Freud - Complete Works (759 page)
I devoted a lecture (the
twenty-fifth) to anxiety in my previous series; and I must briefly
recapitulate what I said in it. We described anxiety as an
affective state - that is to say, a combination of certain feelings
in the pleasure-unpleasure series with the corresponding
innervations of discharge and a perception of them, but probably
also the precipitate of a particular important event, incorporated
by inheritance - something that may thus be likened to an
individually acquired hysterical attack. The event which we look
upon as having left behind it an affective trace of this sort is
the process of birth, at the time of which the effects upon the
heart’s action and upon respiration characteristic of anxiety
were expedient ones. The very first anxiety would thus have been a
toxic one. We then started off from a distinction between realistic
anxiety and neurotic anxiety, of which the former was a reaction,
which seemed intelligible to us, to a danger - that is, to an
expected injury from outside - while the latter was completely
enigmatic, and appeared to be pointless.
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In an analysis of realistic
anxiety we brought it down to the state of increased sensory
attention and motor tension which we describe as
‘preparedness for anxiety’. It is out of this that the
anxiety reaction develops. Here two outcomes are possible. Either
the generation of anxiety - the repetition of the old traumatic
experience - is limited to a signal, in which case the remainder of
the reaction can adapt itself to the new situation of danger and
can proceed to flight or defence; or the old situation can retain
the upper hand and the total reaction may consist in no more than a
generation of anxiety, in which case the affective state becomes
paralysing and will be inexpedient for present purposes.
We then turned to neurotic
anxiety and pointed out that we observe it under three conditions.
We find it first as a freely floating, general apprehensiveness,
ready to attach itself temporarily, in the form of what is known as
‘expectant anxiety’, to any possibility that may
freshly arise - as happens, for instance, in a typical anxiety
neurosis. Secondly, we find it firmly attached to certain ideas in
the so-called ‘phobias’, in which it is still possible
to recognize a relation to external danger but in which we must
judge the fear exaggerated out of all proportion. Thirdly and
lastly, we find anxiety in hysteria and other forms of severe
neurosis, where it either accompanies symptoms or emerges
independently as an attack or more persistent state, but always
without any visible basis in an external danger. We then asked
ourselves two questions: ‘What are people afraid of in
neurotic anxiety?’ and ‘How are we to bring it into
relation with realistic anxiety felt in the face of external
dangers?’
Our investigations were far from
remaining unsuccessful: we reached a few important conclusions. In
regard to anxious expectation clinical experience revealed that it
had a regular connection with the libidinal economics of sexual
life. The commonest cause of anxiety neurosis is unconsummated
excitation. Libidinal excitation is aroused but not satisfied, not
employed; apprehensiveness then appears instead of this libido that
has been diverted from its employment. I even thought I was
justified in saying that this unsatisfied libido was directly
changed into anxiety. This view found support in some quite
regularly occurring phobias of small children. Many of these
phobias are very puzzling to us, but others, such as the fear of
being alone and the fear of strangers, can be explained with
certainty. Loneliness as well as a strange face arouse the
child’s longing for his familiar mother; he is unable to
control this libidinal excitation, he cannot hold it in suspense
but changes it into anxiety. This infantile anxiety must therefore
be regarded not as of the realistic but as of the neurotic kind.
Infantile phobias and the expectation of anxiety in anxiety
neurosis offer us two examples of one way in which neurotic anxiety
originates: by a direct transformation of libido. We shall at once
come to know of a second mechanism, but it will turn out not to be
very different from the first.
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For we consider that what is
responsible for the anxiety in hysteria and other neuroses is the
process of repression. We believe it is possible to give a more
complete account of this than before, if we separate what happens
to the idea that has to be repressed from what happens to the quota
of libido attaching to it. It is the idea which is subjected to
repression and which may be distorted to the point of being
unrecognizable; but its quota of affect is regularly transformed
into anxiety - and this is so whatever the nature of the affect may
be, whether it is aggressiveness or love. It makes no essential
difference, then, for what reason a quota of libido has become
unemployable: whether it is on account of the infantile weakness of
the ego, as in children’s phobias, or on account of somatic
processes in sexual life, as in anxiety neurosis, or owing to
repression, as in hysteria. Thus in reality the two mechanisms that
bring about neurotic anxiety coincide.
In the course of these
investigations our attention was drawn to a highly significant
relation between the generation of anxiety and the formation of
symptoms - namely, that these two represent and replace each other.
For instance, an agoraphobic patient may start his illness with an
attack of anxiety in the street. This would be repeated every time
he went into the street again. He will now develop the symptom of
agoraphobia; this may also be described as an inhibition, a
restriction of the ego’s functioning, and by means of it he
spares himself anxiety attacks. We can witness the converse of this
if we interfere in the formation of symptoms, as is possible, for
instance, with obsessions. If we prevent a patient from carrying
out a washing ceremonial, he falls into a state of anxiety which he
finds hard to tolerate and from which he had evidently been
protected by his symptom. And it seems, indeed, that the generation
of anxiety is the earlier and the formation of symptoms the later
of the two, as though the symptoms are created in order to avoid
the outbreak of the anxiety state. This is confirmed too by the
fact that the first neuroses of childhood are phobias - states in
which we see so clearly how an initial generation of anxiety is
replaced by the later formation of a symptom; we get an impression
that it is from these interrelations that we shall best obtain
access to an understanding of neurotic anxiety. And at the same
time we have also succeeded in answering the question of what it is
that a person is afraid of in neurotic anxiety and so in
establishing the connection between neurotic and realistic anxiety.
What he is afraid of is evidently his own libido. The difference
between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two
points: that the danger is an internal instead of an external one
and that it is not consciously recognized.
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In phobias it is very easy to
observe the way in which this internal danger is transformed into
an external one - that is to say, how a neurotic anxiety is changed
into an apparently realistic one. In order to simplify what is
often a very complicated business, let us suppose that the
agoraphobic patient is invariably afraid of feelings of temptation
that are aroused in him by meeting people in the street. In his
phobia he brings about a displacement and henceforward is afraid of
an external situation. What he gains by this is obviously that he
thinks he will be able to protect himself better in that way. One
can save oneself from an external danger by flight; fleeing from an
internal danger is a difficult enterprise.
At the conclusion of my earlier
lecture on anxiety I myself expressed the opinion that, although
these various findings of our enquiry were not mutually
contradictory, somehow they did not fit in with one another.
Anxiety, it seems, in so far as it is an affective state, is the
reproduction of an old event which brought a threat of danger;
anxiety serves the purposes of self-preservation and is a signal of
a new danger; it arises from libido that has in some way become
unemployable and it also arises during the process of repression;
it is replaced by the formation of a symptom, is, as it were,
psychically bound - one has a feeling that something is missing
here which would bring all these pieces together into a whole.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, the
dissection of the mental personality into a super-ego, an ego and
an id, which I put before you in my last lecture, has obliged us to
take our bearings afresh in the problem of anxiety as well. With
the thesis that the ego is the sole seat of anxiety - that the ego
alone can produce and feel anxiety - we have established a new and
stable position from which a number of things take on a new aspect.
And indeed it is difficult to see what sense there would be in
speaking of an ‘anxiety of the id’ or in attributing a
capacity for apprehensiveness to the super-ego. On the other hand,
we have welcomed a desirable element of correspondence in the fact
that the three main species of anxiety, realistic, neurotic and
moral, can be so easily connected with the ego’s three
dependent relations - to the external world, to the id and to the
super-ego. Along with this new view, moreover, the function of
anxiety as a signal announcing a situation of danger (a notion,
incidentally, not unfamiliar to us) comes into prominence, the
question of what the material is out of which anxiety is made loses
interest, and the relations between realistic and neurotic anxiety
have become surprisingly clarified and simplified. It is also to be
remarked that we now understand the apparently complicated cases of
the generation of anxiety better than those which were considered
simple.
For we have recently been
examining the way in which anxiety is generated in certain phobias
which we class as anxiety hysteria, and have chosen cases in which
we were dealing with the typical repression of wishful impulses
arising from the Oedipus complex. We should have expected to find
that it was a libidinal cathexis of the boy’s mother as
object which, as a result of repression, had been changed into
anxiety and which now emerged, expressed in symptomatic terms,
attached to a substitute for his father. I cannot present you with
the detailed steps of an investigation such as this; it will be
enough to say that the surprising result was the opposite of what
we expected. It was not the repression that created the anxiety;
the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the
repression. But what sort of anxiety can it have been? Only anxiety
in the face of a threatening external danger - that is to say, a
realistic anxiety. It is true that the boy felt anxiety in the face
of a demand by his libido - in this instance, anxiety at being in
love with his mother; so the case was in fact one of neurotic
anxiety. But this being in love only appeared to him as an internal
danger, which he must avoid by renouncing that object, because it
conjured up an external situation of danger. And in every case we
examine we obtain the same result. It must be confessed that we
were not prepared to find that internal instinctual danger would
turn out to be a determinant and preparation for an external, real,
situation of danger.
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But we have not made any mention
at all so far of what the real danger is that the child is afraid
of as a result of being in love with his mother. The danger is the
punishment of being castrated, of losing his genital organ. You
will of course object that after all that is not a real danger. Our
boys are not castrated because they are in love with their mothers
during the phase of the Oedipus complex. But the matter cannot be
dismissed so simply. Above all, it is not a question of whether
castration is really carried out; what is decisive is that the
danger is one that threatens from outside and that the child
believes in it. He has some ground for this, for people threaten
him often enough with cutting off his penis during the phallic
phase, at the time of his early masturbation, and hints at that
punishment must regularly find a phylogenetic reinforcement in him.
It is our suspicion that during the human family’s primaeval
period castration used actually to be carried out by a jealous and
cruel father upon growing boys, and that circumcision, which so
frequently plays a part in puberty rites among primitive peoples,
is a clearly recognizable relic of it. We are aware that here we
are diverging widely from the general opinion; but we must hold
fast to the view that fear of castration is one of the commonest
and strongest motives for repression and thus for the formation of
neuroses. The analysis of cases in which circumcision, though not,
it is true, castration, has been carried out on boys as a cure or
punishment for masturbation (a far from rare occurrence in
Anglo-American society) has given our conviction a last degree of
certainty. It is very tempting at this point to go more deeply into
the castration complex, but I will stick to our subject.
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Fear of castration is not, of
course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place
in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot
have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by
a fear of loss of love, which is evidently a later prolongation of
the infant’s anxiety if it finds its mother absent. You will
realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this
anxiety. If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her
child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is
perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension. Do not
reject the idea that these determinants of anxiety may at bottom
repeat the situation of the original anxiety at birth, which, to be
sure, also represented a separation from the mother. Indeed, if you
follow a train of thought suggested by Ferenczi, you may add the
fear of castration to this series, for a loss of the male organ
results in an inability to unite once more with the mother (or a
substitute for her) in the sexual act. I may mention to you
incidentally that the very frequent phantasy of returning into the
mother’s womb is a substitute for this wish to copulate.
There would be many interesting things and surprising connections
to tell you at this point, but I cannot go outside the framework of
an introduction to psycho-analysis. I will only draw your attention
to the fact that here psychological researches trench upon the
facts of biology.
