny wedding
night. But probably, with the fine perception of a poet, he sensed
the ancient motive, which had been lost in the tendentious
narrative, and has merely restored its earlier content to the
material.
Sadger (1912) has shown in a
penetrating analysis how Hebbel was determined in his choice of
material by his own parental complex, and how he came to take the
part of the woman so regularly in the struggle between the sexes,
and to feel his way into the most hidden impulses of her mind. He
also quotes the motives which the poet himself gives for the
alteration he has made in the material, and he rightly finds them
artificial and as though intended to justify
outwardly
something the poet himself is unconscious of, while at bottom
concealing it. I will not dispute Sadger’s explanation of why
Judith, who according to the Biblical narrative is a widow, has to
become a
virgin
widow. He refers to the purpose found in
childish phantasies of denying the sexual intercourse of the
parents and of turning the mother into an untouched virgin. But I
will add: after the poet has established his heroine’s
virginity, his sensitive imagination dwells on the hostile reaction
released by the violation of her maidenhood.
The Taboo Of Virginity
2363
We may say, then, in conclusion
that defloration has not only the one, civilized consequence of
binding the woman lastingly to the man; it also unleashes an
archaic reaction of hostility towards him, which can assume
pathological forms that are frequently enough expressed in the
appearance of inhibitions in the erotic side of married life, and
to which we may ascribe the fact that second marriages so often
turn out better than first. The taboo of virginity, which seems so
strange to us, the horror with which, among primitive peoples, the
husband avoids the act of defloration, are fully justified by this
hostile reaction.
It is interesting that in
one’s capacity as analyst one can meet with women in whom the
opposed reactions of bondage and hostility both find expression and
remain intimately associated with each other. There are women of
this kind who seem to have fallen out with their husbands
completely and who all the same can only make vain efforts to free
themselves. As often as they try to direct their love towards some
other man, the image of the first, although he is no longer loved,
intervenes with inhibiting effect. Analysis then teaches us that
these women, it is true, still cling to their first husbands in a
state of bondage, but no longer through affection. They cannot get
away from them, because they have not completed their revenge upon
them, and in pronounced cases they have not even brought the
impulses for vengeance to consciousness.
2364
THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC VIEW OF PSYCHOGENIC DISTURBANCE OF VISION
(1910)
2365
Intentionally left blank
2366
THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC VIEW OF PSYCHOGENIC DISTURBANCE OF VISION
GENTLEMEN
, - I propose to take the
example of psychogenic disturbance of vision, in order to show you
the modifications which have taken place in our view of the genesis
of disorders of this kind under the influence of psycho-analytic
methods of investigation. As you know, hysterical blindness is
taken as the type of a psychogenic visual disturbance. It is
generally believed, as a result of the researches of the French
School (including such men as Charcot, Janet and Binet), that the
genesis of these cases is understood. For we are in a position to
produce blindness of this kind experimentally if we have at our
disposal someone who is susceptible to somnambulism. If we put him
into deep hypnosis and suggest the idea to him that he sees nothing
with one of his eyes, he will in fact behave as though he had
become blind in that eye, like a hysteric who has developed a
visual disturbance spontaneously. We may thus construct the
mechanism of spontaneous hysterical disturbances of vision on the
model of suggested hypnotic ones. In a hysteric the idea of being
blind arises, not from the prompting of a hypnotist, but
spontaneously - by autosuggestion, as people say; and in both cases
this idea is so powerful that it turns into reality, exactly like a
suggested hallucination, paralysis, etc.
This seems perfectly sound and
will satisfy anyone who can ignore the many enigmas that lie
concealed behind the concepts of hypnosis, suggestion and
autosuggestion. Autosuggestion in particular raises further
questions. When and under what conditions does an idea become so
powerful that it is able to behave like a suggestion and turn into
reality without more ado? Closer investigation has taught us that
we cannot answer this question without calling the concept of the
‘unconscious’ to our assistance. Many philosophers
rebel against the assumption of a mental unconscious of this kind,
because they have not concerned themselves with the phenomena which
compel us to make that assumption. Psychopathologists have found
that they cannot avoid working with such things as unconscious
mental processes, unconscious ideas, and so on.
The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision
2367
Appropriate experiments have
shown that people who are hysterically blind do nevertheless see in
some sense, though not in the full sense. Excitations of the blind
eye may have certain psychical consequences (for instance, they may
produce affects) even though they do not become conscious. Thus
hysterically blind people are only blind as far as consciousness is
concerned; in their unconscious they see. It is precisely
observations such as this that compel us to distinguish between
conscious and unconscious mental processes.
How does it happen that such
people develop the unconscious ‘autosuggestion’ that
they are blind, while nevertheless they see in their
unconscious? The reply given by the French researches is to
explain that in patients predisposed to hysteria there is an
inherent tendency to dissociation - to a falling apart of the
connections in their mental field - as a consequence of which some
unconscious processes do not continue as far as into the conscious.
Let us leave entirely on one side the value that this attempted
explanation may have as regards an understanding of the phenomena
in question, and let us look at the matter from another angle. As
you see, Gentlemen, the identity of hysterical blindness with the
blindness provoked by suggestion, on which so much stress was laid
to begin with, has now been given up. The hysterical patient is
blind, not as the result of an autosuggestive idea that he cannot
see, but as the result of a dissociation between unconscious and
conscious processes in the act of seeing; his idea that he does not
see is the well-founded
expression
of the psychical state of
affairs and not its
cause
.
If, Gentlemen, you complain of
the obscurity of this exposition I shall not find it easy to
defend. I have tried to give you a synthesis of the views of
different investigators, and in doing so I have probably coupled
them together too closely. I wanted to condense into a single
composite whole the concepts that have been brought up to make
psychogenic disturbances intelligible - their origin from
excessively powerful ideas, the distinction between conscious and
unconscious mental processes and the assumption of mental
dissociation. And I have been no more successful in this than the
French writers, at whose head stands Pierre Janet. I hope,
therefore, that you will excuse not only the obscurity but the
inaccuracy of my exposition, and will allow me to tell you how
psycho-analysis has led us to a view of psychogenic disturbances of
vision which is more self-consistent and probably closer to the
facts.
The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision
2368
Psycho-analysis, too, accepts the
assumptions of dissociation and the unconscious, but relates them
differently to each other. Its view is a dynamic one, which traces
mental life back to an interplay between forces that favour or
inhibit one another. If in any instance one group of ideas remains
in the unconscious, psycho-analysis does not infer that there is a
constitutional incapacity for synthesis which is showing itself in
this particular dissociation, but maintains that the isolation and
state of unconsciousness of this group of ideas have been caused by
an active opposition on the part of other groups. The process owing
to which it has met with this fate is known as
‘repression’ and we regard it as something analogous to
a condemnatory judgement in the field of logic. Psycho-analysis
points out that repressions of this kind play an extraordinarily
important part in our mental life, but that they may also
frequently fail and that such failures of repression are the
precondition of the formation of symptoms.
If, then, as we have learnt,
psychogenic disturbances of vision depend on certain ideas
connected with seeing being cut off from consciousness, we must, on
the psycho-analytic view, assume that these ideas have come into
opposition to other, more powerful ones, for which we use the
collective concept of the ‘ego’- a compound which is
made up variously at different times - and have for that reason
come under repression. But what can be the origin of this
opposition, which makes for repression, between the ego and various
groups of ideas? You will no doubt notice that it was not possible
to frame such a question before the advent of psycho-analysis, for
nothing was known earlier of psychical conflict and repression. Our
researches, however, have put us in a position to give us the
desired answer. Our attention has been drawn to the importance of
the instincts in ideational life. We have discovered that every
instinct tries to make itself effective by activating ideas that
are in keeping with its aims. These instincts are not always
compatible with one another; their interests often come into
conflict. Opposition between ideas is only an expression of
struggles between the various instincts. From the point of view of
our attempted explanation, a quite specially important part is
played by the undeniable opposition between the instincts which
subserve sexuality, the attainment of sexual pleasure, and those
other instincts, which have as their aim the self-preservation of
the individual - the ego-instincts. As the poet has said, all the
organic instincts that operate in our mind may be classified as
‘hunger’ or ‘love’. We have traced the
‘sexual instinct’ from its first manifestations in
children to its final form, which is described as
‘normal’. We have found that it is put together from
numerous ‘component instincts’ which are attached to
excitations of regions of the body; and we have come to see that
these separate instincts have to pass through a complicated
development before they can be brought effectively to serve the
aims of reproduction. The light thrown by psychology on the
evolution of our civilization has shown us that it originates
mainly at the cost of the sexual component instincts, and that
these must be suppressed, restricted, transformed and directed to
higher aims, in order that the mental constructions of civilization
may be established. We have been able to recognize as a valuable
outcome of these researches something that our colleagues have not
yet been willing to believe, namely that the human ailments known
as ‘neuroses’ are derived from the many different ways
in which these processes of transformation in the sexual component
instincts may miscarry. The ‘ego’ feels threatened by
the claims of the sexual instincts and fends them off by
repressions; these, however, do not always have the desired result,
but lead to the formation of dangerous substitutes for the
repressed and to burdensome reactions on the part of the ego. From
these two classes of phenomena taken together there emerge what we
call the symptoms of neuroses.
The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision
2369
We have apparently digressed
widely from our problem, though in doing so we have touched on the
manner in which neurotic pathological conditions are related to our
mental life as a whole. But let us now return to the narrower
question. The sexual and ego-instincts alike have in general the
same organs and systems of organs at their disposal. Sexual
pleasure is not attached merely to the function of the genitals.
The mouth serves for kissing as well as for eating and
communication by speech; the eyes perceive not only alterations in
the external world which are important for the preservation of
life, but also characteristics of objects which lead to their being
chosen as objects of love - their charms. The saying that it is not
easy for anyone to serve two masters is thus confirmed. The closer
the relation into which an organ with a dual function of this kind
enters with
one
of the major instincts, the more it with
holds itself from the other. This principle is bound to lead to
pathological consequences if the two fundamental instincts are
disunited and if the ego maintains a repression of the sexual
component instinct concerned. It is easy to apply this to the eye
and to seeing. Let us suppose that the sexual component instinct
which makes use of looking - sexual pleasure in looking - has drawn
upon itself defensive action by the ego-instincts in consequence of
its excessive demands, so that the ideas in which its desires are
expressed succumb to repression and are prevented from becoming
conscious; in that case there will be a general disturbance of the
relation of the eye and of the act of seeing to the ego and
consciousness. The ego will have lost its dominance over the organ,
which will now be wholly at the disposal of the repressed sexual
instinct. It looks as though the repression had been carried too
far by the ego, as though it had emptied the baby out with the
bath-water: the ego refuses to see anything at all any more, now
that the sexual interest in seeing has made itself so prominent.
But the alternative picture seems more to the point. This
attributes the active role instead to the repressed pleasure in
looking. The repressed instinct takes its revenge for being held
back from further psychical expansion, by becoming able to extend
its dominance over the organ that is in its service. The loss of
conscious dominance over the organ is the detrimental substitute
for the repression which had miscarried and was only made possible
at that price.
The Psycho-Analytic View Of Psychogenic Disturbance Of Vision
2370
This relation of an organ with a
double claim on it - its relation to the conscious ego and to
repressed sexuality - is to be seen even more clearly in motor
organs than in the eye: as when, for instance, a hand which has
tried to carry out an act of sexual aggression, and has become
paralysed hysterically, is unable, after that act has been
inhibited, to do anything else as though it were obstinately
insisting on carrying out a repressed innervation; or as when the
fingers of people who have given up masturbation refuse to learn
the delicate movements required for playing the piano or the
violin. As regards the eye, we are in the habit of translating the
obscure psychical processes concerned in the repression of sexual
scopophilia and in the development of the psychogenic disturbance
of vision as though a punishing voice was speaking from within the
subject, and saying: ‘Because you sought to misuse your organ
of sight for evil sensual pleasures, it is fitting that you should
not see anything at all any more’, and as though it was in
this way approving the outcome of the process. The idea of talion
punishment is involved in this, and in fact our explanation of
psychogenic visual disturbance coincides with what is suggested by
myths and legends. The beautiful legend of Lady Godiva tells how
all the town’s inhabitants hid behind their shuttered
windows, so as to make easier the lady’s task of riding naked
through the streets in broad daylight, and how the only man who
peeped through the shutters at her revealed loveliness was punished
by going blind. Nor is this the only example which suggests that
neurotic illness holds the hidden key to mythology as well.
Psycho-analysis is unjustly
reproached, Gentlemen, for leading to purely psychological theories
of pathological problems. The emphasis which it lays on the
pathogenic role of sexuality, which, after all, is certainly not an
exclusively psychical factor should alone protect it from this
reproach. Psycho-analysts never forget that the mental is based on
the organic, although their work can only carry them as far as this
basis and no beyond it. Thus psycho-analysis is ready to admit, and
indeed to postulate, that not all disturbances of vision need be
psychogenic, like those that are evoked by the repression of erotic
scopophilia. If an organ which serves the two sorts of instinct
increases its erotogenic role, it is in general to be expected that
this will not occur without the excitability and innervation of the
organ undergoing changes which will manifest themselves as
disturbances of its function in the service of the ego. Indeed, if
we find that an organ normally serving the purpose of
sense-perception begins to behave like an actual genital when its
erotogenic role is increased, we shall not regard it as improbable
that
toxic
changes are also occurring in it. For lack of a
better name we must retain the old unsuitable term of
‘neurotic’ disturbances for both classes of functional
disturbances - those of physiological as well as those of toxic
origin - which follow from an increase in the erotogenic factor.
Generally speaking, the neurotic disturbances of vision stand in
the same relation to the psychogenic ones as the ‘actual
neuroses’ do to the psychoneuroses: psychogenic visual
disturbances can no doubt hardly ever appear without neurotic ones,
but the latter can appear without the former. These neurotic
symptoms are unfortunately little appreciated and understood even
today; for they are not directly accessible to psycho-analysis, and
other methods of research have left the standpoint of sexuality out
of account.
