Freud - Complete Works (620 page)

   If this is so, then, the system
Cs
. is characterized by the peculiarity that in it (in
contrast to what happens in the other psychical systems) excitatory
processes do not leave behind any permanent change in its elements
but expire, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious. An
exception of this sort to the general rule requires to be explained
by some factor that applies exclusively to that one system. Such a
factor, which is absent in the other systems, might well be the
exposed situation of the system
Cs
., immediately abutting as
it does on the external world.

 
¹
What follows is based
throughout on Breuer’s views in
Studies on Hysteria
(Breuer and Freud, 1895).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

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   Let us picture a living organism
in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle
of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface
turned towards the external world will from its very situation be
differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli.
Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of
developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous
system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex
remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the
organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties.
It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the
ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle,
its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently
modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it
from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be
formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked
through’ by stimulation that it would present the most
favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and
become incapable of any further modification. In terms of the
system
Cs
., this would mean that its elements could undergo
no further permanent modification from the passage of excitation,
because they had already been modified in the respect in question
to the greatest possible extent: now, however, they would have
become capable of giving rise to consciousness. Various ideas may
be formed which cannot at present be verified as to the nature of
this modification of the substance and of the excitatory process.
It may be supposed that, in passing from one element to another, an
excitation has to overcome a resistance, and that the diminution of
resistance thus effected is what lays down a permanent trace of the
excitation, that is, a facilitation. In the system
Cs
.,
then, resistance of this kind to passage from one element to
another would no longer exist. This picture can be brought into
relation with Breuer’s distinction between quiescent (or
bound) and mobile cathectic energy in the elements of the psychical
systems;¹ the elements of the system
Cs
. would carry no
bound energy but only energy capable of free discharge. It seems
best, however, to express oneself as cautiously as possible on
these points. None the less, this speculation will have enabled us
to bring the origin of consciousness into some sort of connection
with the situation of the system
Cs
. and with the
peculiarities that must be ascribed to the excitatory processes
taking place in it.

  
¹
Breuer and Freud, 1895.

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3731

   But we have more to say of the
living vesicle with its receptive cortical layer. This little
fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an
external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it
would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were
not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires
the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the
structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic
and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane
resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external
world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have
remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity;
and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective
shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been
allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer has saved all the
deeper ones from a similar fate - unless, that is to say, stimuli
reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective
shield.
Protection against
stimuli is an almost more
important function for the living organism than
reception of
stimuli. The protective shield is supplied with its own store of
energy and must above all endeavour to preserve the special modes
of transformation of energy operating in it against the effects
threatened by the enormous energies at work in the external world -
effects which tend towards a levelling out of them and hence
towards destruction. The main purpose of the
reception
of
stimuli is to discover the direction and nature of the external
stimuli; and for that it is enough to take small specimens of the
external world, to sample it in small quantities. In highly
developed organisms the receptive cortical layer of the former
vesicle has long been withdrawn into the depths of the interior of
the body, though portions of it have been left behind on the
surface immediately beneath the general shield against stimuli.
These are the sense organs, which consist essentially of apparatus
for the reception of certain specific effects of stimulation, but
which also include special arrangements for further protection
against excessive amounts of stimulation and for excluding
unsuitable kinds of stimuli. It is characteristic of them that they
deal only with very small quantities of external stimulation and
only take in
samples
of the external world. They may perhaps
be compared with feelers which are all the time making tentative
advances towards the external world and then drawing back from
it.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

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   At this point I shall venture to
touch for a moment upon a subject which would merit the most
exhaustive treatment. As a result of certain psycho-analytic
discoveries, we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion
of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary
forms of thought’. We have learnt that unconscious mental
processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. This means in
the first place that they are not ordered temporally, that time
does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be
applied to them. These are negative characteristics which can only
be clearly understood if a comparison is made with
conscious
mental processes. On the other hand, our abstract idea of time
seems to be wholly derived from the method of working of the system
Pcpt.-Cs
. and to correspond to a perception on its own part
of that method of working. This mode of functioning may perhaps
constitute another way of providing a shield against stimuli. I
know that these remarks must sound very obscure, but I must limit
myself to these hints.

   We have pointed out how the
living vesicle is provided with a shield against stimuli from the
external world; and we had previously shown that the cortical layer
next to that shield must be differentiated as an organ for
receiving stimuli from without. This sensitive cortex, however,
which is later to become the system
Cs
., also receives
excitations from
within
. The situation of the system between
the outside and the inside and the difference between the
conditions governing the reception of excitations in the two cases
have a decisive effect on the functioning of the system and of the
whole mental apparatus. Towards the outside it is shielded against
stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a
reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield; the
excitations in the deeper layers extend into the system directly
and in undiminished amount, in so far as certain of their
characteristics give rise to feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure
series. The excitations coming from within are, however, in their
intensity and in other, qualitative, respects - in their amplitude,
perhaps - more commensurate with the system’s method of
working than the stimuli which stream in from the external world.
This state of things produces two definite results. First, the
feelings of pleasure and unpleasure (which are an index to what is
happening in the interior of the apparatus) predominate over all
external stimuli. And secondly, a particular way is adopted of
dealing with any internal excitations which produce too great an
increase of unpleasure: there is a tendency to treat them as though
they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so
that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into
operation as a means of defence against them. This is the origin of
projection
, which is destined to play such a large part in
the causation of pathological processes.

   I have an impression that these
last considerations have brought us to a better understanding of
the dominance of the pleasure principle; but no light has yet been
thrown on the cases that contradict that dominance. Let us
therefore go a step further. We describe as ‘traumatic’
any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break
through the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of
trauma necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach
in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event
as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large
scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set
in motion every possible defensive measure. At the same time, the
pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no
longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from
being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem
arises instead - the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus
which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense,
so that they can then be disposed of.

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   The specific unpleasure of
physical pain is probably the result of the protective shield
having been broken through in a limited area. There is then a
continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery
concerned to the central apparatus of the mind, such as could
normally arise only from
within
the apparatus. And how shall
we expect the mind to react to this invasion? Cathectic energy is
summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of
energy in the environs of the breach. An ‘anticathexis’
on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other
psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical
functions are extensively paralysed or reduced. We must endeavour
to draw a lesson from examples such as this and use them as a basis
for our metapsychological speculations. From the present case,
then, we infer that a system which is itself highly cathected is
capable of taking up an additional stream of fresh inflowing energy
and of converting it into quiescent cathexis, that is of binding it
psychically. The higher the system’s own quiescent cathexis,
the greater seems to be its binding force; conversely, therefore,
the lower its cathexis, the less capacity will it have for taking
up inflowing energy and the more violent must be the consequences
of such a breach in the protective shield against stimuli. To this
view it cannot be justly objected that the increase of cathexis
round the breach can be explained far more simply as the direct
result of the inflowing masses of excitation. If that were so, the
mental apparatus would merely receive an increase in its cathexes
of energy, and the paralysing character of pain and the
impoverishment of all the other systems would remain unexplained.
Nor do the very violent phenomena of discharge to which pain gives
rise affect our explanation, for they occur in a reflex manner -
that is, they follow without the intervention of the mental
apparatus. The indefiniteness of all our discussions on what we
describe as metapsychology is of course due to the fact that we
know nothing of the nature of the excitatory process that takes
place in the elements of the psychical systems, and that we do not
feel justified in framing any hypothesis on the subject. We are
consequently operating all the time with a large unknown factor,
which we are obliged to carry over into every new formula. It may
be reasonably supposed that this excitatory process can be carried
out with energies that vary
quantitatively
; it may also seem
probable that it has more than one
quality
(in the nature of
amplitude, for instance). As a new factor we have taken into
consideration Breuer’s hypothesis that charges of energy
occur in two forms; so that we have to distinguish between two
kinds of cathexis of the psychical systems or their elements - a
freely flowing cathexis that presses on towards discharge and a
quiescent cathexis. We may perhaps suspect that the binding of the
energy that streams into the mental apparatus consists in its
change from a freely flowing into a quiescent state.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

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   We may, I think, tentatively
venture to regard the common traumatic neurosis as a consequence of
an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against
stimuli. This would seem to reinstate the old, naïve theory of
shock, in apparent contrast to the later and psychologically more
ambitious theory which attributes aetiological importance not to
the effects of mechanical violence but to fright and the threat to
life. These opposing views are not, however, irreconcilable; nor is
the psycho-analytic view of the traumatic neurosis identical with
the shock theory in its crudest form. The latter regards the
essence of the shock as being the direct damage to the molecular
structure or even to the histological structure of the elements of
the nervous system; whereas what
we
seek to understand are
the effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach in the
shield against stimuli and by the problems that follow in its
train. And we still attribute importance to the element of fright.
It is caused by lack of any preparedness for anxiety, including
lack of hypercathexis of the systems that would be the first to
receive the stimulus. Owing to their low cathexis those systems are
not in a good position for binding the inflowing amounts of
excitation and the consequences of the breach in the protective
shield follow all the more easily. It will be seen, then, that
preparedness for anxiety and the hypercathexis of the receptive
systems constitute the last line of defence of the shield against
stimuli. In the case of quite a number of traumas, the difference
between systems that are unprepared and systems that are well
prepared through being hypercathected may be a decisive factor in
determining the outcome; though where the strength of a trauma
exceeds a certain limit this factor will no doubt cease to carry
weight. The fulfilment of wishes is, as we know, brought about in a
hallucinatory manner by dreams, and under the dominance of the
pleasure principle this has become their function. But it is not in
the service of that principle that the dreams of patients suffering
from traumatic neuroses lead them back with such regularity to the
situation in which the trauma occurred. We may assume, rather, that
dreams are here helping to carry out another task, which must be
accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can
ever begin. These dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus
retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the
cause of the traumatic neurosis. They thus afford us a view of a
function of the mental apparatus which, though it does not
contradict the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of
it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining
pleasure and avoiding unpleasure.