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Articles- Part XVII
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud (1920)
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming
that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated
by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course
of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension,
and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides
with a lowering of that tension--that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure
or a production of pleasure. In taking that course into account in
our consideration of the mental processes which are the subject of
our study, we are introducing an `economic' point of view into our
work; and if, in describing those processes, we try to estimate this
`economic' factor in addition to the `topographical' and `dynamic'
ones, we shall, I think, be giving the most complete description of
them of which we can at present conceive, and one which deserves to
be distinguished by the term 'metapsychological'.
It is of no concern to us in this connection
to enquire how far, with this hypothesis of the pleasure principle,
we have approached or adopted any particular, historically established,
philosophical system. We have arrived at these speculative assumptions
in an attempt to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation
in our field of study. Priority and originality are not among the
aims that psycho-analytic work sets itself; and the impressions that
underlie the hypothesis of the pleasure principle are so obvious that
they can scarcely be overlooked. On the other hand we would readily
express our gratitude to any philosophical or psychological theory
which was able to inform us of the meaning of the feelings of pleasure
and unpleasure which act so imperatively upon us. But on this point
we are, alas, offered nothing to our purpose. This is the most obscure
and inaccessible region of the mind, and, since we cannot avoid contact
with it, the least rigid hypothesis, it seems to me, will be the best.
We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity
of excitation that is present in the mind but is not in any way `bound';
and to relate them in such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to
an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution.
What we are implying by this is not a simple relation between the
strength of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure and the corresponding
modifications in the quantity of excitation; least of all--in view
of all we have been taught by psycho-physiology--are we suggesting
any directly proportional ratio: the factor that determines the feeling
is probably the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of
excitation in a given period of time. Experiment might possibly play
a part here; but it is not advisable for us analysts to go into the
problem further so long as our way is not pointed by quite definite
observations.
* * * *
The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance
of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the
hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity
of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep
it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating
the pleasure principle; for if the work of the mental apparatus is
directed towards keeping the quantity of excitation low, then anything
that is calculated to increase that quantity is bound to be felt as
adverse to the functioning of the apparatus, that is as unpleasurable.
The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy: actually
the latter principle was inferred from the facts which forced us to
adopt the pleasure principle.
It must be pointed out, however, that
strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the
pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a
dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would
have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas
universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. The
most that can be said, therefore, is that there exists in the mind
a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that
that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances,
so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency
towards pleasure.
If we turn now to the question of what
circumstances are able to prevent the pleasure principle from being
carried into effect, we find ourselves once more on secure and well-trodden
ground and, in framing our answer, we have at our disposal a rich
fund of analytic experience.
The first example of the pleasure principle
being inhibited in this way is a familiar one which occurs with regularity.
We know that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary
method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from
the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the
difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient
and even highly dangerous. Under the influence of the ego's instincts
of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality
principle. This latter principle does not abandon the intention
of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and
carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment
of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary
toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.
The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working
employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate',
and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often
succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of
the organism as a whole.
There can be no doubt, however, that
the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle
can only be made responsible for a small number, and by no means the
most intense, of unpleasure experiences. Another occasion of the release
of unpleasure, which occurs with no less regularity, is to be found
in the conflicts and dissensions that take place in the mental apparatus
while the ego is passing through its development into more highly
composite organizations. Almost all the energy with which the apparatus
is filled arises from its innate instinctual impulses. But these are
not all allowed to reach the same phases of development. In the course
of things it happens again and again that individual instincts or
parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands
with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive
unity of the ego. The former are then split off from this unity by
the process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical
development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction.
If they succeed subsequently, as can so easily happen with repressed
sexual instincts, in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a
direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would
in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the
ego as unpleasure. As a consequence of the old conflict which ended
in repression, a new breach has occurred in the pleasure principle
at the very time when certain instincts were endeavouring, in accordance
with the principle, to obtain fresh pleasure.
The two sources of unpleasure which
I have just indicated are very far from covering the majority of our
unpleasurable experiences. But as regards the remainder it can be
asserted with some show of justification that their presence does
not contradict the dominance of the pleasure principle. Most of the
unpleasure that we experience is perceptual unpleasure. It
may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may
be external perception which is either distressing in itself or which
excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus-that is,
which is recognized by it as a 'danger'. The reaction to these instinctual
demands and threats of danger, a reaction which constitutes the proper
activity of the mental apparatus, can then be directed in a correct
manner by the pleasure principle or the reality principle by which
the former is modified. This does not seem to necessitate any far-reaching
limitation of the pleasure principle. Nevertheless the investigation
of the mental reaction to external danger is precisely in a position
to produce new material and raise fresh questions bearing upon our
present problem.
II
A condition has long been known and described which occurs after
several mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents
involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of 'traumatic
neurosis'. The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great
number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the
temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions
of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force. The symptomatic
picture presented by traumatic neurosis approaches that of hysteria
in the wealth of its similar motor symptoms, but surpasses it as a
rule in its strongly marked signs of subjective ailment (in which
it resembles hypochondria or melancholia) as well as in the evidence
it gives of a far more comprehensive general enfeeblement and disturbance
of the mental capacities. No complete explanation has yet been reached
either of war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace. In the
case of war neuroses, the fact that the same symptoms sometimes came
about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force seemed
at once enlightening and bewildering. In the case of the ordinary
traumatic neuroses, two characteristics emerge prominently: first,
that the chief weight in their causation seems to rest upon the factor
of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted
simultaneously works as a rule against the development of a
neurosis. 'Fright', 'fear', and 'anxiety' are improperly used as synonymous
expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their
relation to danger. 'Anxiety' describes a particular state of expecting
the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one.
'Fear' requires a definite object of which to be afraid. 'Fright',
however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when
he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes
the factor of surprise. I do not believe anxiety can produce a traumatic
neurosis. There is something about anxiety that protects its subject
against fright and so against fright-neuroses. We shall return to
this point later.
The study of dreams may be considered
the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes.
Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic
of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his
accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. This
astonishes people far too little. They think the fact that the traumatic
experience is constantly forcing itself upon the patient even in his
sleep is a proof of the strength of that experience: the patient is,
as one might say, fixated to his trauma. Fixations to the experience
which started the illness have long been familiar to us in hysteria.
Breuer and Freud declared in 1893 that 'hysterics suffer mainly from
reminiscences'. In the war neuroses, too, observers like Ferenczi
and Simmel have been able to explain certain motor symptoms by fixation
to the moment at which the trauma occurred.
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.
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. 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' ['gone']. 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 skillfully
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' ['there']. 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.
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 he 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. We know
of other children who liked to express similar hostile impulses by
throwing away objects instead of persons. 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 expressions
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.
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.
III
Twenty-five years of intense work have had as their result that the
immediate aims of psycho-analytic technique are quite other today
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. Psycho-analysis 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. 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.
In order to make it easier to understand
this 'compulsion to repeat', which emerges during the psycho-analytic
treatment of neurotics, we must above all get rid of the mistaken
notion that what we are dealing with in our struggle against resistances
is resistance on the part of the unconscious. The unconscious--that
is to say, the 'repressed'--offers no resistance whatever to the efforts
of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to
break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either
to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action. Resistance
during treatment arises from the same higher strata and systems of
the mind which originally carried out repression. But the fact that,
as we know from experience, the motives of the resistances, and indeed
the resistances themselves, are unconscious at first during the treatment,
is a hint to us that we should correct a shortcoming in our terminology.
We shall avoid a lack of clarity if we make our contrast not between
the conscious and the unconscious but between the coherent ego
and the repressed. It is certain that much of the ego is itself
unconscious, and notably what we may describe as its nucleus; only
a small part of it is covered by the term `preconscious'. Having replaced
a purely descriptive terminology by one which is systematic or dynamic,
we can say that the patient's resistance arises from his ego, and
we then at once perceive that the compulsion to repeat must be ascribed
to the unconscious repressed. It seems probable that the compulsion
can only express itself after the work of treatment has gone half-way
to meet it and has loosened the repression.
There is no doubt that the resistance
of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the
pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be
produced by the liberation of the repressed. Our efforts, on the other
hand, are directed towards procuring the toleration of that unpleasure
by an appeal to the reality principle. But how is the compulsion to
repeat--the manifestation of the power of the repressed--related to
the pleasure principle? It is clear that the greater part of what
is re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego
unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual
impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered
and does riot contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one
system and simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come
now to a new and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat
also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility
of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction
even to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed.
The early efflorescence of infantile
sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes are incompatible
with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the
child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the most
distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful
feelings. Loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury
to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion
contributes more than anything to the `sense of inferiority' which
is so common in neurotics. The child's sexual researches, on which
limits are imposed by his physical development, lead to no satisfactory
conclusion; hence such later complaints as `I can't accomplish anything;
I can't succeed in anything'. The tie of affection, which binds the
child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment,
to a vain expectation of satisfaction or to jealousy over the birth
of a new baby--unmistakable proof of the infidelity of the object
of the child's affections. His own attempt to make a baby himself,
carried out with tragic seriousness, fails shamefully. The lessening
amount of affection he receives, the increasing demands of education,
hard words and an occasional punishment--these show him at last the
full extent to which he has been scorned. These are a few typical
and constantly recurring instances of the ways in which the love characteristic
of the age of childhood is brought to a conclusion.
Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions
in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They
seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is
still incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned,
to oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly;
they discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the
passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan
or a promise of some grand present--which turns out as a rule to be
no less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in
the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less unpleasure
today if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of taking the
form of fresh experiences. They are of course the activities of instincts
intended to lead to satisfaction; but no lesson has been learnt from
the old experience of these activities having led instead only to
unpleasure. In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of
a compulsion.
What psycho-analysis reveals in the
transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives
of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued
by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho-analysis
has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged
by themselves and determined by early infantile influences. The compulsion
which is here in evidence differs in no way from the compulsion to
repeat which we have found in neurotics, even though the people we
are now considering have never shown any signs of dealing with a neurotic
conflict by producing symptoms. Thus we have come across people all
of whose human relationships have the same outcome: such as the benefactor
who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his proteges,
however much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus
seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man
whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who
time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into
a position of great private or public authority and then, after a
certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by
a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a
woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion.
This `perpetual recurrence of the same thing' causes us no astonishment
when it relates to active behaviour on the part of the person
concerned and when we can discern in him an essential character-trait
which always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression
in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed
by cases where the subject appears to have a passive experience,
over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition
of the same fatality. There is the case, for instance, of the woman
who married three successive husbands each of whom fell ill soon afterwards
and had to be nursed by her on their deathbeds. The most moving poetic
picture of a fate such as this is given by Tasso in his romantic epic
Gerusalemme Liberata. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills
his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour
of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange
magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes
with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and
the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard
complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.
If we take into account observations
such as these, based upon behaviour in the transference and upon the
life-histories of men and women, we shall find courage to assume that
there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides
the pleasure principle. Now too we shall be inclined to relate to
this compulsion the dreams which occur in traumatic neuroses and the
impulse which leads children to play.
But it is to be noted that only in rare
instances can we observe the pure effects of the compulsion to repeat,
unsupported by other motives. In the case of children's play we have
already laid stress on the other ways in which the emergence of the
compulsion may be interpreted; the compulsion to repeat and instinctual
satisfaction which is immediately pleasurable seem to converge here
into an intimate partnership. The phenomena of transference are obviously
exploited by the resistance which the ego maintains in its pertinacious
insistence upon repression; the compulsion to repeat, which the treatment
tries to bring into its service is, as it were, drawn over by the
ego to its side (clinging as the ego does to the pleasure principle).
A great deal of what might be described as the compulsion of destiny
seems intelligible on a rational basis; so that we are under no necessity
to call in a new and mysterious motive force to explain it.
The least dubious instance [of such
a motive force] is perhaps that of traumatic dreams. But on maturer
reflection we shall be forced to admit that even in the other instances
the whole ground is not covered by the operation of the familiar motive
forces. Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a
compulsion to repeat--something that seems more primitive, more elementary,
more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides.
But if a compulsion to repeat does operate in the mind, we
should be glad to know something about it, to learn what function
it corresponds to, under what conditions it can emerge and what its
relation is to the pleasure principle--to which, after all, we have
hitherto ascribed dominance over the course of the processes of excitation
in mental life.
IV
What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which
the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.
It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of
curiosity to see where it will lead. Psycho-analytic speculation takes
as its point of departure the impression, derived from examining unconscious
processes, that consciousness may be, not the most universal attribute
of mental processes, but only a particular function of them. Speaking
in metapsychological terms, it asserts that consciousness is a function
of a particular system which it describes as Cs. What consciousness
yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from
the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which
can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible
to assign to the system Pcpt.-Cs. a position in space. It must
lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned
towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
It will be seen that there is nothing daringly new in these assumptions;
we have merely adopted the views on localization held by cerebral
anatomy, which locates the `seat' of consciousness in the cerebral
cortex--the outermost, enveloping layer of the central organ. Cerebral
anatomy has no need to consider why, speaking anatomically, consciousness
should be lodged on the surface of the brain instead of being safely
housed somewhere in its inmost interior. Perhaps we shall be more
successful in accounting for this situation in the case of our system
Pcpt.-Cs.
Consciousness is not the only distinctive
character which we ascribe to the processes in that system. On the
basis of impressions derived from our psycho-analytic experience,
we assume that all excitatory processes that occur in the other
systems leave permanent traces behind in them which form the foundation
of memory. Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact
of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most
enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never
entered consciousness. We find it hard to believe, however, that permanent
traces of excitation such as these are also left in the system Pcpt.-Cs.
If they remained constantly conscious, they would very soon set limits
to the system's aptitude for receiving fresh excitations. If, on the
other hand, they were unconscious, we should be faced with the problem
of explaining the existence of unconscious processes in a system whose
functioning was otherwise accompanied by the phenomenon of consciousness.
We should, so to say, have altered nothing and gained nothing by our
hypothesis relegating the process of becoming conscious to a special
system. Though this consideration is not absolutely conclusive, it
nevertheless leads us to suspect that becoming conscious and leaving
behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other within
one and the same system. Thus we should be able to say that the excitatory
process becomes conscious in the system Cs. but leaves no permanent
trace behind there; but that the excitation is transmitted to the
systems lying next within and that it is in them that its traces are
left.
It must be borne in mind that little
enough is known from other sources of the origin of consciousness;
when, therefore, we lay down the proposition that consciousness arises
instead of a memory-trace, the assertion deserves consideration, at
all events on the ground of its being framed in fairly precise terms.
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.
* * * *
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.
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.
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, naive 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 even 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.
This would seem to be the place, then,
at which to admit for the first time an exception to the proposition
that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Anxiety dreams, as I have shown
repeatedly and in detail, offer no such exception. Nor do `punishment
dreams', for they merely replace the forbidden wish-fulfilment by
the appropriate punishment for it; that is to say, they fulfil the
wish of the sense of guilt which is the reaction to the repudiated
impulse. But it is impossible to classify as wishfulfilments the dreams
we have been discussing which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the
dreams during psycho-analyses which bring to memory the psychical
traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion
to repeat, though it is true that in analysis that compulsion is supported
by the wish (which is encouraged by `suggestion') to conjure up what
has been forgotten and repressed. Thus it would seem that the function
of dreams, which consists in setting aside any motives that might
interrupt sleep, by fulfilling the wishes of the disturbing impulses,
is not their original function. It would not be possible for
them to perform that function until the whole of mental life had accepted
the dominance of the pleasure principle. If there is a `beyond the
pleasure principle', it is only consistent to grant that there was
also a time before the purpose of dreams was the fulfilment of wishes.
This would imply no denial of their later function. But if once this
general rule has been broken, a further question arises. May not dreams
which, with a view to the psychical binding of traumatic impressions,
obey the compulsion to repeat--may not such dreams occur outside
analysis as well? And the reply can only be a decided affirmative.
I have argued elsewhere that `war neuroses'
(in so far as that term implies something more than a reference to
the circumstances of the illness's onset) may very well he traumatic
neuroses which have been facilitated by a conflict in the ego. A gross
physical injury caused simultaneously by the trauma diminishes the
chances that a neurosis will develop, becomes intelligible if one
bears in mind two facts which have been stressed by psycho-analytic
research: firstly, that mechanical agitation must be recognized as
one of the sources of sexual excitation, and secondly, that painful
and feverish illnesses exercise a powerful effect, so long as they
last, on the distribution of libido. Thus, on the one hand, the mechanical
violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation
which, owing to the lack of preparation for anxiety, would have a
traumatic effect; but, on the other hand, the simultaneous physical
injury, by calling for a narcissistic hypercathexis of the injured
organ, would bind the excess of excitation. It is also well known,
though the libido theory has not yet made sufficient use of the fact,
that such severe disorders in the distribution of libido as melancholia
are temporarily brought to an end by intercurrent organic illness,
and indeed that even a fully developed condition of dementia praecox
is capable of a temporary remission in these same circumstances.
V
The fact that the cortical layer which receives stimuli is without
any protective shield against excitations from within must have as
its result that these latter transmissions of stimulus have a preponderance
in economic importance and often occasion economic disturbances comparable
with traumatic neuroses. The most abundant sources of this internal
excitation are what are described as the organism's 'instincts'--the
representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the
body and transmitted to the mental apparatus--at once the most important
and the most obscure element of psychological research.
It will perhaps not be thought too rash
to suppose that the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong
to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile
processes which press towards discharge. The best part of what we
know of these processes is derived from our study of the dream-work.
We there discovered that the processes in the unconscious systems
were fundamentally different from those in the preconscious (or conscious)
systems. In the unconscious, cathexes can easily be completely transferred,
displaced and condensed. Such treatment, however, could produce only
invalid results if it were applied to preconscious material; and this
accounts for the familiar peculiarities exhibited by manifest dreams
after the preconscious residues of the preceding day have been worked
over in accordance with the laws operating in the unconscious. I described
the type of process found in the unconscious as the `primary' psychical
process, in contradistinction to the `secondary' process which is
the one obtaining in our normal waking life. Since all instinctual
impulses have the unconscious systems as their point of impact, it
is hardly an innovation to say that they obey the primary process.
Again, it is easy to identify the primary psychical process with Breuer's
freely mobile cathexis and the secondary process with changes in his
bound or tonic cathexis. If so, it would be the task of the higher
strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation
reaching the primary process. A failure to effect this binding would
provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis; and only
after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the
dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modification, the
reality principle) to proceed unhindered. Till then the other task
of the mental apparatus, the task of mastering or binding excitations,
would have precedence--not, indeed, in opposition to the pleasure
principle, but independently of it and to some extent in disregard
of it.
The manifestations of a compulsion to
repeat (which we have described as occurring in the early activities
of infantile mental life as well as among the events of psycho-analytic
treatment) exhibit to a high degree an instinctual character and,
when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance
of some 'daemonic' force at work. In the case of children's play we
seemed to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the
additional reason that they can master a powerful impression far more
thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing
it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery
they are in search of. Nor can children have their pleasurable
experiences repeated often enough, and they are inexorable in their
insistence that the repetition shall be an identical one. This character
trait disappears later on. If a joke is heard for a second time it
produces almost no effect; a theatrical production never creates so
great an impression the second time as the first; indeed, it is hardly
possible to persuade an adult who has very much enjoyed reading a
book to reread it immediately. Novelty is always the condition of
enjoyment. But children will never tire of asking an adult to repeat
a game that he has shown them or played with them, till he is too
exhausted to go on. And if a child has been told a nice story, he
will insist on hearing it over and over again rather than a new one;
and he will remorselessly stipulate that the repetition shall be an
identical one and will correct any alterations of which the narrator
may be guilty--though they may actually have been made in the hope
of gaining fresh approval. None of this contradicts the pleasure principle:
repetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly
in itself a source of pleasure. In the case of a person in analysis,
on the contrary, the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood
in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in
every way. The patient behaves in a purely infantile fashion and thus
shows us that the repressed memory-traces of his primaeval experiences
are not present in him in a bound state and are indeed in a sense
incapable of obeying the secondary process. It is to this fact of
not being bound, moreover, that they owe their capacity for forming,
in conjunction with the residues of the previous day, a wishful phantasy
that emerges in a dream. This same compulsion to repeat frequently
meets us as an obstacle to our treatment when at the end of an analysis
we try to induce the patient to detach himself completely from his
physician. It may be presumed, too, that when people unfamiliar with
analysis feel an obscure fear--a dread of rousing something that,
so they feel, is better left sleeping--what they are afraid of at
bottom is the emergence of this compulsion with its hint of possession
by some 'daemonic' power.
But how is the predicate of being `instinctual'
related to the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot escape
a suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute
of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not
hitherto been clearly recognized or at least not explicitly stressed.
It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic
life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity
has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing
forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it
another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.
This view of instincts strikes us as
strange because we have become used to see in them a factor impelling
towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize
in them the precise contrary--an expression of the conservative nature
of living substance. On the other hand we soon call to mind examples
from animal life which seem to confirm the view that instincts are
historically determined.
We shall be met by the plausible objection
that it may very well be that, in addition to the conservative instincts
which impel towards repetition, there may be others which push forward
towards progress and the production of new forms. This argument must
certainly not be overlooked, and it will be taken into account at
a later stage. But for the moment it is tempting to pursue to its
logical conclusion the hypothesis that all instincts tend towards
the restoration of an earlier state of things. The outcome may give
an impression of mysticism or of sham profundity; but we can feel
quite innocent of having had any such purpose in view. We seek only
for the sober results of research or of reflection based on it; and
we have no wish to find in those results any quality other than certainty.
Let us suppose, then, that all the organic
instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards
the restoration of an earlier state of things. It follows that the
phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing
and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from
its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained
the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course
of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on development
of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its
relation to the sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon
the course of the organism's life is accepted by the conservative
organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts
are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces
tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely
seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover
it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving.
It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts
if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been
attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial
state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed
and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along
which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that
knows no exception that everything living dies for internal
reasons--becomes inorganic once again--then we shall be compelled
to say that `the aim of all life is death' and, looking backwards,
that `inanimate things existed before living ones'.
The attributes of life were at some
time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose
nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process
similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness
in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose
in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel
itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct
to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that
time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably
only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure
of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was
thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive
external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving
substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of
life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching
its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept
to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us today with
the picture of the phenomena of life. It we firmly maintain the exclusively
conservative nature of instincts, we cannot arrive at any other notions
as to the origin and aim of life.
The implications in regard to the great
groups of instincts which, as we believe, lie behind the phenomena
of life in organisms must appear no less bewildering. The hypothesis
of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all living
beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life
as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical
importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion
and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose
function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path
to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic
existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself.
We have no longer to reckon with the organism's puzzling determination
(so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in
the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that
the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians
of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence arises
the paradoxical situation that the living organism struggles most
energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help it
to attain its life's aim rapidly--by a kind of short-circuit. Such
behaviour is, however, precisely what characterizes purely instinctual
as contrasted with intelligent efforts.
But let us pause for a moment and reflect.
It cannot be so. The sexual instincts, to which the theory of the
neuroses gives a quite special place, appear under a very different
aspect. The whole path of development to natural death is not trodden
by all the elementary entities which compose the complicated body
of one of the higher organisms. Some of them, the germ-cells, probably
retain the original structure of living matter and, after a certain
time, with their full complement of inherited and freshly acquired
instinctual dispositions, separate themselves from the organism as
a whole. These two characteristics may be precisely what enables them
to have an independent existence. Under favourable conditions, they
begin to develop--that is, to repeat the performance to which they
owe their existence; and in the end once again one portion of their
substance pursues its development to a finish, while another portion
harks back once again as a fresh residual germ to the beginning of
the process of development. These germ-cells, therefore, work against
the death of the living substance and succeed in winning for it what
we can only regard as potential immortality, though that may mean
no more than a lengthening of the road to death. We must regard as
in the highest degree significant the fact that this function of the
germ-cell is reinforced, or only made possible, if it coalesces with
another cell similar to itself and yet differing from it.
The instincts which watch over the destinies
of these elementary organisms that survive the whole individual, which
provide them with a safe shelter while they are defenceless against
the stimuli of the external world, which bring about their meeting
with other germ-cells, and so on--these constitute the group of the
sexual instincts. They are conservative in the same sense as the other
instincts in that they bring back earlier states of living substance;
but they are conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly
resistant to external influences; and they are conservative too in
another sense in that they preserve life itself for a comparatively
long period. They are the true life instincts. They operate against
the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their
function, to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition
between them and the other instincts, an opposition whose importance
was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses. It is as though
the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group
of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as
swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has
been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make
a fresh start and so prolong the journey. And even though it is certain
that sexuality and the distinction between the sexes did not exist
when life began, the possibility remains that the instincts which
were later to be described as sexual may have been in operation from
the very first, and it may not be true that it was only at a later
time that they started upon their work of opposing the activities
of the 'ego-instincts'.
Let us now hark back for a moment ourselves
and consider whether there is any basis at all for these speculations.
Is it really the case that, apart from the sexual instincts,
there are no instincts that do not seek to restore an earlier state
of things--that there are none that aim at a state of things which
has never yet been attained? I know of no certain example from the
organic world that would contradict the characterization I have thus
proposed. There is unquestionably no universal instinct towards higher
development observable in the animal or plant world, even though it
is undeniable that development does in fact occur in that direction.
But on the one hand it is often merely a matter of opinion when we
declare that one stage of development is higher than another, and
on the other hand biology teaches us that higher development in one
respect is very frequently balanced or outweighed by involution in
another. Moreover there are plenty of animal forms from whose early
stages we can infer that their development has, on the contrary, assumed
a retrograde character. Both higher developments and involution might
well be the consequences of adaptation to the pressure of external
forces; and in both cases the part played by instincts might be limited
to the retention (in the form of an internal source of pleasure) of
an obligatory modification.
It may be difficult, too, for many of
us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection
at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high
level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which
may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have
no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct
and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved.
The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me,
no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority
of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection
can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression
upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.
The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction,
which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction.
No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice
to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the
difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is
demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides
the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position
attained, but, in the poet's words, `ungebandigt immer vorwdrts
dringt' [Presses ever forward unsubdued.' Mephistopheles in Faust,
Part I, Scene 4]. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction
is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions.
So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which
growth is still free--though with no prospect of bringing the process
to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal. The processes
involved in the formation of a neurotic phobia, which is nothing else
than an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct, present
us with a model of the manner of origin of this supposititious `instinct
towards perfection'--an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed
to every human being. The dynamic conditions for its development
are, indeed, universally present; but it is only in rare cases that
the economic situation appears to favour the production of the phenomenon.
I will add only a word to suggest that
the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever larger
unities probably provide a substitute for this `instinct towards perfection'
whose existence we cannot admit. The phenomena that are attributed
to it seem capable of explanation by these efforts of Eros taken in
conjunction with the results of repression.
VI
The upshot of our enquiry so far has been the drawing of a sharp
distinction between the 'ego-instincts' and the sexual instincts,
and the view that the former exercise pressure towards death and the
latter towards a prolongation of life. But this conclusion is bound
to be unsatisfactory in many respects even to ourselves. Moreover,
it is actually only of the former group of instincts that we can predicate
a conservative, or rather retrograde, character corresponding to a
compulsion to repeat. For on our hypothesis the ego-instincts arise
from the coming to life of inanimate matter and seek to restore the
inanimate state; whereas as regards the sexual instincts, though it
is true that they reproduce primitive states of the organism, what
they are clearly aiming at by every possible means is the coalescence
of two germ-cells which are differentiated in a particular way. If
this union is not effected, the germ-cell dies along with all the
other elements of the multicellular organism. It is only on this condition
that the sexual function can prolong the cell's life and lend it the
appearance of immortality. But what is the important event in the
development of living substance which is being repeated in sexual
reproduction, or in its fore-runner, the conjugation of two protista?
We cannot say; and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole
structure of our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition
between the ego or death instincts 2 and the sexual or life instincts
would then cease to hold and the compulsion to repeat would no longer
possess the importance we have ascribed to it.
Let us turn back to one of the assumptions
that we have already made, with the expectation that we shall be able
to give it a categorical denial. We have drawn far-reaching conclusions
from the hypothesis that all living substance is bound to die from
internal causes. We made this assumption thus carelessly because it
does not seem to us to be an assumption. We are accustomed
to think that such is the fact, and we are strengthened in our thought
by the writings of our poets. Perhaps we have adopted the belief because
there is some comfort in it. If we are to die ourselves, and first
to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit
to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime 'Avayxq' [Necessity],
than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped. It may be,
however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only
another of those illusions which we have created 'um die Schwere
des Daseins zu ertragen' ['To bear the burden of existence.' Shiller,
Die Braut von Messina]. It is certainly not a primaeval belief. The
notion of `natural death' is quite foreign to primitive races; they
attribute every death that occurs among them to the influence of an
enemy or of an evil spirit. We must therefore turn to biology in order
to test the validity of the belief.
If we do so, we may be astonished to
find how little agreement there is among biologists on the subject
of natural death and in fact that the whole concept of death melts
away under their hands. The fact that there is a fixed average duration
of life at least among the higher animals naturally argues in favour
of there being such a thing as death from natural causes. But this
impression is countered when we consider that certain large animals
and certain gigantic arboreal growths reach a very advanced age and
one which cannot at present be computed. According to the large conception
of Wilhelm Fliess, all the phenomena of life exhibited by organism--and
also, no doubt, their death--are linked with the completion of fixed
periods, which express the dependence of two kinds of living substance
(one male and the other female) upon the solar year. When we see,
however, how easily and how extensively the influence of external
forces is able to modify the date of the appearance of vital phenomena
(especially in the plant world)--to precipitate them or hold them
back--doubts must be cast upon the rigidity of Fliess's formulas or
at least upon whether the laws laid down by him are the sole determining
factors.
The greatest interest attaches from
our point of view to the treatment given to the subject of the duration
of life and the death of organisms in the writings of Weismann (1882,
1884, 1892, etc. ). It was he who introduced the division of living
substance into mortal and immortal parts. The mortal part is the body
in the narrower sense--the 'soma'--which alone is subject to natural
death. The germ-cells, on the other hand, are potentially immortal,
in so far as they are able, under certain favourable conditions, to
develop into a new individual, or, in other words, to surround themselves
with a new soma. (August Weismann, Die Dauer des Lebens, 1884.)
* * * *
It will be seen at once that to concede in this way that higher organisms
have a natural death is of very little help to us. For if death is
a late acquisition of organisms, then there can be no question of
there having been death instincts from the very beginning of life
on this earth. Multicellular organisms may die for internal reasons,
owing to defective differentiation or to imperfections in their metabolism,
but the matter is of no interest from the point of view of our problem.
An account of the origin of death such as this is moreover far less
at variance with our habitual modes of thought than the strange assumption
of `death instincts'.
* * * *
Our expectation that biology would flatly contradict the recognition
of death instincts has not been fulfilled. We are at liberty to continue
concerning ourselves with their possibility, if we have other reasons
for doing so. The striking similarity between Weismann's distinction
of soma and germ-plasm and our separation of the death instincts from
the life instincts persists and retains its significance.
We may pause for a moment over this
pre-eminently dualistic view of instinctual life. According to E.
Hering's theory, two kinds of processes are constantly at work in
living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive
or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory. May we
venture to recognize in these two directions taken by the vital processes
the activity of our two instinctual impulses, the life instincts and
the death instincts? There is something else, at any rate, that we
cannot remain blind to. We have unwittingly steered our course into
the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy. For him death is the `true
result and to that extent the purpose of life', while the sexual instinct
is the embodiment of the will to live.
Let us make a bold attempt at another
step forward. It is generally considered that the union of a number
of cells into a vital association--the multicellular character of
organisms--has become a means of prolonging their life. One cell helps
to preserve the life of another, and the community of cells can survive
even if individual cells have to die. We have already heard that conjugation,
too, the temporary coalescence of two unicellular organisms, has a
life-preserving and rejuvenating effect on both of them. Accordingly,
we might attempt to apply the libido theory which has been arrived
at in psycho-analysis to the' mutual relationship of cells. We might
suppose that the life instincts or sexual instincts which are active
in each cell take the other cells as their object, that they partly
neutralize the death instincts (that is, the processes set up by them)
in those cells and thus preserve their life; while the other cells
do the same for them, and still others sacrifice themselves
in the performance of this libidinal function. The germ-cells themselves
would behave in a completely `narcissistic' fashion--to use the phrase
that we are accustomed to use in the theory of the neuroses to describe
a whole individual who retains his libido in his ego and pays none
of it out in object-cathexes. The germ-cells require their libido,
the activity of their life instincts, for themselves, as a reserve
against their later momentous constructive activity. (The cells of
the malignant neoplasms which destroy the organism should also perhaps
be described as narcissistic in this same sense: pathology is prepared
to regard their germs as innate and to ascribe embronic attributes
to them.) In this way the libido of our sexual instincts would coincide
with the Eros of the poets and philosophers which holds all living
things together.
Here then is an opportunity for looking
back over the slow development of our libido theory. In the first
instance the analysis of the transference neuroses forced upon our
notice the opposition between the `sexual instincts', which are directed
towards an object, and certain other instincts, with which we were
very insufficiently acquainted and which we described provisionally
as the 'ego-instincts'. A foremost place among these was necessarily
given to the instincts serving the self-preservation of the individual.
It was impossible to say what other distinctions were to be drawn
among them. No knowledge would have been more valuable as a foundation
for true psychological science than an approximate grasp of the common
characteristics and possible distinctive features of the instincts.
But in no region of psychology were we groping more in the dark. Everyone
assumed the existence of as many instincts or `basic instincts' as
he chose, and juggled with them like the ancient Greek natural philosophers
with their four elements--earth, air, fire and water. Psycho-analysis,
which could not escape making some assumption about the instincts,
kept at first to the popular division of instincts typified in the
phrase `hunger and love'. At least there was nothing arbitrary in
this; and by its help the analysis of the psychoneuroses was carried
forward quite a distance. The concept of `sexuality', and at the same
time of the sexual instinct, had, it is true, to be extended so as
to cover many things which could not be classed under the reproductive
function; and this caused no little hubbub in an austere, respectable
or merely hypocritical world.
The next step was taken when psycho-analysis
felt its way closer towards the psychological ego, which it had first
come to know only as a repressive, censoring agency, capable of erecting
protective structures and reactive formations. Critical and far-seeing
minds had, it is true, long since objected to the concept of libido
being restricted to the energy of the sexual instincts directed towards
an object. But they failed to explain how they had arrived at their
better knowledge or to derive from it anything of which analysis could
make use. Advancing more cautiously, psycho-analysis observed the
regularity with which libido is withdrawn from the object and directed
on to the ego (the process of introversion); and, by studying the
libidinal development of children in its earliest phases, came to
the conclusion that the ego is the true and original reservoir of
libido, and that it is only from that reservoir that libido is extended
on to objects. The ego now found its position among sexual objects
and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which
was in this way lodged in the ego was described as 'narcissistic'.
This narcissistic libido was of course also a manifestation of the
force of the sexual instinct in the analytical sense of those words,
and it had necessarily to be identified with the 'self-preservative
instincts' whose existence had been recognized from the first. Thus
the original opposition between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts
proved to be inadequate. A portion of the ego-instincts was seen to
be libidinal; sexual instincts-probably alongside others-operated
in the ego. Nevertheless we are justified in saying that the old formula
which lays it down that psychoneuroses are based on a conflict between
ego-instincts and sexual instincts contains nothing that we need reject
today. It is merely that the distinction between the two kinds of
instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way qualitative,
must now be characterized differently--namely as being topographical.
And in particular it is still true that the transference neuroses,
the essential subject of psycho-analytic study, are the result of
a conflict between the ego and the libidinal cathexis of objects.
But it is all the more necessary for
us to lay stress upon the libidinal character of the self-preservative
instincts now that we are venturing upon the further step of recognizing
the sexual instinct as Eros, the preserver of all things, and of deriving
the narcissistic libido of the ego from the stores of libido by means
of which the cells of the soma are attached to one another. But we
now find ourselves suddenly faced by another question. If the self-preservative
instincts too are of a libidinal nature, are there perhaps no other
instincts whatever but the libidinal ones? At all events there are
none other visible. But in that case we shall after all be driven
to agree with the critics who suspected from the first that psycho-analysis
explains everything by sexuality, or with innovators like Jung
who, making a hasty judgement, have used the word `libido' to mean
instinctual force in general. Must not this be so?
It was not our intention at all
events to produce such a result. Our argument had as its point of
departure a sharp distinction between egoinstincts, which we equated
with death instincts, and sexual instincts, which we equated with
life instincts. (We were prepared at one stage to include the so-called
self-preservative instincts of the ego among the death instincts;
but we subsequently corrected ourselves on this point and withdrew
it.) Our views have from the very first been dualistic, and
today they are even more definitely dualistic than before--now that
we describe the opposition as being, not between ego-instincts and
sexual instincts but between life instincts and death instincts. Jung's
libido theory is on the contrary monistic; the fact that he
has called his one instinctual force `libido' is bound to cause confusion,
but need not affect us otherwise. We suspect that instincts other
than those of self-preservation operate in the ego, and it ought to
be possible for us to point to them. Unfortunately, however, the analysis
of the ego has made so little headway that it is very difficult for
us to do so. It is possible, indeed, that the libidinal instincts
in the ego may be linked in a peculiar manner with these other ego-instincts
which are still strange to us. Even before we had any clear understanding
of narcissism, psycho-analysts had a suspicion that the 'ego-instincts'
had libidinal components attached to them. But these are very uncertain
possibilities, to which our opponents will pay very little attention.
The difficulty remains that psycho-analysis has not enabled us hitherto
to point to any [ego-] instincts other than the libidinal ones. That,
however, is no reason for our falling in with the conclusion that
no others in fact exist.
In the obscurity that reigns at present
in the theory of the instincts, it would be unwise to reject any idea
that promises to throw light on it. We started out from the great
opposition between the life and death instincts. Now object-love itself
presents us with a second example of a similar polarity--that between
love (or affection) and hate (or aggressiveness). If only we could
succeed in relating these two polarities to each other and in deriving
one from the other! From the very first we recognized the presence
of a sadistic component in the sexual instinct. As we know, it can
make itself independent and can, in the form of a perversion, dominate
an individual's entire sexual activity. It also emerges as a predominant
component instinct in one of the 'pregenital organizations', as I
have named them. But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim it is
to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life?
Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death
instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has
been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in
relation to the object? It now enters the service of the sexual function.
During the oral stage of organization of the libido, the act of obtaining
erotic mastery over an object coincides with that object's destruction;
later, the sadistic instinct separates off, and finally, at the stage
of genital primacy, it takes on, for the purposes of reproduction,
the function of overpowering the sexual object to the extent necessary
for carrying out the sexual act. It might indeed be said that the
sadism which has been forced out of the ego has pointed the way for
the libidinal components of the sexual instinct, and that these follow
after it to the object. Wherever the original sadism has undergone
no mitigation or intermixture, we find the familiar ambivalence of
love and hate in erotic life.
If such an assumption as this is permissible,
then we have met the demand that we should produce an example of a
death instinct--though, it is true, a displaced one. But this way
of looking at things is very far from being easy to grasp and creates
a positively mystical impression. It looks suspiciously as though
we were trying to find a way out of a highly embarrassing situation
at any price. We may recall, however, that there is nothing new in
an assumption of this kind. We put one forward on an earlier occasion,
before there was any question of an embarrassing situation. Clinical
observations led us at that time to the view that masochism, the component
instinct which is complementary to sadism, must be regarded as sadism
that has been turned round upon the subject's own ego. But there is
no difference in principle between an instinct turning from an object
to the ego and its turning from the ego to an object--which is the
new point now under discussion. Masochism, the turning round of the
instinct upon the subject's own ego, would in that case be a return
to an earlier phase of the instinct's history, a regression. The account
that was formerly given of masochism requires emendation as being
too sweeping in one respect: there might be such a thing as
primary masochism--a possibility which I had contested at that time.
* * * *
But we still feel our line of thought appreciably hampered by the
fact that we cannot ascribe to the sexual instinct the characteristic
of a compulsion to repeat which first put us on the track of the death
instincts. The sphere of embryonic developmental processes is no doubt
extremely rich in such phenomena of repetition; the two germ-cells
that are involved in sexual reproduction and their life history are
themselves only repetitions of the beginnings of organic life. But
the essence of the processes to which sexual life is directed is the
coalescence of two cellbodies. That alone is what guarantees the immortality
of the living substance in the higher organisms.
In other words, we need more information
on the origin of sexual reproduction and of the sexual instincts in
general. This is a problem which is calculated to daunt an outsider
and which the specialists themselves have not yet been able to solve.
We shall therefore give only the briefest summary of whatever seems
relevant to our line of thought from among the many discordant assertions
and opinions.
* * * *
Science has so little to tell us about the origin of sexuality that
we can liken the problem to a darkness into which not so much as a
ray of a hypothesis has penetrated. In quite a different region, it
is true, we do meet with such a hypothesis; but it is of so fantastic
a kind-a myth rather than a scientific explanation--that I should
not venture to produce it here, were it not that it fulfils precisely
the one condition whose fulfilment we desire. For it traces the origin
of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of things.
What I have in mind is, of course, the
theory which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium,
and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct
but also with the most important of its variations in relation to
its object. `The original human nature was not like the present, but
different. In the first place, the sexes were originally three in
number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union
of the two....' Everything about these primaeval men was double: they
had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on.
Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two, `like a sorb-apple
which is halved for pickling'. After the division had been made, 'the
two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and
threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one'.
Shall we follow the hint given us by
the poet-philosopher, and venture upon the hypothesis that living
substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small
particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the
sexual instincts? that these instincts, in which the chemical affinity
of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed
through the kingdom of the protista, in overcoming the difficulties
put in the way of that endeavour by an environment charged with dangerous
stimuli--stimuli which compelled them to form a protective cortical
layer? that these splintered fragments of living substance in this
way attained a multicellular condition and finally transferred the
instinct for reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the
germ-cells?--But here, I think, the moment has come for breaking off.
Not, however, without the addition of
a few words of critical reflection. It may be asked whether and how
far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have
been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced
myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe
in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe
in them. There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional
factor of conviction should enter into this question at all. It is
surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow
it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the
reader prefers, as an advocatus diaboli, who is not on that
account himself sold to the devil. I do not dispute the fact that
the third step in the theory of the instincts, which I have taken
here, cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as the two
earlier ones--the extension of the concept of sexuality and the hypothesis
of narcissism. These two innovations were a direct translation of
observation into theory and were no more open to sources of error
than is inevitable in all such cases. It is true that my assertion
of the regressive character of instincts also rests upon observed
material--namely on the facts of the compulsion to repeat. It may
be, however, that I have overestimated their significance. And in
any case it is impossible to pursue an idea of this kind except by
repeatedly combining factual material with what is purely speculative
and thus diverging widely from empirical observation. The more frequently
this is done in the course of constructing a theory, the more untrustworthy,
as we know, must be the final result. But the degree of uncertainty
is not assignable. One may have made a lucky hit or one may have gone
shamefully astray. I do not think a large part is played by what is
called 'intuition' in work of this kind. From what I have seen of
intuition, it seems to me to be the product of a kind of intellectual
impartiality. Unfortunately, however, people are seldom impartial
where ultimate things, the great problems of science and life, are
concerned. Each of us is governed in such cases by deep-rooted internal
prejudices, into whose hands our speculation unwittingly plays. Since
we have such good grounds for being distrustful, our attitude towards
the results of our own deliberations cannot well be other than one
of cool benevolence. I hasten to add, however, that self-criticism
such as this is far from binding one to any special tolerance towards
dissentient opinions. It is perfectly legitimate to reject remorselessly
theories which are contradicted by the very first steps in the analysis
of observed facts, while yet being aware at the same time that the
validity of one's own theory is only a provisional one.
We need not feel greatly disturbed in
judging our speculation upon the life and death instincts by the fact
that so many bewildering and obscure processes occur in it--such as
one instinct being driven out by another or an instinct turning from
the ego to an object, and so on. This is merely due to our being obliged
to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative
language, peculiar to psychology (or, more precisely, to depth psychology).
We could not otherwise describe the processes in question at all,
and indeed we could not have become aware of them. The deficiencies
in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position
to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones.
It is true that they too are only part of a figurative language; but
it is one with which we have long been familiar and which is perhaps
a simpler one as well.
On the other hand it should be made
quite clear that the uncertainty of our speculation has been greatly
increased by the necessity for borrowing from the science of biology.
Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect
it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess
what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions
we have put to it. They may be of a kind which will blow away the
whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses. If so, it may be
asked why I have embarked upon such a line of thought as the present
one, and in particular why I have decided to make it public. Well--I
cannot deny that some of the analogies, correlations and connections
which it contains seemed to me to deserve consideration.
VII
If it is really the case that seeking to restore an earlier state
of things is such a universal characteristic of instincts, we need
not be surprised that so many processes take place in mental life
independently of the pleasure principle. This characteristic would
be shared by all the component instincts and in their case would aim
at returning once more to a particular stage in the course of development.
These are matters over which the pleasure principle has as yet no
control; but it does not follow that any of them are necessarily opposed
to it, and we have still to solve the problem of the relation of the
instinctual processes of repetition to the dominance of the pleasure
principle.
We have found that one of the earliest
and most important functions of the mental apparatus is to bind the
instinctual impulses which impinge on it, to replace the primary process
prevailing in them by the secondary process and convert their freely
mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis.
While this transformation is taking place no attention can be paid
to the development of unpleasure; but this does not imply the suspension
of the pleasure principle. On the contrary, the transformation occurs
on behalf of the pleasure principle; the binding is a preparatory
act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle.
Let us make a sharper distinction than
we have hitherto made between function and tendency. The pleasure
principle, then, is a tendency operating in the service of a function
whose business it is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation
or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as
low as possible. We cannot yet decide with certainty in favour of
any of these ways of putting it; but it is clear that the function
thus described would be concerned with the most universal endeavour
of all living substance--namely to return to the quiescence of the
inorganic world. We have all experienced how the greatest pleasure
attainable by us, that of the sexual act, is associated with a momentary
extinction of a highly intensified excitation. The binding of an instinctual
impulse would be a preliminary function designed to prepare the excitation
for its final elimination in the pleasure of discharge.
This raises the question of whether
feelings of pleasure and unpleasure can be produced equally from bound
and from unbound excitatory processes. And there seems to be no doubt
whatever that the unbound or primary processes give rise to far more
intense feelings in both directions than the bound or secondary ones.
Moreover the primary processes are the earlier in time; at the beginning
of mental life there are no others, and we may infer that if the pleasure
principle had not already been operative in them it could never have
been established for the later ones. We thus reach what is at bottom
no very simple conclusion, namely that at the beginning of mental
life the struggle for pleasure was far more intense than later but
not so unrestricted: it had to submit to frequent interruptions. In
later times the dominance of the pleasure principle is very much more
secure, but it itself has no more escaped the process of taming than
the other instincts in general. In any case, whatever it is that causes
the appearance of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure in processes
of excitation must be present in the secondary process just as it
is in the primary one.
Here might be the starting-point for
fresh investigations. Our consciousness communicates to us feelings
from within not only of pleasure and unpleasure but also of a peculiar
tension which in its turn can be either pleasurable or unpleasurable.
Should the difference between these feelings enable us to distinguish
between hound and unbound processes of energy? Or is the feeling of
tension to be related to the absolute magnitude, or perhaps to the
level, of the cathexis, while the pleasure and unpleasure series indicates
a change in the magnitude of the cathexis within a given unit of
time? Another striking fact is that the life instincts have so
much more contact with our internal perception--emerging as breakers
of the peace and constantly producing tensions whose release is felt
as pleasure--while the death instincts seem to do their work unobtrusively.
The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.
It is true that it keeps watch upon stimuli from without, which are
regarded as dangers by both kinds of instincts; but it is more especially
on guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would
make the task of living more difficult. This in turn raises a host
of other questions to which we can at present find no answer. We must
be patient and await fresh methods and occasions of research. We must
be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time,
if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand
that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given
up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming
his views. We may take comfort, too, for the slow advances of our
scientific knowledge in the words of the poet:
Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken. Die Schrift sagt,
es ist keine Sunde zu hinken.1
1 ['What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping.... The Book tells
us it is no sin to limp.' The last lines of `Die beiden Gulden', a version
by Ruckert of one of the Magqamat of al-Hariri. Freud also quoted
these lines in a letter to Fliess of Oct. 20, 1895 (Freud 1950a, Letter
32).]
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