Freud - Complete Works (618 page)

   I am not aware, however, that
patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in
their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they
are more concerned with
not
thinking of it. Anyone who
accepts it as something self-evident that their dreams should put
them back at night into the situation that caused them to fall ill
has misunderstood the nature of dreams. It would be more in harmony
with their nature if they showed the patient pictures from his
healthy past or of the cure for which he hopes. If we are not to be
shaken in our belief in the wish-fulfilling tenor of dreams by the
dreams of traumatic neurotics, we still have one resource open to
us: we may argue that the function of dreaming, like so much else,
is upset in this condition and diverted from its purposes, or we
may be driven to reflect on the mysterious masochistic trends of
the ego.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3720

   At this point I propose to leave
the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on
to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus
in one of its earliest
normal
activities - I mean in
children’s play.

   The different theories of
children’s play have only recently been summarized and
discussed from the psycho-analytic point of view by Pfeifer (1919),
to whose paper I would refer my readers. These theories attempt to
discover the motives which lead children to play, but they fail to
bring into the foreground the
economic
motive, the
consideration of the yield of pleasure involved. Without wishing to
include the whole field covered by these phenomena, I have been
able, through a chance opportunity which presented itself, to throw
some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a
half and invented by himself. It was more than a mere fleeting
observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his
parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered
the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly
repeated

   The child was not at all
precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a
half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also
make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning
intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms
with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid
to his being a ‘good boy’. He did not disturb his
parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch
certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never
cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time,
he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him
herself but had also looked after him without any outside help.
This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit
of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them
away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that
hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a
business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out
‘o-o-o-o’, accompanied by an expression of interest and
satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were
agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but
represented the German word ‘
fort
’. I eventually
realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of
his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made
an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel
with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to
pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its
being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string
and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so
that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his
expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of
the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a
joyful ‘
da
’. This, then, was the complete game -
disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first
act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though
there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the
second act.¹

  
¹
A further observation subsequently
confirmed this interpretation fully. One day the child’s
mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met
with the words ‘Baby o-o-o-o!’ which was at first
incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this
long period of solitude the child had found a method of making
himself
disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a
full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that
by crouching down he could make his mirror-image
‘gone’.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3721

  
The interpretation of
the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s
great cultural achievement - the instinctual renunciation (that is,
the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which be had made in
allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated
himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance
and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course 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. Our interest is
directed to another point. The child cannot possibly have felt his
mother’s departure as something agreeable or even
indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing
experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may
perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a
necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the
latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must
be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure,
was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the
episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.

   No certain decision can be
reached from the analysis of a single case like this. On an
unprejudiced view one gets an impression that the child turned his
experience into a game from another motive. At the outset he was in
a
passive
situation - he was overpowered by the experience;
but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he
took on an
active
part. These efforts might be put down to
an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether
the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. But still another
interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that
it was ‘gone’ might satisfy an impulse of the
child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge
himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it
would have a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I
don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ A
year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used
to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor,
exclaiming: ‘Go to the fwont!’ He had heard at that
time that his absent father was ‘at the front’, and was
far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite
clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession
of his mother.¹ We know of other children who liked to express
similar hostile impulses by throwing away objects instead of
persons.² We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the
impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as
to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary
event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the
case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have
been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the
repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another
sort but none the less a direct one.

  
¹
When this child was five and
three-quarters, his mother died. Now that she was really
‘gone’ (‘o-o-o’), the little boy showed no
signs of grief. It is true that in the interval a second child had
been born and had roused him to violent jealousy.

  
²
Cf. my note on a childhood memory of
Goethe’s (1917
b
).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3722

  
Nor shall we be helped
in our hesitation between these two views by further considering
children’s play. It is clear that in their play children
repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real
life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the
impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the
situation. But on the other hand it is obvious that all their play
is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time - the
wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do.
It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an
experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks
down a child’s throat or carries out some small operation on
him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will
be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection
overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another
source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the
experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the
disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way
revenges himself on a substitute.

   Nevertheless, it emerges from
this discussion that there is no need to assume the existence of a
special imitative instinct in order to provide a motive for play.
Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and
artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike
children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the
spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences
and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing
proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle,
there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself
unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in
the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which
have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be
undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach
to its subject-matter. They are of no use for
our
purposes,
since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure
principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies
beyond
the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more
primitive than it and independent of it.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3723

III

Twenty five years of intense work have had as
their result that the immediate aims of psycho-analytic technique
are quite other to-day than they were at the outset. At first the
analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious
material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and,
at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then
first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve
the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to
oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from
his own memory. In that endeavour the chief emphasis lay upon the
patient’s resistances: the art consisted now in uncovering
these as quickly as possible, in pointing them out to the patient
and in inducing him by human influence - this was where suggestion
operating as ‘transference’ played its part - to
abandon his resistances.

   But it became ever clearer that
the aim which had been set up - the aim that what was unconscious
should become conscious - is not completely attainable by that
method. The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed
in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential
part of it. Thus he acquires no sense of conviction of the
correctness of the construction that has been communicated to him.
He is obliged to
repeat
the repressed material as a
contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer
to see,
remembering
it as something belonging to the
past.¹ These reproductions, which emerge with such
unwished-for exactitude, always have as their subject some portion
of infantile sexual life - of the Oedipus complex, that is, and its
derivatives; and they are invariably acted out in the sphere of the
transference, of the patient’s relation to the physician.
When things have reached this stage, it may be said that the
earlier neurosis has now been replaced by a fresh,
‘transference neurosis’. It has been the
physician’s endeavour to keep this transference neurosis
within the narrowest limits: to force as much as possible into the
channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as
repetition. The ratio between what is remembered and what is
reproduced varies from case to case. The physician cannot as a rule
spare his patient this phase of the treatment. He must get him to
re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to
it, on the other hand, that the patient retains some degree of
aloofness, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to
recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a
reflection of a forgotten past. If this can be successfully
achieved, the patient’s sense of conviction is won, together
with the therapeutic success that is dependent on it.

 
¹
See my paper on
‘Recollecting, Repeating and Working Through‘
(1914
g
).