All posts tagged guilt

An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

  • by storing up stimuli in the memory
  • by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
  • dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
  • learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

  1. the deep inner world – the id
  2. a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
  3. a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind,  stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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Freud on religion

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motivation of human behaviour and thought, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian, bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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‘God is at bottom nothing but a projection of the father.’

The influence of Darwin

In his later writings, in the 1870s, Charles Darwin hinted at the implications of his theory of evolution by natural selection for human psychology. In the 1890s Sigmund Freud, like many other scientists and psychologists of his generation, picked up on these hints by developing a theory of human nature which aimed to be entirely materialistic, secular and biological.

But in Freud’s writings this project became closely linked to his lifelong, systematic and remorseless attack on religion, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity – leading to a lifelong obsession with rewriting Christianity’s history, concepts and present-day appeal in purely secular, materialist, psychological terms.

Freud takes Darwin’s insights into the natural world (i.e. that all life evolved from less organised to more organised forms via countless trillions of variations, with no divine intervention or plan) and applies them to the life of the mind. He aimed to show that the mind, as much a part of the natural world as our legs or eyes, also evolved by a process of natural selection, by trial and error, from below, rather than being divinely created from above.

Freud’s theory of the mind

Building on this foundation Freud went on to claim, and try to prove, that the mind is a complex overlay of different strategies, instincts and forces which are frequently in conflict with each other. It is the conflicts between different instincts in the mind which account for much of our unhappiness, our sense of being at odds with ourselves or with the world.

Freud divides the mind into different compartments or functions which engage in the struggle for survival among themselves: predominantly this is a battle between the unconscious, instinctive part of the mind, the ‘id’, and the rational, strategic, forward-looking ‘ego’.

Freud developed a technique, the so-called talking cure, whereby patients were helped to express these unconscious conflicts in order to become fully conscious of them and so cope with them better. The technique and the theory together came to be called psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has been used differently in the hands of different practitioners, but with Freud it went hand-in-hand with Darwin’s idea that religion, ethics and so on are to be dealt with naturalistically, as products of the developing human species, rather than as supernatural gifts from God.

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s lifelong animus against religious belief was:

  1. partly a product of the antisemitism he encountered from childhood onwards in the Austrian capital, Vienna
  2. partly due to the fierce anti-clericalism of the German, rationalist, materialist tradition which he imbibed at school and while studying science at university

Both these sources were further confirmed by the hypocritical and hysterical attacks made on him by churchmen of all denominations as he published the results of his new discoveries of the mind throughout the early 1900s. As with Darwin, the stupidity and ignorance of the Christian attacks on him confirmed Freud in his low opinion of Christian authorities and ‘thinkers’.

Freud’s critique of religion

Freud critiques religion in a number of ways, approaching the issue from various angles, which this blog post will describe in the following order:

  1. by providing an alternative, purely secular psychological account of religious experience
  2. by demonstrating that religious feeling is at bottom wish-fulfilment, to which we are all susceptible
  3. by drawing an analogy between religious rituals and neurotic obsessions
  4. by analysing specific religious phenomena in secular terms
  5. by rewriting religious history (of Judaism in particular) in purely psychological terms
  6. by showing how harmful religious belief is in modern life, both to the individual and to society as a whole

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

Religion, Freud claims, is the fulfilment of mankind’s oldest, deepest wishes, namely:

  • to have a coherent explanation of why we’re here
  • to have our path through the world watched over by a benevolent Providence
  • to have clear-cut guidelines as to how to behave and the promise of reward if we behave well
  • to live forever
  • to be loved unconditionally

Religion answers all of these wishes by creating an all-powerful God:

  • who made the world
  • who watches over and protects all of us so that not even the falling of a sparrow goes unnoticed
  • who created us free to choose, and planted a knowledge of morality in us and a little watchdog in our brains – our ‘conscience’
  • who will reward us for obeying its promptings with eternal life

But for Freud individual religious belief is an illusion because none of the above is true. Very obviously all the qualities attributed to ‘God’ are based on the child’s view of their all-powerful father, or are designed to address the anxieties and uncertainties we all face as adults.

As for society as a whole, society-wide religious belief is a type of mass delusion and, at its most extreme, actually takes the form of mass delusions, from the group weddings of the Moonies to the religious hysteria of entire nations e.g. the Iranians in the aftermath of their revolution, or periodic outbreaks of ‘end-of-the-world’ hysterias.

You don’t have to delve far back into European history to uncover evidence of mass, society-wide outbreaks of madness, many of them centred around hysterical religious fervour, not least the 130 years of social turmoil and civil war which came to be called the Wars of Religion (roughly 1520 to 1648).

In addition to the, as it were, ‘rational’ or sympathetic wishes listed above (the wish to be looked after, protected, comforted etc), religion offers a range of other satisfactions:

  • by teaching you to turn away from relying on the outside world and concentrate on ‘spiritual affairs’, religion helps in the avoidance of the pain inevitably caused by the outside world; for example, the inevitable ageing and death of ourselves and those we love
  • religion helps you sublimate your basic instincts into socially acceptable routes; for example, a powerful sexual drive can become sublimated into a love of all humanity, or into exhausting works of ‘charity’; aggression can be practiced as long as it’s against acceptable objects, like ‘heretics’, ‘the infidel’, Jews etc
  • religion helps you feel part of a gang, of a large organisation which you can devote yourself to, and so helps you to forget your personal difficulties, or submerge them into working for a higher cause
  • religion offers the pleasure of feeling superior to outsiders – ‘I’m saved. You’re damned’ – which has been such a feature in Christian theology

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

When we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas we see that they are not the precipitates of experience or the end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. The infant’s terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for the protection provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life makes it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.

Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilisation; and the prolongation of a earthly life in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say these things are illusions I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin arose out of dung was an error. On the other hand it was an illusion of Christopher Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by Columbus’s wish in the illusion is obvious. He wanted to discover a new route to the Indies. And so on the slightest evidence he thought he had.

Thus what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealisable, or in contradiction with reality. For example, a middle class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible and a few such cases have occurred. But that the Messiah will come and institute a golden age is much less likely, that is, it includes a larger proportion of pure wish-fulfilment… And so we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

(The Future of an Illusion, section 6, Pelican Freud volume 12: pages 212 to 213)

Thus, at the heart of religious belief – or religious illusion – there is a real truth, the truth of our infantile, helpless dependence on our parents and our experience of the unconditional love they showed us. And religious belief arises from a long-suppressed wish to return to such a state of unconditional belovedness.

Submission to an organised religious creed, with its offers of punishment as well as reward, amounts to a compromise between a) the Pleasure Principle’s bottomless need for love and b) the Reality Principle, the rational ego’s knowledge that endless love is difficult if not impossible to attain in this hazardous world. Between optimism and pessimism.

This explains why religious ‘conversion’ is commonly experienced as a breakthrough into a realm of radical happiness, happiness such as we thought we could never have again because it is the re-experiencing of childhood simplicities.

Freud’s theory says that the sense of ‘victory over death’ described by converts is a purely internal, psychological victory of the love-wanting, wishful part of our mind over the mature, realistic, pessimistic part. It is thus a ‘real’ experience, just that it has no reference to events outside our minds.

Christians’ mistake is the elementary one of thinking that this breakthrough inside their own heads is reflective of an objective reality; is fed by, or part of, a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is the same mistake made by drug-users, drunks and psychotics of projecting their inner experience onto the universe.

Thus, on Freud’s theory, the success and endurance of religion is its ability to fit the individual’s powerful libidinal wishes into an acceptable, nay, an eminently respectable social structure, the form and hierarchies of the church. In the church the most personal and private, semi-conscious, infantile fantasy-wishes are united with eminently grown-up, sophisticated, objective realities. Are approved.

Where else outside the Church could ordinary, boring, middle-aged men dress up in purple skirts, be adored and worshipped by pretty young boys, move solemnly through an atmosphere rich in incense and gold, and play-act that they have infinite power of judgement, of the forgiveness of sins?

Where else could their rather mediocre opinions and ideas about life be listened to, soaked up and debated with fervour by a large, devout congregation? The power of that experience must be intoxicating. And, since all enjoyment is suspect in Christianity, the very thrill of power and control itself might make the subject think he is being tempted by to the Devil’s sin of Pride. Which explains, in Freud’s view, why so many Christians go around and around in a self-confirming cycle of hyper-self-awareness, doubt, spiritual agonies, religious breakthrough etc etc, all the time convincing themselves that they are not boring, insignificant cyphers who will grow old, grow ill and die – but are at the centre of a great cosmic battle between good and evil.

How boring non-believers’ mundane lives seem in comparison. How lost and unfocused they seem.

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

Freud was the first to draw attention to the similarity in psychological structure between the religious believer’s performance of religious rituals and the array of bizarre obsessions displayed by some mental patients:

It is easy to see where the resemblance lies between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual; in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions, and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.

(Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, 1907)

On the face of it, though, obsessive compulsions – like not walking in cracks in the pavement in case the Devil snatches at your feet, or closing all the doors in a house in a certain fixed order – are meaningless, whereas religious ritual is charged with the highest meaning.

No. This has been psychoanalysis’s greatest achievement: revealing that even the silliest behaviour, the kind of deviant behaviour that in previous ages resulted in witches being burned and lunatics locked up in Bedlam or dismissed as ‘hysterics’, is in fact supercharged with meaning for the subject.

This meaning may be either historical (the compulsive repeating of a real trauma) or symbolical (i.e. a disguised defence mechanism against a perceived threat, where the threat – for example, of a long-dead father’s punishment – no longer exists in the outside world, but is still a terrifying reality in the patient’s mind).

A good deal of Freud’s work consisted in listing compulsive behaviours which seem weird in isolation and showing their origin and root in real unhappiness experienced in a patient’s life. And Freud’s distinctive contribution was to show that often this unhappiness was caused by the repression of an instinctual need.

At the bottom of every obsessional neurosis is the repression of an instinctual impulse which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to repression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious.

Analysis of obsessive actions shows us that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events but is constantly being revived by renewed temptation…. This sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they are miserable sinners and the pious observations (such as prayers, etc) with which pious people preface every daily act.

As the mental protection slips, crumbles, the subject – threatened with a return of the repressed and forbidden instinctual wish, and warned of the return by symptoms of anxiety or hysteria – erects ever more frantic mental barriers against its inadmissible return into consciousness, actions which will ward off the unacceptable truth by, as it were, magic.

The same psychic mechanism thus underlies superstitious belief (not walking under ladders), obsessive behaviour (washing of hands, not walking on cracks in the pavement), the games of children with arbitrary but crucial rules (hopscotch), the propitiatory behaviour of primitive peoples towards their gods (for fear that omission of one aspect invalidates the entire ritual and thus will call down the anger of the gods), and the propitiatory behaviour of Christians towards their God (saying three Hail Marys, crossing yourself as you pass in front of the altar in a Church etc).

The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component.

A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis.

For some reason the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

A reversion to the primitive oral phase of childhood when we try to control the environment, to assimilate the outside world, by eating it: watch any two-year-old.

Conscience

‘Conscience’ is the superego, the absorption into your psyche of the instructions and demands of your parents from your earliest years, a function of the mind then expanded by later teachers and other authority figures. It hurts to disobey them but we do, and guilt is the result. Guilt is no proof of Man’s uniquely moral nature, as some Christians argue. It is the purely mechanical result of transgressing our early training. Think of dogs who disobey their masters, and then look sheepish.

Conversion

Being ‘born again’ is the result of returning, after a detour, to the sense of being loved by, and of loving, the God-like figures of our parents as they appeared to us in our childhood. Most ‘born-again’ Christians are in fact returning to the religion of their childhood which they had rejected at some stage. Two examples I know of are W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis who were both brought up in Anglican households, underwent student and early manhood years of light-hearted atheism, and then returned to the religion of their boyhoods with an overwhelming sense of relief and illumination, which went on to underpin all their writings from the moment of their (re)conversions until they died.

God

God is a projection onto the universe of the demanding, caring, loving, all-powerful father as we experienced him in our earliest infancy, in the first couple of years of life.

The devil

The devil is an equal and opposite projection of the father in his bad, punishing aspect. In the Old Testament the two are mixed together in the figure of Yahweh, the demanding, violent jealous god. The achievement of Christianity was to extract and focus on the figure of the God of Love implicit in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this psychological or theological development also had the effect of bringing into greater clarity the image of the anti-God, the figure of pure malice and evil, the Devil. This explains why there is little mention of the devil in the Old Testament but why he comes to play such a central role in the New Testament.

Immortality

Immortality is everyone’s deepest wish, for death does not exist in the unconscious mind. It is a creation of the conscious mind which we can never quite fully believe. Everyone else might die, but not me.

Morality

Morality is a system of approved behaviour worked out by society, instilled in a child by its parents, and reinforced by later authority figures. Some Christians use the alleged existence of a moral sense in human beings as proof that there is a moral God. But:

  1. the so-called moral sense boils down to a person’s accumulated training in how to behave and not behave
  2. it is, to put it mildly, extremely variable, in content and effectiveness, across individuals, societies, and cultures
  3. it is entirely absent in some people, so God demonstrably did not implant the moral sense in some people – why not?

Guilt

Guilt is an internal psychological response to the act of disobedience to the rules and regulations which have been so strongly inculcated by your parents and other authority figures. It is a purely psychological reaction, a form of fear that punishment will be inflicted if we do something wrong. Inflicted by whom? By our parents, even if they’re dead, because their image and prolonged training live on in our minds, whether they are alive or dead, present or absent. It is the legacy of our earliest, deepest training, which is almost impossible to shake off.

Spiritual feelings

Spiritual feelings are reawakenings of the earliest narcissistic phase of childhood when the child hadn’t yet differentiated between its feelings and the reality of the outside world. These feelings, just like the earliest infantile feeling of fear or abandonment, can be revived in later life. This is the explanation of all forms of religious feelings of the sublime or ‘oneness with the universe’.

Original sin

Original sin combines two emotions:

1. The deeply held feeling all of us have of having been in some way expelled from a paradise of love and physical bliss. Freud says this was the experience of babyhood at the mother’s breast, the immensely powerful, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience of inhabiting a wonderland of union and fulfilment.

2. Along with obscure feelings of punishment at the hands of our parents.

Each of these can be experienced individually. What’s interesting is that some individuals, and even entire cultures, fail to combine the two into ‘original sin’ as Christians wish them to.

The two main sources of ‘original sin’ can be explained as the inevitable result of the natural processes of human growth and development, with no supernatural overtones whatever.

Prayer

Prayer is a relic of ‘magic’, a reversion to the child’s primitive belief in ‘the omnipotence of its thoughts’, the childish conviction that the universe revolves around us and can be altered by our wishes and commands. It can’t.

We are taught to pray to ‘our Father’ to make things right, look after us and our loved ones. What could be more transparent?

Superstition

Superstition amounts to relics of animism and primitive (i.e. childish-neurotic) beliefs which have been discarded by religion under the modernising influence of the rational Enlightenment (for example, burning witches, epileptics are possessed by devils, evil omens and unlucky days).

But these primitive psychological formations, anxieties and fears, still threaten to grip the ignorant, the simple, or the extremely repressed. or any of us when we’re in a stressful situation.

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

Central to Freud’s theory is the Oedipus Complex. Each of us is born into the world with the problem of how to grow beyond the boundaries of our parents’ care into autonomous individuals. To put it another way, how to overthrow the sometimes terrifying authority of our Father and build on the love and nurturing of our Mother.

In our unconscious minds, swarming with uncontrollable feelings, we act out countless inchoate scenarios of revenge and possession. How effectively we repress these earliest fantasies determines our later character.

Freud (who was, of course, himself Jewish, although a non-believing, atheist Jew) thought that Judaism is the religion of the Oedipus Complex par excellence.

He believed the Jews stood out in the ancient world due to their more advanced ethical code but that this was intimately connected with their greater fear and reverence of a demanding Father-God.

Freud thought that the Jews’ especial devoutness stemmed from an actual historical event when they actually played out an Oedipal scenario. He thought that the Israelites actually rose up and killed their obstinate leader, Moses, who tried to impose his version of monotheism onto the Jews’ primitive worship of the thunder god Yahweh – and were forever afterward guilty about this murder.

Slowly, over the following centuries, the primitive belief in Yahweh was spiritualised by the higher ethical and intellectual content of Moses’ monotheism. A belief grew among the spiritual elite that the Israelites were the chosen people because Moses, the prophet of the One God, had quite literally chosen them.

The Old Testament records a succession of prophets rising up to recall this stubborn, backsliding people (the Israelites) back to the high spiritual requirements of Moses’ idol-less, afterlife-less faith.

Sometime around the fifth century BC priests compiled the various stories handed down by tradition into a coherent and chronological account of:

  • the creation of the world
  • the era of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob etc)
  • the era of the Kings (Solomon, David)
  • the era of the Prophets (Ezekial, Isaiah, Jeremiah)

Central to the entire religion are the ‘covenants’ or promises made between the Chosen People and God. Because the Israelites are constantly falling away from God’s detailed and demanding law, they are in continual need of forgiveness.

This process – adoption of pure monotheism and the sorting out of their holy writings – was substantially complete, and the Jewish religion formalised, by about the fifth century BC.

The Jews’ survival was due, paradoxically, to the fact that they were repeatedly conquered and hauled off into bondage, first to Egypt, then Babylon and finally, after the failed wars with Rome, in 70 and 135 AD, expelled from Palestine altogether.

These experiences left the Jews no land or capital or buildings, nothing but a written tradition requiring the highest ethical standards, which both produced a tremendous ethnic cohesion, confidence and success, but also triggered suspicion and resentment of them wherever they went.

Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious Jew, a Pharisee, steeped in the Orthodox tradition. When he heard about the crucifixion of an obscure wandering preacher in Judea he set about persecuting his blasphemous followers.

But then Paul had a literally blinding insight which changed his life and the course of history. For a thousand years Judaism has been a guilty Father-religion, the purest form of the social memory of the struggle all human beings undergo to wriggle free of their parents’ domination.

Judaism was saturated in the sense of letting the Father down. According to Jewish scripture and tradition, again and again and again the Chosen People fell away from the laws and purity demanded by their God and Father, which resulted in a permanent sense of guilt and unworthiness.

It was Saint Paul who realised that the death of this man who called himself the Son of God had the potential to bring a millennium of crushing guilt to an end. From now on Christians could openly acknowledge the importance of Original Sin, an idea only vaguely formed in official Judaism, because they have been relieved of it. The execution of the Son relieves us of the guilty memory of being the Father-hating children we all were in childhood. In the ultimate sacrifice of the crucified Son, all true believers are freed from their primal guilt and so experience the wonderful psychological liberation of being ‘born again’, of starting a new, guilt-free, sin-free life.

In the decades after Jesus’ execution it quickly became clear that Christianity and Judaism were incompatible. The Jews doubled down on their religion of guilt while the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire swiftly fell for the new religion of liberation, especially as it proved capable – unlike the racially and geographically restricted religion of the Jews – of claiming to be universal, of welcoming everyone, rich or poor, man or women, free or slave, of any ethnicity.

Christianity also had the advantage of being flexible. In its early inchoate form it had the ability to assimilate a lot of the fringe beliefs which were floating around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. For example, Christianity easily assimilated:

  • doctrines based on the oriental Mother goddess
  • the idea of a family of Gods (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, plus the Holy Mother)
  • the idea of a terrifyingly powerful Evil Spirit who came to be called Satan, derived, ultimately from Zoroastrianism
  • a sky full of angels
  • a complicated system of punishment and reward in a place called ‘hell’, only vaguely hinted at in Jewish scripture but worked out by Christians in terrifying detail

In this sense (in Freud’s view), although a step forward psychologically (insofar as it presents a solution to the perennial Oedipus problem), Christianity actually operates at a much lower intellectual level than the rigid monotheism of the Jews. It leads to much more florid and bizarre behaviour (as history, indeed, records: monks, stylites, self-castrators, martyrs, miracles).

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

Christianity triumphed because of its ability to combine Jewish high ethical standards with pagan superstition, thus providing a comprehensive home for most people’s deepest fantasies and wishes – of salvation, of punishment, of eternal life.

The notion of an all-powerful all-seeing God who nonetheless allowed His Creation to be wrecked by evil, pain and suffering is a logical nonsense but who cares? It is a bold and imaginative attempt to explain and justify, in mythological terms, the fundamental psychological need of human beings to reconcile the childish experience of our all-powerful, all-seeing parents with the traumas of adult life – and then to project this fantastical narrative onto the (in reality, blank and uncaring) universe.

We need to be helped. We want to be protected. We want to be loved. If something’s gone wrong it must be our fault. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, say you forgive me.’

So we try to reconcile this deep need for there to be an all-powerful, all-seeing father guiding the universe, with the evidence before our noses that the world is harsh and arbitrary, amoral and terrifyingly indifferent to our little lives.

The doctrine of Original Sin is a mythological way of reconciling these opposite desires. The fact that it makes no sense to those outside the cult is a matter of indifference to those inside the cult; for them it is vital because the deeper ‘Original Sin’ has plunged us into the depths of misery and guilt, then the more intense the feeling of liberation, of being ‘born again’ through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, becomes. The longer the foreplay, the more intense the feeling of release.

So, in Freud’s view, the psychological mechanism at the heart of Christianity is extremely effective in channelling and resolving very real psychological feelings which we all experience, but it comes at a price: the price being that you accept a good deal of weird, often deeply irrational, beliefs, superstitions and legends.

But even this problem has long ago been worked through and resolved by Christianity’s many, very brilliant, apologists: ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ as the 18th century poet William Cowper wrote i.e. don’t think about any of this too hard or the illogicality and irrationality will undermine your faith. Just accept it.

Jesus himself said: ‘You must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3). Exactly. Just as Freud said, almost all of our problems, our anxieties, our achievements, our characters, stem from our earliest childhood experiences. One difference between Freud and Christianity is that the latter calls us to relinquish adult intelligence, and adopt a sentimentalised, simplified version of childhood, all submission and innocence. Whereas Freud knew what anyone who can remember their childhood knows, that those years are far from being paradise but often full of dread and anxiety, awash with uncontrollable emotions, and sometimes the scene of terrible experiences which we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to grips with.

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Christianity imposes impossible ethical requirements on people, which result in failure and a crippling sense of guilt (for example, the impossible requirement to ‘love your enemy as yourself’). Imposing these impossible commandments on young children warps their personalities and leads to neurotic illness in later life.

Christianity’s forbidding of open-ended debate, and limiting the spirit of scientific enquiry, damages the prospects of creating a better society.

Christianity suppresses perfectly natural sexuality in a way calculated to produce the maximum number of neurotics and perverts. By restricting sexual activity to heterosexual, adult, married, genital-focused copulation, exclusively for the purposes of procreation, Christian teaching drives people into illness or the arms of prostitutes, makes them choose between madness or immorality; or, more simply, makes them disobedient to their teachers and moral leaders and so habituates them to a life of lies and hypocrisy.

Relying on religion to underpin morality is dangerous because, since religious belief is visibly crumbling away (Freud wrote in the 1920s), so will the foundations of our social morality. Quite obviously, morality needs to be put on a firm, secure, secular basis in order to survive the coming social changes.

Conclusion

In his more optimistic moments Freud thought that organised religion would wither away in a new world shaped by reason and technology – but this turned out to be misplaced optimism.

Indeed, the whole tenor of his work undermines and disproves his own hope. The whole point of his work was to establish the existence of the vast, unconscious, irrational aspects of the mind – primitive, inexpressible urges whose attempts to enter the conscious mind can only be controlled at the expense of a variety of compulsions and obsessions, personal rituals and beliefs.

Precisely the penetrating nature of his critique of religion as an appeasement of so many of our deeply irrational instincts should have alerted Freud to the fact that religious belief will continue as long as human nature continues to be what it is, because – although irrational in form and content – religion does, often very effectively, alleviate many of the anxieties and fears which all human beings will always be prey to.

Therefore, it was childish of Freud to imagine that organised religion and religious belief would die out. They will quite clearly be around as long as there are anxious irrational humans i.e. forever. And in times of stress and uncertainty they will revive and flourish and there is nothing the hyper-rational psychoanalyst can do about it.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. All the works cited here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s.

Freud and religion reading list

  • Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
  • Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
  • Totem and Taboo (1913)
  • On Transience (1915)
  • A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
  • The Future of An Illusion (1927)
  • Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
  • Group Psychology (1930)
  • Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
  • Moses and Monotheism (1939)
  • Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

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Posted by Simon on July 3, 2023

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Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (1930)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Civilisation and Its Discontents might more accurately be titled Why Civilisation Makes Us Unhappy. Freud suggests that civilisation is built on the renunciation of sexual and aggressive drives but that, although this benefits wider society, it often comes at the expense of anxiety and guilt i.e. mental illness, for us as individuals.

Many of the articles and books I’ve read about Freud claim that this was his single most influential book.

Civilisation and Its Discontents is a good example of Freud’s lifelong interest in the Big Questions of society – religion, morality, art and so on. His attempts at explaining the origins of society in Totem and Taboo (1914) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) were heavily criticised at the time and have been generally discredited since. His attack on Christianity in The Future of an Illusion (1927) doesn’t address (or invent) historical events in the same way as Totem and Moses does and so hasn’t dated so badly. It’s more an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of organised religion and so retains some force – although it has been superseded by thousands of later writers, commentators, utopians and revolutionaries, also seeking to abolish religious belief, so it’s just one polemic in a very crowded field.

By comparison with those other books, Civilisation and Its Discontents (although it kicks off with yet another dig at religious belief) is built on stronger foundations. Its central thesis that repression of our baser instincts is simultaneously the basis of a ‘civilised’ society and the source of many problems and mental illnesses suffered by its civilised citizens. This is an intuitively plausible argument which the passage of time has done nothing to discredit, which is why many critics reckon it might have been Freud’s single most influential book: its message that modern society makes us ill probably reached a far wider audience than any of his more theoretical or therapeutic works.

1.

Freud opens with a reference to his essay The Future of an Illusion, his most sustained, full-frontal attack on the psychological bases of religious belief. Freud replies to a critic who had written to say that Future failed to take into account genuinely spiritual feelings, in particular the ‘oceanic feeling’ of which the religious speak (as did Freud’s renegade follower, C.G. Jung).

Freud explains that this feeling is a relic, left after the realistic ego grew up, of a person’s infantile narcissism and sense of oneness with the world. For Freud religious belief begins in the infant’s sense of helplessness and need for parental protection, a feeling which is reborn and accentuated in the adult by their nervous awareness of the countless risks and dangers of human existence.

2.

Life is cruel. Human beings, endowed with memory to remember the past and reason enough to foresee the disasters of the future, need protection from both. There are three ways of escaping reality:

  1. Defence mechanisms, such as religion.
  2. Substitute satisfactions and sublimations of hopes and fears – Art.
  3. Intoxicants to extinguish consciousness.

What is the purpose of life? Well, who knows. But when you examine the way people actually behave – and not what they say – it is clear that most people live life in the pursuit of happiness. This happiness is threatened by three things:

  1. The decay and dissolution of the body.
  2. The destructiveness of the outside world.
  3. Our difficult relations with other people.

So how can we escape this dreadful predicament?

  • hedonism? (full of risks and danger)
  • art? (limited to the percipient few)
  • intoxicants? (ultimately self-destructive)
  • Eastern quietism? (brings only mild contentment, not happiness)
  • hermetic isolation? (you go mad)
  • delusions and mental illness? (as in psychotics and paranoiacs)
  • mass delusions? (for example, religion)
  • love, which may be the source of our greatest gratifications? (but oh how exposed and vulnerable we are to its sudden withdrawal)
  • the enjoyment of beauty? (fickle and easily destroyed)

There are maybe three psychological types, who will each tackle these problems differently:

  1. The Erotic Man who wants love and sexual satisfaction.
  2. The Narcissist who tries to take control of the world in his own mental pleasures.
  3. The Man of Action who seeks to change the world.

But there is one complete worldview which seeks to tackle all of these threats to our wellbeing – Religion. Religion tackles the vulnerability of human beings by:

  • depressing the value of life in this world
  • drawing its followers into an unreal view of the world, similar to mass delusion
  • fixing them in psychical infantilism

3.

So, it’s 1930. We are all discontented with civilisation. Why? Because in rising to a civilised level we have been forced to renounce many instinctual pleasures. A glance at many primitive peoples, for example, Australian aborigines, seems to show a people at one with life. By contrast, psychoanalysis has shown the terrible price in neurosis and nervous disease paid by ‘civilised’ people for the benefits of civilisation. A general disappointment with the early promises to improve life made by science and technology hasn’t improved things. So what are the salient features of this civilisation we are so unhappy with?

  • technology and the exploitation of nature
  • the creation of order and beauty
  • higher mental achievements, for example, religion, art and science
  • the ordering of human affairs via Justice and the Law

On the level of the individual citizen, civilisation is a process which results in:

  • character-formation
  • the sublimation of the instincts into ‘higher’ cultural achievements
  • the renunciation of instinct

4.

The development of civilisation is like the growth of an individual. Savage men are driven to compete for a wife/sex object. One strong man comes to rule the horde. Then the sons rise up and kill the Father. Genital love is the motor in the formation of the Family. Aim-inhibited love leads to friendship and camaraderies, useful for uniting the group and forming bonds between them. Once set on this path, Man is moved to sublimate his basic sex-drive into more complicated psychic and social structures. As society is built up it exerts tighter control on the individual’s potentially anarchic sexuality, corralling it and narrowing it down to focus on heterosexual pairing. Even that restricted arena of expression mustn’t come about before a rigorous series of rituals have been carried out.

So much for libido and sex drive. Are there other reasons for the unhappiness created by civilisation?

5.

Yes. Human beings are violent. The Biblical injunction to love your neighbour is only necessary because there is such a violent urge in all of us to rape, torture, exploit and mutilate our neighbour. Society uses every means at its disposal to rearrange libido so as to secure social acquiescence. One obvious way is via aim-inhibited libido, libido which is rerouted into either generalised affection (for your dog or children or old people) or into friendship, rerouted libido which vastly expand the ties of family into society.

Civilisation has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods designed to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of ‘love’, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence, too, the ego-ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself – a commandment which is justified by the fact that nothing runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man.
(Pelican Freud Library, volume 12, page 303)

The communists say that men were originally peaceable and equal but that the institution of private property has corrupted them. Do away with private property and everything will be alright. Freud laughs. On the contrary, all societies are bound together by what they exclude, by their ability to project the natural aggression of their members outwards onto outsiders.

In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilisations who were their hosts. (volume 12, page 305)

A newly insurgent dream of Germanic world domination has inevitably raised the oldest scapegoat upon which to focus its anger – the Jew. And the communist utopia in Russia turns out to call for an entire class to anathematise, the bourgeoisie (although, at this period, the direst fate was being meted out to the wealthier peasants, known as kulaks.)

In order to become civilised, man has to give up these two elements: unbridled sexual satisfaction and the expression of aggression. Primitive man expressed these easily and was happy. He also died young. Civilised man has exchanged happiness for security. We live long lives with a lot of frustration and misery in them.

6.

Section 6 is a complicated defence of Freud’s theory of the death instinct or Thanatos. Originally Freud posited just two psychic classes, ego-instincts and object-instincts. The idea of narcissism, first developed in an essay of 1914, complicated matters and by 1920 Freud had developed a new fundamental opposition, that between Eros and the death drive, between instincts which seek to unify, to bind (in a primitive way with the breast, with food; later with a sex-object; in a sublimated form with friends or comrades, via aim-inhibited libido) and instincts which seek to break psychic energy down into smaller units, ultimately to death.

In practice our instincts always appear in some combination. On the personal level libido accompanied with aggression is sadism; the death drive comes to the aid of group psychology and aim-inhibited libido by being deflected outwards onto strangers and enemies. Aggression thwarted is turned inwards as masochism or self-punishment or suicide. Despite opposition and scepticism to these ideas, even within analytic circles:

I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilisation. (12: 313)

Civilisation is a process in the services of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. These collections of men are libidinally bound to each other. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilisation. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside Eros and which shares world dominion with it. Thus the evolution of civilisation represents a struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and it is this battle of giants that our nursemaids try to distract us from with their lullaby about Heaven. (12: 314)

7.

So how is this aggression controlled in the individual? Through the superego. By returning it in upon itself, by setting a part of itself aside, the ego is able to satisfy upon itself the aggressive wishes it would like to impose on others – Freud calls this mental agency the conscience and the emotional affect it produces in us is guilt. The superego is the watch-dog of civilisation planted inside the head of each of us.

Guilt is the fear of the loss of love, its primal source the withdrawal of parental love. In its simplest form, if you do something bad you are anxious that you will be found out and that love will be withdrawn from you, the love of your parents or of the community at large. So you can still do wrong but will strive not to be found out.

In the more sophisticated form, you develop a full superego based on childish experiences and anxieties. Now you feel guilty even if no-one finds out or can find out what you’ve done – because someone does know; your conscience knows. What’s more, it knows about things you haven’t even done but have fantasised about doing; and it knows about things you’ve fantasised about doing and repressed so deeply you don’t even remember them. Since everyone has the same Oedipal fantasies, everyone suffers a greater or lesser sense of guilt.

More: the superego is fiercest in those who set out to please it most; the more you try to please it in every way, the more demanding the superego becomes. Hence the pathological saint. And if bad luck from the external world does actually befall you, this only provides the punishing superego with more opportunities to punish you for being such a loser. Hence, Freud declares, with the confidence of an unbelieving Jew, the characteristics of the Jewish race, in that the more calamities overtook it, the more they blamed themselves.

More: there is an original substratum of guilt laid down in all of us due to archaic vestiges of the primal Parricide, which is bequeathed to each of us at birth. Its traces are reawakened by naughty things we do, which introduces us to fear of punishment (withdrawal of love); and further reinforced by the introjection of that fear/aggression in a superego. The more we renounce our instincts, the more the superego is given energy to punish us, to demand more. Therefore, insofar as civilisation is defined as the renunciation of instinct, it must inevitably lead to an increase in guilt. Civilisation, by its very nature, reinforces the superego in all of us, and the superego is the punishing principle. Civilisation must make everyone feel guilty.

8.

So, to recap: The price we pay for civilisation and security is the loss of happiness through instinctual renunciation and an accompanying increase in personal guilt.

Freud goes on to speculate that maybe guilt is the product not of libidinal wishes but only of repressed aggressive wishes. So neurotic symptoms are the result of the libido being repressed; when aggression is repressed it reactivates ancient feelings of remorse (for murders, real or imaginary) and guilt i.e. the aggression is rechannelled, via the superego, against the repressing ego, in the form of demands for more obeisance and penitence.

Freud draws the analogy between the development of an individual and the development of civilisation. In the latter, also, a superego, an ego-ideal, is created in the form of a strong leader – Moses, Jesus et al. Just as the oedipal boy unconsciously wishes his authoritative father dead but then suffers remorse and guilt at these buried feelings, so the Jews and Christians wanted their insufferably strict leaders dead and then, in fact, killed them. And just as the individual superego – in the latency period – sets up an idealised version of the dead leader’s injunctions and punishes followers for not attaining them, so entire peoples feel guilt and remorse at the primal murder they’ve committed, set up idealised versions of the murdered Father (of Moses who talked to God, of Jesus who IS God) and punish themselves for not living up to these impossibly high ethical standards.

Over and above the vague sense of guilt or malaise whose origin Freud has explained, there are the specific injunctions of the superego. In individual patients, modern therapy often consists in softening the impossibly strict demands made on them by their own superegos, demands which result in unhappiness and illness.

In society as a whole, the same is true. Our society makes impossible demands on people. Freud singles out the injunction to love your neighbour as yourself as a prime example. It is a fine specimen of the highest ethical ideal a society can rise to, but its very impossibility leads to unhappiness among the many people who try to live up to it, fail, and then punish themselves.

Freud dryly remarks that he thinks maybe a real change in the relations of people and their possessions, a genuine redistribution of wealth – in other words communism – would be more likely to produce ethical improvement than religion’s insistence on demanding the impossible.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Civilisation and Its Discontents was translated into English in 1961 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this blog post are from the version which was included in Volume 12 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Civilisation, Society and Religion’, published in 1985.

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Posted by Simon on June 30, 2023

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The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

In 1926 the Viennese authorities began legal proceedings against Dr Theodor Reik, a non-medical psychoanalyst, under an old Austrian law against quackery, because he was practicing psychotherapy without a medical qualification. Freud wrote this pamphlet to clarify the underlying question of whether the practice of analytic therapy should be restricted to trained medical doctors.

Many first-generation analysts, themselves originally doctors by training, thought that psychoanalytic practice very much should be restricted to qualified physicians. But Freud’s answer was: No, it shouldn’t.

The book is cast in the form of a dialogue, with ‘An Impartial Person’ asking questions (which I highlight in italics) and Freud, in the first person, slowly, sensibly answering them.

The text comes in seven bite-size chapters and is written in a light-hearted style which I have copied in my own summary and comments.

1.

Freud outlines the kind of psychological symptoms which may take you to the doctor: a horrible sense of guilt, a compulsive need to perform obsessive actions, a fear of going outside or socialising, all sorts of phobias, sexual impotence, fear of women, frigidity, attachment to prostitutes or perversions, inability to concentrate or to stop the mind rambling along unconnected byways of its own.

You are referred to a psychoanalyst. What happens there? You talk, the analyst listens.

So it’s like a simple magical cure? Well, yes, except that it takes months, sometimes years of talking. So it’s like going to confession, then? No, because the most important part is that you are encouraged to say things you do not know. What?

2.

Before we go any further let’s explain a bit of theory. This account is not necessarily complete and the theory has changed and evolved into its present form over thirty years, but then this is Science not Holy Writ, so please bear in mind the things written here are contingent on new discoveries.

Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought longs so deeply.
(Freud Pelican Library volume 15, page 291)

Well now, all of us have moments when the mind slips off and wanders at will through a fantasy world which is very like the  mental world of some mentally ill people; and these are in dreams. Interpreting dreams is a key way of getting at the unconscious mind, although many people have picked up this idea from newspapers etc and distorted its application.

Anyway, let’s construct our mental picture of the mind. We are going to use spacial analogies, using metaphors of above, below, shallow, deep. Admittedly these don’t refer to actual positions in the mind: but it’s the best we can do and, after all, what do you expect? All scientific theories are a little rough at the beginning.

Well now, all of us are aware of a part of us mediating between our basic physical needs and the sometimes harsh realities of the outside world. Let’s call this mediating part of the mind the ‘I’ or, to use Latin, the ego. This is pretty much what we mean when we say ‘I’m hot’ or ‘I’m hungry’, reflecting the feelings of the conscious mind.

But behind this conscious assessment of what we feel, we often sense the presence of an enormous number of unexpressed feelings. Let’s call the place where these unexpressed feelings originate the ‘it’ or, in Latin, the id.

We propose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (the id) which has been modified by the influence of the external world (of reality)…

For us the ego is something superficial and the id something deeper. The ego lies between reality and the id, which is what is truly mental. (volume 15, page 296)

Picture the ego as an organisation characterised by a focus on unity, trying to hold things together in the face of conflicting demands. By contrast, the id is all over the place; the multiplicity of urges which make up the id are each pursuing their separate agendas, in their own way, regardless of each other, of the ego or of outside reality.

You don’t believe this because you haven’t experienced it. Most of our trainees sit there thinking, Yeah, so what, big deal. Then they begin a training analysis and slowly the reality of this theory is demonstrated to them.

3.

Let’s look at the mind in another way, from a dynamic rather than a topographic perspective:

Instincts fill the id. All the energy in the id originates from them. Nor have the forces in the ego any other origin; they are derived from those in the id. What do these instincts want? Satisfaction – the establishment of the situation in which bodily needs can be extinguished. A lowering of the tension of need is felt by our organ of consciousness as pleasurable; an increase of it is soon felt as unpleasurable. (15:300)

Hence we say that mental activity operates under the rule of the Pleasure Principle. The id is continually pushing for satisfaction of all its instinctual drives – food, sex, booze, anger etc, literally the driving forces of the human animal.

The ego has to steer a ship driven by all these wild desires, avoiding all the snares and dangers of the real world. The ego observes the real world, learning how best to achieve satisfaction from it; and tries to rein in the drives of the id, keeping them on a tight rein until the moment is right.

The ego, then, operates under the Reality Principle. When things are going well, the ego and the id function together, because they are in fact made of the same stuff, mental energy. But:

A small living organism is a miserable, powerless thing in face of the overwhelming destructive might of the outside world. A primitive organism which hasn’t developed an ego-organisation is at the mercy of instinctual drives. It lives by the ‘blind’ satisfaction of its instinctual wishes and often perishes in consequence. The differentiation of an ego is above all a step towards self-preservation. (15:302)

If a desire brings the organism into peril which it, fortuitously, survives, the next time it approaches a similar situation it experiences a memory of the first event which is also a warning: it experiences this as anxiety. The ego will try and turn back the drive which is prompting the anxiety attack but can only repress it. Instinct will out. Roaming around within the crazy world of the id, the frustrated drive attaches itself to a more respectable colleague and emerges as a symptom. In a crazy distorted way, therefore, we see unconscious wishes which have been repressed for the survival of the organism emerge when our ego defences are low – hence our interest in those moments of low defence, during sleep in the form of dreams, in slips of the tongue and inexplicable amnesias, and in neurotic symptoms.

So the really serious mental cases I’ve heard about, the psychotics and the schizophrenics, with them maybe the ego didn’t even put up a fight but just went flying off with the id into its crazy world, into ‘a world of its own’?

Now you’re getting the hang of it. Nobody knows for sure, but that’s pretty much our theory.

Now I’m in a position to explain to you what psychoanalytic therapy is. We try to restore to the ego its autonomy; we try to restore its control over the id by bringing to light the repression of instinct which has driven the id to an unorthodox escape route i.e. created the patient’s symptoms.

Experience shows that the decisive repressions which lie behind most symptoms originally occurred in most patients’ childhood, when the ego was struggling to master its instinctual drives and finding its place in the outside world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that analysis takes the patient back to the earliest period of their life and uncovers memories which most of us would prefer to leave buried in the oblivion of childish amnesia.

The problem areas are identified by exploring the patient’s past, using dream interpretation and free association. As we approach the danger area the patient dries up – the associations and the memories stop. We have to teach the patient to overcome this resistance. We are educating the ego not to take refuge in the mental equivalent of ‘flight’, but to drag the memory, and the wish behind it, into the light of day. Once this is expressed, the patient is empowered to begin trying to overcome it.

Why, if it was impossible to face up to this experience back then, should the patient be able to handle the truth of his wishes now?

Because back then the patient was three-years-old and, although the terror was real and overwhelming to the infant at that age, to the adult mind whose ego-mechanisms are hugely more developed, the final revelation of what has been troubling  them all along often appears embarrassingly infantile.

The thing from which the patient’s childish ego fled in terror will often seem to their adult and strengthened ego no more than child’s play. (15:305)

4.

What about sex? I thought psychoanalysis was all about your sex life and surely only doctors who are entirely trustworthy and trained to a high level of dispassionateness have the integrity to be trusted with that kind of matter?

As to sex, yes, it has turned out to be the basis of so many of our patients’ problems that we are led to believe it plays a key role in mental life. But what, after all, would you expect? Just look at the importance of reproduction for animals

Insofar as we have evolved from the animal kingdom, of course we have inherited a strong sex drive; a drive which is not restricted, as it is in most animals, to certain seasons when they are ‘on heat’, but operates all the year round.

If you asked people to speak openly and with utter candour about all aspects of their lives’ wouldn’t you expect their sexual experiences, their sexual fears and fantasies, to crop up sooner or later.

All this seems to me simple and reasonable. That it has brought down on our heads all kinds of denunciations and accusations of immorality and pansexualism and obsession with sex, I attribute to the deeply neurotic and repressed nature of our civilization, which leads most people to reject and deny the truth about human nature.

Back to psychotherapy: So we return to memories of infancy to find the cause of the repressions which afflict the adult. And we find that most of those infant repressions are to do with sexuality.

You mean…?

Yes. Psychoanalysis’s greatest discovery has been the sexuality of children. People say we have desecrated the innocence of childhood. I say we are reporting what every nurse and many pediatricians have always known but been too afraid to put into words.

The sex life of a child is of course different from that of an adult. It passes through a long process of development during which it becomes involved with numerous component instincts with different aims, until at last it arrives at the seat of, and is ready at the service of, the grand goal of reproduction. But in such a long development there are bound to be hiccups.

For instance, the libido can become fixated at certain points, tied up with other instincts. Years later, when obstacles arise to normal sexual function, the libido may retreat to these earlier fixations, a process called regression.

The oddest thing is not that children have sexual feelings; when you really think about it, it would be odd if, as little animals, they didn’t have inklings of, or experiment with, the apparatus for the all-important task of reproduction to come.

The odd thing is that those feelings go into abeyance at about age 5 and are suppressed. Much is forgotten or loses its attraction during this period, the latency period. During the latency period the child builds up what we call reaction-formations, of disgust and shame, which combine with what it is told by parents to form a ‘morality’, something missing from the first five years as any parent knows and hard enough to instil into the older child.

This is the period when rules of behaviour, when ethics and morality, when right and wrong are instilled into the child who is repeatedly told that the simple gratification of its wishes (as in the early years) is ‘dirty’, ‘naughty’, ‘bad’ etc. From an evolutionary point of view you can see why the tribes who managed to do this to their young probably functioned better and survived.

We believe what happens is that the child needs a respite between the purely instinctual development of the early years, and the eruption of strength and renewed desires and lusts at puberty.

Civilization, therefore, is based on the effective repression of individual desires. A good citizen represses their desires effectively; a bad citizen either gratifies themself in an anti-social way, or falls prey to the kind of illness we began by looking at.

As to the content of those childhood feelings, consider the contents of fairy tales and mythology. There we see a persistent fear of the father. Kronos swallowed his children and castrated his father, Uranus. In his turn Kronos was himself emasculated by his son, Zeus, who he had tried to kill and who only triumphed through the help of his loving mother.

Think of the big bad wolf coming to eat you. Psychoanalysis says these are all projections of the primal fear of the huge father and that the most vivid way this terror can express itself, for a boy, is the fear that Daddy will chop off his penis. We call this the castration complex.

Maybe there is such a close correlation between the mental life of the child and the myths and stories of the earliest peoples because the child literally lives through the intellectual state of the primitive, rather as the embryo undergoes reptile or fish-like stages in its gestation in the womb.

However this may be, the essential fact about childhood sexuality is that it climaxes in the Oedipus Complex. The boy develops strong feelings for the mother, the girl for her father. You have to appreciate the vehemence of the love and the equal vehemence of the hate against the same-sex parent. The boy violently wishes to supersede the father, to replace him in his mother’s affections.

Eventually the Oedipus Complex is overcome, it disintegrates, it is resolved and the child lapses into the general amnesia of the latency period. But only rarely are all the stresses and strains associated with the Oedipus Complex in its full complexity totally mastered. And with the onset of puberty what hasn’t been properly sorted out returns to dominate the subject –  sometimes within the bounds of ‘normal’ behaviour, sometimes pushing the subject beyond these bounds into illness.

And the evidence for all this is?

  1. The records of earliest civilisations i.e. most mythologies include incestuous liaisons between father and daughter and mother and son. By the time we hear of them they have been repressed from everyday life and projected, culturally, onto gods and heroes who amount to psychological fantasy figures.
  2. The overwhelming testimony of adults under analysis.
  3. The analysis of children themselves down to the earliest years which we are now carrying out.

5.

So much for theory. This is what you need to know as an analyst, but now come the skills of technique.

You must listen in an unprejudiced way to everything the patient says. Nothing is too trivial. Everything has meaning. But the meaning isn’t clear. It has been distorted, by time, by the telling, but above all by the censoring processes of the ego.

Everything – memories, dreams, free associations – require skillful interpretation. This interpretation, of course, may be influenced by your personality. So you need to undergo a thorough analysis yourself to bring all your own neuroses to the surface, to transform you as much as possible into the ideal interpreter.

There is a method and there are the lessons of symbolisation we have built up since psychoanalysis emerged. But there is no denying it has a strong subjective element, too. How could it be otherwise in psychological treatment. Even doctors have to listen carefully and interpret what the patient is telling them.

Doctors are often wrong because they are taught about the body and modern pharmacology but fail to listen. Analysts have this advantage over doctors, that their entire training is in how to listen, how to suspend disbelief and listen to the hints and tips given out by the unconscious mind.

You have to have the insight and the tact to know exactly when to intervene in the analysis to put forward your interpretation. Too soon and you arouse resistance and defiance; too late and you have missed the moment.

And as if that wasn’t hard enough, when you finally tell the conscious ego of the patient what’s wrong with him – he denies it. All his wishes for a cure are thrown out of the window while he absolutely denies all your interpretation. Because every neurosis represents a flight from reality, a flight into illness, it is not easily to be given up.

For many patients this is because being ill has positive advantages. It brings them sympathy, allows them to avoid onerous duties (like going to the Front during the War), enables them to impose on their families or on friends or loved ones. Such basic strategies are hard to overthrow.

But there is another more complicated reason. There is something I omitted from our topographical description of the mind:

Within the ego itself a particular agency has become differentiated, which we name the superego. This superego occupies a special position between the ego and the id. It belongs to the ego and shares its high degree of psychical organisation; but it has a particularly intimate connection with the id. It is in fact a precipitate of the first object-cathexes of the id and is the heir to the Oedipus Complex after its demise.

This superego can confront the ego and treat it like an object and it often treats it very harshly. It is as important for the ego to remain on good terms with the superego as with the id. Estrangements between the superego and the ego are of great significance in mental life.

The superego is the vehicle of the phenomenon we call conscience. Mental health depends on the superego being developed i.e. on it being sufficiently impersonal [representing the impersonal values and ethics of society]. And that is precisely what it is not in neurotics, whose Oedipus Complex has not passed through the correct process of transformation. Their superego still confronts their ego as a strict father confronts a child; and their morality behaves in a primitive fashion, in that the ego gets punished by the superego. Mental illness is employed as the means of this self- punishment. (15:324)

Guilt is the affective malaise generated by the disobedient ego when confronted with the prospect of the imperfectly developed, over-punitive superego. Effective therapy is the overcoming of the patient’s resistances i.e. his attachment to illness as a defence. There are various mechanisms of resistance (anger, denial, partial concession) and an all-consuming guilt is the resistance of a defective superego. The overcoming of these resistances requires much more time and ingenuity than the relatively simple act of interpretation. Maybe you can see now why analysis takes so long. It is very far from being a ‘magical cure’ as you initially suggested.

Oh and one more thing. Just as you think you have finished extracting the psychic material, just when you have made your careful interpretation, just when you have wrestled with the various forms of resistance – the patient falls in love with you. It is very embarrassing.

Surely that is a help, though, because you will cooperate with someone you love and trust?

At first it seems like that, but slowly the love becomes more possessive, more demanding and reveals the other side of the coin, a fierce jealousy and finally a rage and anger and defiance. It drives away all other mental activity. In other words ,it is a very sophisticated form of resistance.

This is what we call transference, the projection of the patient’s early loves and jealousies onto the analyst which the analyst – the detached impartial observer – never prompted or merited. Instead it slowly becomes clear that in the transference the patient is acting out a fantasy; he or she is re-enacting the scene of the real or imagined love and hatred which lie at the root of the neurosis.

Thus transference can be co-opted as part of the cure as the patient is brought to see that he is reliving the past, grappling with his old demons.

So who is the patient really in love with, then?

The parent of the opposite sex. Nine times out of ten the patient is reliving scenes from the early, primitive period of his life when his sexuality was rampant and uncontrolled, when he was infatuated with and terrified by his parents, and projecting onto them his own rages or lusts. Thus we come full circle. You see how we have derived the theory I outlined above and you realise why it is necessary to know the theory when dealing with the practicalities of therapy.

6.

[Now we come to the nub of Freud’s argument for the lay practice of analysis.]

Now, with a correct understanding of what analysis involves it is clear that many of the requirements for it can quite easily be found among exceptional men in society who are prepared to undergo the rigorous training. By contrast, medical doctors are taught about the body as if it were a machine. When it breaks down they are instructed in either the physical techniques or the pills to fix it.

Five years of imbibing this attitude and you are completely the wrong person to undertake the delicate hermeneutics required of analysis.

What’s more, analysis has been greeted by the medical profession with howls of derision and has failed to be incorporated into any medical college’s curriculum. Doctors, being taught in that sceptical atmosphere, are just about the worst kind of people who could practice analysis.

No. Any laws restricting the practice of analysis to qualified doctors would prevent many perfect candidates taking it up, and restrict it to the people least likely by inclination and training to submit to yet another long course of specialist training.

What many doctors have already tried to do as individuals (shorten the analysis period or water down its premises by rejecting the sexual theories) would then be carried out wholesale by the medical profession and all the hard-won wisdom of Freud and his followers be reduced to an ineffective appendage of traditional psychology.

7.

But don’t many of the medical men in your own movement actually want analysis to be restricted to qualified medics to prevent it falling into the hands of quacks?

That is true and I’m not sure why. But for doctors only to be allowed to practise analysis would add a couple of years to the medical curriculum, which is already too long. It is true there are many possible somatic causes of neurosis and it would be as well to be aware of these. But in any case, every patient should be referred before analysis to a medical doctor in order to ensure that they are physically healthy; and, if symptoms arise in analysis, the patient should be referred back again to a doctor.

Wouldn’t it be easier if the analyst was also a doctor and could do this in one?

No, worse. For an analyst to physically examine a patient whom he is analysing is courting disaster. And again, the analyst’s training is not a small adjunct to a medical training; it actually – ideally – involves whole different areas: the history of civilization, ancient history and mythology, the science of literature. Wouldn’t it be better for analysts to be allowed to concentrate on what they require and for doctors to learn what they require and not to muddle up the two?

Freud has two last reasons for keeping analysis open to the public:

1. Rather than be swallowed up to become a footnote in medical textbooks ‘alongside hypnotism, autosuggestion and moral persuasion’, psychoanalysis is destined “to become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilisation and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.” (15:351)

2. Freud concludes with a vision of the future in which an army of analysts in the name of Science cures Humanity of all its neuroses and prepares the way for the millennium! (Compare Oskar Pfister’s critique of Freud’s scientific utopianism in his reply to Freud, Illusion of a Future).

Postscript (1927)

After an interval of discussion within the Psychoanalytic Movement itself, Freud rounded up the debate with this postscript to the main text. For him what matters is not whether an analyst is qualified as a doctor, but whether he is qualified to be an analyst. This requires a training very different from medical training, overlapping in some places but incorporating much sociology, psychology, history of civilization, of myths and religions etc.

Freud gives a brief review of his own career: though qualified as a doctor he never really wanted to be one and it was this distance from medical orthodoxy which gave him the intellectual freedom to discover psychoanalysis:

I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path… In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. (15:358)

Although a medical training at the moment is probably the best preparation for becoming an analyst, Freud looks forward to a time when specialised training institutes dedicated to training analysts will accept people from all walks of life.

Thoughts

1. And this is what happened. Institutes of Psychoanalysis were, as Freud hoped, established in all major Western countries before Freud’s death. But for historian of science Frank Sulloway, it was a fatal moment when analysis set up institutes outside the structure of universities, with their 1,000 yearlong traditions of testing, debating and verification.

Freud wanted to save psychoanalysis from being watered down by the establishment. For Sulloway this short-term gain led to the longer-term dwindling and decline of psychoanalysis as a discipline, which we’re now seeing.

2. Freud’s overview of his theory is compelling, or at least very clear. But the most notable thing comes towards the end when he makes the frank admission that he was never very interested in medicine, and even in psychology, as such. He always wanted to investigate and solve the big cultural, religious and literary puzzles.

The quote about him having to make a detour away from his original interest and only after ‘a long and roundabout journey’ return to his first love, is repeated in all the summaries of him you find in humanities subjects, especially art and literature studies, and candidly and openly explains why in his last decade he devoted ever more energy to writing about religion, civilisation, the origin of society and so on, sometimes persuasively, but often, as in Totem and Taboo and Mose and Monotheism, using scholarship which has now been completely disproved, and with a crankiness which reflects very badly back on his claims for psychoanalysis to be a scientific objective discipline.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. The Question of Lay Analysis was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this review are from the version included in Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical  and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’, published by Pelican Books in 1986.

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Metapsychology: The Theory Of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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Metapsychology is the attempt to link what is observable about human psychological behaviour with the biological basis of the human organism; to link psychology and biology.

Volume 11 of the old Pelican Freud Library is titled ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’ and contains the following works, most but not all of which I summarise in this blog post:

  1. Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning (1911)
  2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)
  3. On narcissism: an introduction (1914)
  4. Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915)
  5. Repression (1915)
  6. The unconscious (1915)
  7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams (1917)
  8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)
  9. Beyond the pleasure principle (1920)
  10. The ego and the id (1923)
  11. The economic problem of masochism (1924)
  12. A note upon the mystic writing pad (1924)
  13. Negation (1925)
  14. A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis (1936)
  15. Splitting of the ego in the process of defence (1940)

Freud’s metapsychology: an overview

Metapsychology was an obscure area in Freud’s day and this volume is a collection of Freud’s very tentative and provisional attempts to link mind and body. Nowadays we know vastly more about the complex nature of the brain, about the nervous system and the action of hormones, about the body’s genetic heritage and so forth. But eighty years after Freud’s death, nobody is much closer to providing a single agreed theory on what links body and mind.

To summarise: Freud began by positing the dominance of instincts, not ‘reason’, over human life, and singling out the sex instinct as the primary instinct. The choice of the sex instinct as primary is logical because, on a Darwinian view, it is evident that we humans share the drive, found across the entire organic world, to reproduce:

The individual actually carries on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is a mere appendage to his germ-plasm, at whose disposal he puts his energies, prompted by the incentive of a bonus of pleasure [sex]. He is the mortal vehicle of an immortal substance… The separation of ego instincts from the sexual instincts reflects this dual character of the individual.

This is the libido theory in a nutshell. The choice of the sex instinct as the central plank of Freud’s theory is also fortuitous/handy/useful because Freud claims that sex, unlike, say, hunger or aggression, is uniquely malleable: it is capable of repression and sublimation, of being transformed into the impressive variety of mental constructs which make up our complex mental life.

Moving on, Freud claims that this libido, this sex instinct, at an early stage of the human’s development, divides, such that some of it becomes focused on the infant ego. As this ego grows and develops it uses libido like mental fuel. Hence the division in all humans between the core sex instinct – which continues blindly to follow the dictates of reproduction – and the growing ego instincts – which develop into individual consciousness and judgement and choice.

So libido can be divided into ego-instincts and object-instincts: inward-directed versus outward-directed mental energies.

Now Freud introduces another binary idea: the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. All the twelve-week-old baby wants is the gratification of its instinctual needs. It operates according to a calculus: it likes what brings pleasure and reacts against what brings unpleasure. Simple.

  • Unpleasure is defined as an uncomfortable increase in stimuli – from the environment, from inside the body’s nervous system, or from inside the psyche itself.
  • Pleasure is the successful resolution or dissipation of these stimuli.

But as it grows and develops, the child learns to use its hands, its body, above all its voice, to achieve its ends. And slowly it learns that its desired ends may be more effectively met later, if it postpones its immediate gratification now. Thus, from the heart of the Pleasure(-Unpleasure) Principle is born the Reality Principle, the ability to delay gratification in the name of survival or just better gratification.

The growth of the Reality Principle goes hand in hand with the growth of the ego. Thus Freud has developed a complete explanation of how conscious mind grows from unconsciousness; how lucid judging reason develops organically from a hotbed of passions and desires.

Thinking, Freud says, is, at bottom, an experimental form of action forced upon us by the failure of our initial wants to be fulfilled in an indifferent world. Thinking is not God given; anything but. It is evolved upwards from base animal instincts through a long precarious developmental process which can go off the rails at any moment.

This bottom-up theory certainly accounts for the rum assortment of characters, types, beliefs and behaviour which we find in the real world – exactly the kind of gimcrack plethora you would expect from a neo-Darwinian account of the constant creation of genetic diversity within a roughly fixed species.

In Freudian terms the triumph of Thinking over Instinctual Action is directly equated with the triumph of the Reality Principle over the Pleasure Principle. There is nothing special about thinking. It is just the instinctive behaviour of a certain species pushed to interesting and complicated new levels.

Once you’ve grasped this story it’s easy to see why the so-called rational mind is so inclined to never develop beyond, or regularly backslide into, all kinds of ‘irrational beliefs’ – and that its fall will be downwards, backwards, into more primitive mental positions and processes. It is these positions which have to be painfully abandoned during the course of what Freud takes to be every human being’s development towards the acme of human reason, the pinnacle of which is Freud’s own disenchanted and rational stoicism.

Post-war revision

However, during the First World War all Freud’s patients went off to fight and, with time on his hands, he sat down to attempt to integrate all the scattered insights about dreams, jokes, repression, resistance, the unconscious etc which he had developed over the previous 15 years, into a fully worked-out metapsychology. At which point he discovered that recent develops in practical psychotherapy disrupted the old scheme. Slowly he developed a new one. Soon after the war he published a series of books in which he outlined its two key modifications of the pre-war theory:

Two become three

In Freud’s new revised version of psychoanalytical theory, the psyche now has three parts, not just the unconscious-conscious dyad of yore. Now we’ve got:

  1. the ego (formerly the conscious mind)
  2. the id (formerly the unconscious)
  3. the superego (a new agency)

The superego

This new concept, the superego is the introjection (internalisation) of the child’s fantasy ideal of its parents – beings it perceives as having total control, issuing orders with total moral authority, but accompanying this with total unconditional love.

Part of this superego is the more or less conscious conscience which nags at us when we behave badly – but much more of it is underground, unconscious, punishing us for stepping out of line with its impossibly high ideals, raging against us for failing to live up to its ideals. Hence the clinical phenomena of guilt, anxiety, of depression and deep self-loathing. These are the results of part of the mind – the strong inflexible judging superego – directing its energy against the all-too-fallible conscious mind or ego.

But hang on – how can these instincts, supposedly all designed to gratify the organism, to satisfy the appetites of life, end up driving it to commit suicide?

Only if you posit a new theory of instincts, if you place the previously separated-out ego instincts and object instincts into one box and call these the instincts of life or Eros. And over against it you put a newcomer, a bold new idea – this is that every organism, every cell, contains within itself a desire not to exist, a deep desire to return to the blissful stasis of the inorganic: a death wish which Freud grandly called Thanatos.

This new Eros-Thanatos division is inestimably bigger and more grand than the tinkering with the various branches of libido which characterised pre-war psychoanalytical theory.

And so it was armed with this new, expanded, far more ambitious post-war theory of instincts, and the new model of the psyche which allowed for immeasurably greater subtlety and insight, that Freud went on to write his key later philosophical works, Civilisation and Its Discontents, The Future of an Illusion and so on.

After this overview of the development of Freud’s metapsychology, let’s turn to the individual papers gathered in this volume.

1. Formulations of the two principles of mental functioning (1911)

This is a brilliant brief outline of the early psychoanalytical theory, explaining the derivation of ‘thinking’ from pure, instinctual wish-fulfilment. From its simple origins as a bundle of undifferentiated appetites Freud shows how instincts grow and develop and, meeting resistance from the outside world, split into ego instincts (supporting the rational mind) and object instincts (targeting various wanted objects in the outside world: a good steak, a spouse), and how these develop similarly but not simultaneously, are prone to become ensnared and snagged at different points of development.

Just a few pages later Freud is explaining how this theoretical model can account for art, religion, the success of education etc etc. Dazzling.

For Freud ‘thinking’ is essentially an experimental form of acting which has gathered a momentum of its own and developed into the complex interacting of over-thinking humans which we call human culture.

2. A note on the unconscious in psychoanalysis (1912)

This is a collection of practical reasons for believing in the existence of the unconscious, for example Bernheim’s experiments with hypnotism. If you hypnotise someone and tell them to strip naked in half an hour and then instruct them to forget the instruction, wake them up and sure enough they’ve forgotten you even hypnotised and yet, nonetheless, half an hour they strip naked and they can’t explain why – well, where was the instruction stored in the meantime? Certainly not in the conscious mind. Why does the inaccessible command have such power? Unless our minds contain a huge reservoir of material which is inaccessible to the conscious mind. Let’s call it the unconscious and accept that it exerts much more influence over our lives and decisions than any of us imagine.

The other main evidence for the existence of the unconscious which Freud produces is dreams. Freud asserts that dreams have meaning and that psychoanalysis can interpret them to reveal the secrets of the unconscious mind.

The reader can tell we’re still in Freud’s First Theory if there’s a lot of simple stuff about dreams. Freud never abandoned his idea that psychoanalysis had revealed the secret of the interpretation of dreams, but these ‘insights’ pale in comparison with the much more powerful later model which claims to have uncovered the secrets of guilt, unhappiness, despair, suicide and a host of other human feelings. It is a far more comprehensive worldview.

3. On narcissism (1914)

This is one of the key texts in Freud’s theory. In it he draws a distinction between object-libido and ego-libido, makes criticisms of the heretics Jung and Adler who had just left the Movement (compare with his History of Psychoanalysis) and introduces the idea of an ego-ideal. This is an agency which is capable of watching and monitoring the ego, not in order to breach its defences, as the unconscious does, but in order to judge it according to higher, suprapersonal criteria, This is the seed of the post-war notion of the superego.

Freud says the young human animal possesses sexual instincts and ego instincts, the latter growing out of the former:

  • ego instincts work to preserve the rational calculating self and its individual requirements
  • sex instincts work to preserve the race i.e. to achieve sexual satisfaction at any cost

It’s easy to see how the two will frequently, on a daily basis, come into conflict.

The activity whereby the libido (which ought to be an outward-facing sex instinct) becomes focused on our own ego, is named narcissism (first identified as a mental disorder by the British essayist and physician Havelock Ellis in 1898.

Every healthy person undergoes a narcissistic phase when libido is diverted to the growing ego. We can talk about a perfectly natural and healthy amount of narcissism because it provides the energising of the ego which is necessary for it to function:

Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.

But in the course of ‘correct’ development, the libido should be redirected beyond the ego, to real objects in the real world, objects which the growing child learns increasingly to identify and understand. Object-instincts, as their name implies, are developing attachments to objects in the outside world, food, love object etc.

One consequence of this development is that, if both object and ego libido are drawn from the same source, the more one is used up, the less there is of the other:

We see also, broadly speaking, an antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido. The more the one is deployed the more the other becomes depleted. The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of ‘being in love’, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis.

(The opposite situation, incidentally, is that of the paranoiac who, in his self-obsession, concentrates all object-libido back on himself and thus comes to fear for ‘the end of the world’ because all his real ties to the external world, his object-cathexes, have been withdrawn from it. A neat model.)

Freud claims the psychological concept of narcissism is justified by its presence in a number of clinical areas:

  • in compulsive masturbators and narcissists in the simple sexual sense
  • in paranoiacs and schizophrenics (who have withdrawn all object libido from the outside world)
  • in hypochondriacs who project concerns about the contingencies and dangers of the outside world back onto themselves
  • and in the genuinely ill (see below)

But maybe most strikingly of all, the interdependence of object- and ego-libido helps to explain the extreme overvaluation of the object which takes place in ‘romantic love’. In romantic love the ego becomes emptied of libido as libido rushes out in a cathexis of the beloved object.

Overvaluation of the beloved is a form of excessive object-cathexis.

Glorification of the love object and depreciation of the self occur:

  • in love: the beloved becomes the sum of all perfections, see Dante etc
  • in religious worship: God is perfect (despite having made a distinctly imperfect world)
  • in parents’ love for babies, where parents transfer onto their babies/children their own repressed narcissism i.e. baby is perfect, nothing is too good for baby etc

In all of these instances there is a sense that we have revived our repressed infantile narcissism, our exorbitant love of our own ego, which characterised all of our early developments – and projected it onto another.

The object takes the place of the ego’s ego-ideal: anything and everything must be done for it and no questions asked by the internal policeman.

We outsiders can only admire and feel an unconscious tug when we see people pouring their hearts out in worship of God or falling head-over-heels in love, or all-consumed by love of their young baby. How wonderful, we say; how wonderful to feel like that – because it reminds us distantly of our own phase of narcissism, of the great primitive pleasure to be obtained by total abandonment of adult worries in the name of a cause, escape from the exigencies of the Reality Principle, and from the harrying of the punitive conscience.

Recap

The ego instinct is at first just that, energy fuelling the developing ego. But in its development, the libido comes to invest energy outwards, onto objects. And the very first stage it takes is to love itself as an object. The ego takes itself as its first object of love. All later loves contain something of this primary narcissism.

In later life the primitive narcissism – which is overcome in natural development as the ego struggles with the process of maturation in a challenging environment – returns.

For example, think of when you’re ill. You instantly withdraw most of your mature cathexes, your libidinal investments in the outside world, and refocus them on yourself. You pamper yourself. You buy yourself comfort food.

Religion shares similar patterns. In a heartless world you want to be loved. The next best thing to being loved is to love someone else totally, so totally and obsessively that you blot out the sad imperfections of your own life and character. All libido becomes invested in the idealised figure of the Beloved. Whether it’s the beatified Beatrice or Brad Pitt, you’d do anything for this idol set up in your soul.

The overinvestment of the Object and debasement of the Subject in romantic love accounts for why, when the affair ends, the subject is left feeling empty, void of purpose and energy, and has to go through a proper period of mourning which is required to reroute their libido towards a full range of external interests again.

Men and women

Freud then goes on to claim that men and women differ in their development. Men form a first love of the ‘attachment’ type i.e. their first love is their mother. All successive lovers have to conform to the maternal model.

But with women it’s different. The different configuration of women’s bodies, the growth of the reproductive organs, focuses women’s gaze inwards. Women tend to be more self-contained than men, and it is the survival of this far higher amount of primitive narcissism in women which so fascinates men and represents itself as a challenge to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of a really gorgeous woman.

There follows Freud’s explanation of Frauendiest i.e. 1,000 years of Western attitudes towards women.

In their development, then, a human being is presented with two basic sexual choices:

ONESELF – narcissism – women

THE PERSON WHO NURTURES YOU – narcissism object-love – men

Between these two extremes a person’s sex life will fall. For Freud the fully-developed adult is a male with the correct genital orientation, capable of a high degree of object-love i.e. who adores his mother and goes out into the world to find someone just like her.

In extremis this tends towards the total object-cathexis (i.e. over-valuation) of romantic love and the abasement of the subjects ego before it. In contrast, women, ‘perverts’ and homosexuals have a far higher complement of narcissism in their psychic make-up. They rest content with taking themselves as libidinal objects.

Psychoanalysis has discovered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model, not their own mother but themselves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed narcissistic.

Thus women will tend to like men who make much of them, bring them flowers, chocolates, meals, opera etc. Many women, Freud claims, are remarkably self-centred and self-contained and this provokes the outward-bound object-driven man to fascination, reminding him of his own long-since-overcome narcissism and provoking him to conquer and penetrate the woman’s mystery/aloofness.

This is also an explanation for why lonely women like cats. It is a reversion to an earlier stage of narcissism projected onto a passive object. Notably narcissistic and self-contained themselves, cats reawaken this primal narcissism in women. Cats’ sublime self-centredness calls forth all the loving and pampering which women wish for themselves.

The same happens with babies, which cats are in fact a preparatory substitute for. It’s simple: having a baby reawakens the baby in us. It legitimises a revival of infantile behaviour in us. And a materialist Darwinian worldview would predict that the narcissistic impulse is stronger in women because it is the woman’s biological role to nurture the baby.

If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognise that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer here is overvaluation of the object which we have already recognised as a narcissistic stigma in the case of object choice…

Thus parents are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child – which sober observation would find no occasion to do – and to conceal or overlook all his shortcomings (incidentally the denial of sexuality in children which it has been psychoanalysis’s achievement to bring into the scientific arena, is another manifestation of this)…

Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect. The child shall have a better time than its parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which we regard as paramount in life when it comes to ourselves. Illness, death, renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions of his will, shall not touch him; the laws of Nature and society will be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more be the core and centre of creation – His Majesty The Baby!

The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they have never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard-pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child.

Parental love which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakeably reveals its former nature.

This is exactly what you would expect of an animal produced over hundreds of years of evolution which has developed an advanced ability to think and feel. Evolution never wastes a successful formula. By the same token it prefers to face new challenges with the old equipment at hand. Evolution patches and extemporises. How can it do otherwise? It has no plan, no intention, except blind adaptability. As Stephen Jay Gould puts it:

If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes… Ideal design is a lousy argument for an omniscient Creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

How neat, then, that the earliest psychic formations which helped get the infant ego off to a start, and which atrophy as the child adapts to the demands of an uncaring world, should then be recycled, revived or redirected in the name of pampering and protecting their offspring – the new addition to the geneline – which ensures the only form of immortality we have, the immortality of the molecule of life, DNA.

To sum up, a person may love:

1. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is (himself)
  • what he was, his past (his vanished youth)
  • what he himself would like to be (projected onto idols and heroes)
  • someone who was once part of himself (in the case of women, the baby who was once part of their body)

2. according to the attachment type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him
  • the succession of substitutes who take their place, whether in the real world or in fantasy (i.e. everyone from a strong protector, in Fascist mentality, to the infinitely strong protector of a supposed Deity)

Freud makes one last crucial point in this essay. Initially, the childish ego is the recipient of unconditional love from its own ego instincts. As the child grows and starts getting hassled about pooing in a pot, not playing with himself etc it becomes clear that the ego is not the little prince we took it for.

As the object-instincts become attached to the mother who nurtures and the father who disciplines, the ego-instincts begin to create an ideal self, a version of the ego which lives up to all these demands, as the real one so lamentably fails to do. This is the origin of the ego-ideal.

The ego-ideal:

  • takes its energy from the ego instincts
  • is formed and shaped in the likeness of parental instruction
  • becomes the object of redirected narcissistic admiration
  • begins to censor and judge the ego in its own right, in a way the wild and simply instinctual unconscious obviously can’t do

And thus the ego-ideal becomes the source of self-judging, of guilt at failure to live up to the ideal.

Now we can restate psychoanalytic explanations of common psychological states using a neat diagram:

  1. Anxiety is formed by the threat of the Return of the Repressed, from below.
  2. Guilt is the superego’s punishment of the ego’s failure to rise to the parental and social standards, from above.

Freud writes:

Repression we have said proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater accuracy that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. We say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal.

This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection of value. As always where the libido is concerned man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he has his own ideal.

So what is the relationship between this high ego ideal and the process of sublimation?

Idealisation is to do with the overvaluing of the object. Sublimation is what happens to the instinct.

The formation of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite different. The formation of an ego ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression [i.e. of idea that doesn’t come up to scratch]. Sublimation is a way out, a way by which those instinctual demands can be met without repression.

In other words, embarrassing wishes and impulses which would otherwise be repressed with the help of the powerful ego ideal, can also be rerouted into socially acceptable behaviour, and this is the psychoanalytical process called sublimation.

In this way the unacceptable psychopath reinvents himself as a famous general. Thus the socially (and personally) unacceptable voyeuristic impulse to see naked women is sublimated into the socially (and personally) acceptable career of being a painter.

The ego-ideal is the source of that running commentary on ourselves, that observation of the ego, which we call self-consciousness.

When it’s going OK, it feels like a voice in our heads debating, arguing, judging. When it goes wrong it’s often linked with ‘hearing voices’ telling you what to do, which can be found in schizophrenics and people whose minds have gone wrong.

In primitive societies, in the old days, and in Catholic countries, these voices are heralded as coming from God, angels (such as inspired Mohammed or Joan of Arc):

It would not surprise us if a special psychic agency were to exist which sees that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego-ideal is ensured and which, to this end, constantly watches over the actual ego and measures it by that ideal.

Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called ‘delusions of being noticed’, of ‘being watched’, which are such striking symptoms of paranoid diseases. Patients of this sort complain that their thoughts are known and that their actions are watched and supervised; they are aware of voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking that again’, ‘Now he’s off’).

The complaint is justified. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed it exists in every one of us in normal life. And in these very voices the ego ideal reveals its origins: for what prompted the subject to form his ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as a watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him, and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment – his cultural milieu–- and public opinion…

The institution of conscience is at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society.

Papers on metapsychology (1915)

During the war Freud sat down to figure out a metapsychology to back up the practice and theory of psychoanalytical psychology. Half-way through it he abandoned the exercise, realising that his own views were in fact changing and realigning. The initial papers from this attempt survive:

4. Instincts and their vicissisitudes (1915)

For Freud an instinct is:

a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychic representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind…. the psychical representative of organic forces…. An instinct can never become the object of consciousness – only the idea that represents the instinct can.

An organism can evade an external stimulus but it cannot evade stimuli from within (instincts) which become attached to particular ideas and images in the psyche. It is with the interplay of these images that psychoanalysis (classically, in the interpretation of dream symbolism) has to deal with, and to deduce from the images present to the waking and sleeping mind, the real state of the instincts, the continual drives, which lie behind them.

Freud posits two fundamental polarities:

  • the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle: all organisms seek to avoid unpleasant excitation
  • the Nirvana Principle: all organisms seek a state of rest

In respect of the Nirvana Principle Freud says some profound things about the Mind:

The nervous system is the apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli which reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition…

Our mental apparatus is first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind helps remarkably towards an internal draining away of excitations which are incapable of direct discharge outwards, or for which at the moment such a discharge is undesirable.

The human mind is a continuation by other means of the organism’s challenge of coping with the unending stream of inner and outer stimuli.

As to the instincts which operate by these two principles they also fall into two categories:

  1. sex instincts
  2. ego instincts

These instincts roughly correspond to:

  1. the Pleasure Principle (PP)
  2. the Reality Principle, with which the PP is in constant conflict

Instincts which come into conflict are subject to four vicissitudes:

  1. reversal into its opposite
  2. turning back on the subject’s own self
  3. repression
  4. sublimation

Instincts may become inhibited in their aim, such as in the case of ‘affection’, a sort of libido which becomes muffled. ‘Aim-inhibited libido’ is Freud’s explanation of friendship and affection.

Instincts may become fixated on particular objects early in their development and thenceforth lack flexibility and mobility, opening the door to the possibility of obsession.

Instincts may work through identification, a primitive mode of assimilating the (good or bad) features of some object.

Identification is based on the oral stage of development, the first fundamental attitude of the infant to reality when he or she seeks to control things by taking them in the mouth.

The parallel with this infantile oral identification is the cannibalistic phase of the development of primitive peoples. Ingesting a god or god-substitute involves taking on his powers.

In Totem and Taboo Freud attributes a primeval act of cannibalism as being the origin of the Oedipus Complex, of Religion and of Morality and notoriously goes on to claim the persistence of primitive oral identification at the heart of the Christian eucharist.

How many instincts are there? You could have as many as you like but Freud focuses on two:

At the root of all neurotic afflictions was found to be a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego… Biology teaches that sexuality is not to be put on a par with other functions of the individual; for its purposes go beyond the individual and have as their content the production of new individuals – that is, the preservation of the species. It shows further that two views, seemingly equally well-founded, may be taken of the relation between the ego and sexuality.

On the one view, the individual is the principal thing, sexuality is one of its activities, and sexual satisfaction one of its needs; while on the other view, the individual is a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germplasm which is entrusted to him by the process of generation.”

7. A metapsychological supplement to the theory of dreams

What the metapsychological writings demonstrate is the gaps in Freud’s system which you normally miss when reading the rest of him, for example, the absence of a decent theory of instincts, among a host of other questions:

What is an instinct? how many are there? how do they work? how is it different from a reaction? What is the exact meaning of the unconscious? What is consciousness? How does perception work? How are the senses linked to the mind? How do we notice? react? to external stimuli? What is language? How are words linked to images in the mind? What is ‘meaning’? What relation does language bear to reality?

Freud’s vacillations in these areas merely highlight how his brilliant psychological insights break down when you try and elaborate them into a self-consistent system.

His metapsychology is not a theoretical underpinning which other psychologists could use. It is a theoretical justification spun out like medieval theology from radical and useful insights and discoveries made elsewhere.

The most striking thing about his plan for a series of metapsychological papers is the lack of a paper on consciousness and perception. Freud couldn’t enter into this realm of tests and experiments on memory and perception and calculation and decision-making without turning into a cognitive psychologist, and he wanted to remain outside that domain, free to speculate.

8. Mourning and melancholia (1917)

Mourning is the systematic decathecting of object-libido from an object which is no more: not always a person, it could be a nationalistic dream or wanting Oldham to win the Cup.

Melancholia (depression) is rage or hatred against some love-object or ideal which has failed. and then this rage projected back upon the ego.

The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment…

Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition – it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position…

The melancholic displays something else in addition to what is lacking in mourning – an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the patient themselves. The patient represents their ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; they reproach themselves, vilify themselves and expect to be cast out and punished.

This delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment and – what is psychologically very remarkable – by the overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

You can see from these quotes why Freud thought every living thing wishes to end the endless flood of incessant stimuli and return to the nirvana of non-being. And why it was only a few more years before he epitomised this drive as Thanatos, the Death Instinct.

And why, at the same time, he comes to see the judging, censoring, punitive ego-ideal as partly fuelled by energy from this latter drive. If ever it gets the upper hand it will push its severe criticism of the miserable ego to the extent where life itself becomes intolerable: the superego.

9. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

In the early years of psychoanalysis the Pleasure Principle, the drive to seek gratification of the instincts and to avoid unnecessary excitation, seemed enough to account for the mental phenomena exposed by Freud’s investigation of neuroses, hysterias and obsessions.

But during the war, as we’ve seen, in papers like On Narcissism and Mourning and Melancholia, Freud begins to deal with psychological phenomena which seem to contradict this simple Pleasure Principle. He uses the examples of:

  • war neuroses i.e. soldiers who have recurring dreams or nightmares
  • the child who plays the ‘here-there’ game i.e. who repeats the traumatic abandonment of his mother in play
  • dreams which contain recurrent unpleasantness
  • the burning need to act out and repeat traumatic scenes from their early lives on the part of patients in therapy
  • in even normal people, the tendency to repeat behaviour patterns, to fail in business or love

Freud points out the existence of a profound compulsion to repeat in human nature which seems at least as primitive as and, in theoretical terms to go far beyond, the simple requirements of the Pleasure Principle.

For example, anxiety dreams present a pretty good refutation of the idea that all dreams are concealed wish-fulfilments.

Now Freud speculates about the presence of a thin cortical layer protecting the brain from excess stimulation, rather as the lining of the cell protects the cell from too much outside. This wall or barrier, he wonders, may be the origins of the preconscious-conscious system, the interface between outer and inner, in which resides our use of language, our sense of time and duration.

The purely psychological equivalent of this anatomical barrier is anxiety, which is the perceived feeling of lots of mental energy being directed to a weak spot in the mental barrier designed to repel borders.

It may then be that anxiety dreams are attempts to master an intrusion of excess stimuli by repeating the cathexis (i.e. projection) of mental energy to the breach in the ego’s defences and that this repeated sending of reinforcements explains the repetitiveness of anxiety dreams.

This reading confirms what Freud has been saying all along: that the function of the psyche is to master and bind excess stimuli and convert them into life-preserving, life-enhancing behaviour.

This is done by binding free-flowing libido / instinctual energy, to cathexes, charges and mental investments. It is only after this initial mastery has taken place and the libido has been converted into manipulable cathexes that these bound cathexes enter under the dominance of the Pleasure-Unpleasure Principle. Thus, shell-shocked soldiers and playing children are compulsively repeating this attempt to bind and master excess stimuli.

It’s really only a logical extension of the stasis implied by the Nirvana Principle. But at this point Freud goes on to postulate a conservative aspect to all instincts, suggesting that all instincts are attempts to return to an earlier organic form which events have conspired to take the organism beyond. In other words, at some level, the deepest aim of living things is the cessation of stimuli i.e. Death!

The sexual instincts are now seen in a completely new light. From the treatment of Anna O in the 1880s up to the middle of the Great War, the conflict between our riotous sex instincts and the feeble ego instincts which try to control them was enough to underpin the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis. With these radical ideas Freud moves the goalposts onto a completely new football pitch, to a different city. The scope of psychoanalysis has been vastly expanded.

The sex instincts are now seen merely as one subset of a more general libido which possess the specialised function of regressing to the state of sperm and egg; the sex instincts are even more regressive in a way than the others except that, in their enthusiasm to return to a monocellular state, they are forced to move the organism forwards on to those sex moments!

Evolution is an accident. There may appear to be an onward and upward movement but that is simply because there is no way back. Circumstances change and entire species are wiped out. Only a few mutants survive and prosper. There is no way back. All organisms are impelled forward, along Time’s Arrow, to reproduce. Reproduction is the embodiment of the Life Drive in Time.

So in order to head forwards the creature must repress its backward instincts, the complexes and cathexes it has had to overcome in the long haul to full maturity and adult sexual activity. The No Entrance sign at the doorway to the unconscious propels us forward, and if the repressed threatens to return it is always accompanied by anxiety, the sense of a terrifying vertiginous descent into the primitive past. Thus the only free space, the only place for growth, is forward.

The final part of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a long meditation on the biological nature of death based on contemporary experiments with protozoa. Left to themselves protozoa multiply and die. But if they can be induced to unite, to join together, they undergo a fresh lease of life, presumably with all the fresh stimuli that have to be coped with on their programmed road to death.

Could this be the basis for a fundamental psychological dichotomy between sex instincts and death instincts found in the higher animals? In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes Freud had postulated two categories of instinct: sex instincts and ego instincts, deduced from:

  • clinical experience of neurotic patients whose conditions nearly all arose from a conflict between a) repressed sexual wishes and b) the conscious ego which was repressing them
  • the fundamental biological fact of the twin purpose of any organism, its individual drive to maintain internal equilibrium fighting against the universal drive to go out there and undergo all manner of trials in order perpetuate the species

But now, in this new version, sex instincts and ego instincts are seen as first cousins, the splitting-off of the same thing. Now the grand dichotomy is between:

  • EROS builder of life
  • and THANATOS, life’s destroyer

What is life? What is death? What is sex? Working within the limited biology of his day, this polarity is the best and deepest answer Freud can come up with.

Key writings

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) takes these ideas further and contains a long description of being in love.

The Ego and the Id (1923) is a more systematic exposition of the new tripartite structure of the mind which I have sketched out here.

But it’s in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud really turns the corner into a deeper, more complex, more visionary understanding of human nature, which is why it’s regarded to this day as a key work.

Credit

The history of the numerous translations of Freud’s many works into English form a complicated subject in their own right. The works in this review were translated into English between 1958 and 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. All references in this blog post are to Volume 11 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis’, published in 1984 by Pelican Books.

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

  1. the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
  2. how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
  3. how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

  • a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
  • b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
  • c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

  • the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
  • later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

  • extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
  • linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate  and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

  1. overvaluation of the sexual object
  2. a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then  be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

  1. to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
  2. to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

  • polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
  • oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
  • anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
  • phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
    • in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
    • other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
    • Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
  • latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
  • genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

  • that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
  • that it develops through a series of stages
  • that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
  • that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
  • that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
  • that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

  1. excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
  2. from the organic interior
  3. from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

  1. perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
  2. physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

  • passive versus active personalities
  • biological i.e. defined by sex organs
  • sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is
  • what he himself was
  • what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
  • someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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Posted by Simon on June 19, 2023

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Eh Joe by Samuel Beckett (1967)

Beckett wrote his first play for television, Eh Joe, in May 1965. The first English broadcast of Eh Joe was on BBC2 on 4 July 1966, with Jack MacGowran playing Joe and Siân Phillips as Voice.

The play is another of Beckett’s ‘skullscapes’ in the sense of being entirely about an older male figure ‘trapped’ inside a space – in this case a shabby room very like the room in Film – while he is addressed by an interminable female voice accusing him of various crimes, so trapped that the setup becomes a metaphor for being inside the protagonist’s head.

Where does the voice come from? Is it real? Is it the voice of his conscience? Is it from within what the Voice calls his ‘penny farthing hell you call your mind’? Or is it in some sense ‘real’, external to him, an objective entity?

In any case, the man is dumb, says nothing, is forced to listen, to let the Voice play out.

Voices, unnamed abstract voices, play a big role in Beckett’s works. In his two most extreme novels, The Unnamable and How It Is, the text is driven by a voice which speaks to and through the protagonist and which appears to be more ‘real’ than him. Many Beckett protagonists are driven by the voice in their head, which dominates them, propels them forward, which haunts them with fragments of memory and, to some extent, gives them such reality as they possess.

In Eh Joe the voice is particularly haunting and accusatory. Is it saying he killed his father and mother or merely laid their tormenting ghosts to rest? It strongly implies he was responsible for a lover he abandoned committing suicide? In the other texts I’ve mentioned, the protagonist to some extent talks back or discusses the voice or voices in his head. There is something extremely stifling in the way which, in Eh Joe, the male figure can not reply, can not move, can not speak, but is utterly paralysed by the Voice and forced to listen to its accusations.

Stage directions

As so often with the plays from the 1960s onwards, the preciseness of the physical and visual direction Beckett wrote for it are as thought provoking as the ‘content’. For Eh Joe there are one and a half pages of detailed directions and just five pages of text. The directions start with a brief sketch of Joe’s persona and appearance.

Joe
Joe, late fifties, grey hair, old dressing-gown, carpet slippers, in his room.

The play opens in a shabby knackered bedsit to reveal a shabby knackered man pottering about. Like a child he methodically goes through his room as if checking for monsters. As he does so the camera follows him until he finally settles on the edge of his shabby bed, and then… we hear a voice, sly and beguiling. Beckett was very specific indeed about how the voice should sound.

Voice
Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal. Between phrases a beat of one second at least. Between paragraphs about seven, i.e. three before camera starts to advance and four for advance before it is stopped by voice resuming.

The voice is clearly accusing him. Actresses and directors left records of working directly with Beckett on this play. Billie Whitelaw says Beckett kept on saying “‘No colour, no colour” and “slow”… absolutely flat; absolutely on a monotone.’ She explained how she delivered her lines as a form of ‘Chinese water torture’ so that each phrase of the text was delivered as a drop of water literally dripped into Joe’s head.” In the first TV production the vocal colourlessness Beckett was aiming for was achieved by placing a microphone right up against Sian Phillips’s mouth so that, as she spoke, both high and low frequencies were filtered out, producing a flat, slow, calm accusing voice.

To the American director he often worked with, Alan Schneider, Beckett wrote: ‘Voice should be whispered. A dead voice in his head. Minimum of colour. Attacking. Each sentence a knife going in, pause for withdrawal, then in again.’ In the play itself the Voice says Joe once describes her as having a voice ‘like flint glass’.

The voice comes in ten instalments, paragraphs of monologue. Between each section of monologue the camera moves a little closer to Joe, increasing our sense of claustrophobia, creating a sense of trapment, beginning at a distance and moving closer and closer until the camera is literally staring him in the face. As you might imagine, the precise timing and movement of the camera are also very precisely specified by Beckett.

Camera
Joe’s opening movements followed by camera at constant remove, Joe full length in frame throughout. No need to record room as whole. After this opening pursuit, between first and final closeup of face, camera has nine slight moves in towards face, say four inches each time. Each move is stopped by voice resuming, never camera move and voice together. This would give position of camera when dolly stopped by first word of text as one yard from maximum closeup of face. Camera does not move between paragraphs till clear that pause (say three seconds) longer than between phrases. Then four inches in say four seconds when movement stopped by voice resuming.
Voice Low, distinct, remote, little colour, absolutely steady rhythm, slightly slower than normal. Between phrases a beat of one second at least. Between paragraphs about seven, i.e. three before camera starts to advance and four for advance before it is stopped by voice resuming.

If the Voice and the Camera are the first two elements, the third is Joe’s face. Jack MacGowran was one of Beckett’s favourite actors because of the tired, haunted expressiveness of his face and that is all the male actor is actually called on to do. After the opening minute fiddling with the window, door and cupboard, the main requirement of the play is for him to find the facial expressions to react to the Voice’s accusations and the slow forward advance of the Camera towards him. It is solely about conveying guilt and hauntedness through his expression. The only bit of dynamic he can bring to the role is that, when the Accusing Voice pauses, he can for a moment relax his haunted gaze.

Face
Practically motionless throughout, eyes unblinking during paragraphs, impassive except in so far as it reflects mounting tension of listening. Brief zones of relaxation between paragraphs when perhaps voice has relented for the evening and intentness may relax variously till restored by voice resuming.

‘Zones of relaxation… when perhaps voice has relented’. But it doesn’t relent, for the play’s 18 tense and intense minutes, piling on the accusations, heaping up the guilt on the unspeaking middle-aged man.

Content

So what does the Voice say in these knife-like sentences?

1. The voice asks Joe if he has checked everything. Why is the light on? And the bed, he’s changed the bed, hasn’t he, but it doesn’t make any difference… It crumbles when he lies in the dark…

2. He told her the best was still to come as he hurried her into her coat, she taunts him that no-one can say that phrase like him, ‘the best’s to come’…

3. The Voice says she is not the first to come and haunt him like this. First it was his father, his father’s voice in his head for years, until he found a way to metaphorically throttle him. Then, the Voice says, it was his mother’s voice, getting weaker and weaker ’till you laid her too’, and others, lots of others, all loved him this pitiful man who now spends his nights alone in his shabby bedroom, ‘throttling the dead in  his head.’

4. The Voice knows he pays a woman to come every Saturday, demeaning the transaction with a children’s playground phrase ‘Penny a hoist tuppence as long as you like’, but warns him what it’ll be like if he runs out of money, if he runs out of ‘us‘, presumably meaning women, or women prepared to pander to him.

5. The Voice recalls what it was like in the early days of their relationship, summer, sitting together on the grass watching the ducks, holding hands. He liked her, complimented her on her elocution, said she had a voice like ‘flint glass’. But now he has squeezed her down to a voice, a bare whisper, in  his head. She taunts him: he was able to throttle the other voices, his father’s, his mother’s – but what if she can’t stop hers? Imagine if the whispering goes on forever as he strains to catch the words. She uses the phrase ‘until you join us’ – does that mean she is dead? A Voice from beyond the grave?

6. The Voice mocks Joe’s religious faith, and turns it against him. What happens when He, his God, ‘starts in on you’, starts talking in his head. Does Joe think he’ll be able to throttle that voice as he did his father and mother’s.

7. She taunts him that she found another (presumably another man), better than Joe, kinder, stronger, more intelligent, better looking. Now that’s the kind of taunting which wounds a man.

8. So the Voice has done alright but now she turns to consider one of Joe’s girlfriends who didn’t do so well, a young, slim, pale girl, ‘the green one… the narrow one’. The Voice mocks him with their intimate details, the way her pale eyes opened after they’d made love. But then taunts him – he told her the same lies, told her the best was yet to come, just like he told the Voice. All the time he had an airplane ticket in his pocket, knowing he was going to desert her.

9. The Voice asks whether Joe ever wonders what happened to that girl, the one he abandoned? He tries to throttle the Voice in order not to hear, as he throttled his father and mother’s voices (‘That’s right, Joe, squeeze away’) but he can’t, and this leads us into the final and by far the longest section.

10. In by far the longest section, at some five minutes, the Voice gives a lengthy description of what happened to this young woman that, it is implied, Joe seduced and abandoned. One night, in her slip, she got up and went down to the sea (the sea such a constant presence in Beckett’s works from Malone to Embers to Cascando). She goes down to the sea, lies down in the wash to drown herself, but it doesn’t work. She slips back up to her house and gets a razor, the Gillette razor he himself recommended for her to shave her ‘body hair’, slips back out the house, down to the beach, tries to slash her wrists. Doesn’t work either. Tears a strip from the slip and ties it round the cuts on her wrist. Nips back to the house and gets a bottle of pills. Goes back down the garden, under the viaduct, to the beach, walks along the shoreline swallowing the pills. ‘There’s love for you’, the Voice mocks him.

The Voice torments Joe very effectively, interspersing these descriptions of the young woman’s suicide attempts, with erotic details designed to taunt a sensualist and philanderer like him, the way her wet silk slip clings to her slender body, and the special look in her eyes, before they made love, after they made love.

With whispered intensity the Voice tells Joe to imagine what it must have been like for the young woman, the pale one, the narrow one, lying on the cold stones of the shingly beach, her hands scooping holes, her breasts against the cold stones, lips kissing the stones. The camera is right up in Joe’s face as the Voice taunts him with the exquisite sensual details of the misery of the young woman he seduced and abandoned. The Voice tells Joe to imagine it, imagine the misery and the cold and the lips breasts hands face, more tortured than Him (presumably Christ) and then… the Voice fades out… and is gone.

The smile

In the BBC production, after the Voice has whispered itself into silence…. MacGowran smiles. This, apparently, was a note Beckett himself made to the screenplay which has never been incorporated in the printed text. This final decision utterly transforms the experience of the play and its meaning – up till now we are presented with a man haunted, potentially forever, until he becomes ‘one of us’ i.e. dies, with mental and psychological torment. Here, right at the end, in this tiny but massive addition, Beckett suggests there is relief and escape. Joe has been harrowed but the Voice and all its accusation does, eventually, fade out and leave him. Suddenly there is hope, hope that he might be able to throttle this nagging haunting voice as he has done all the others…

BBC production

So here’s the original BBC2 production with Jack MacGowran playing Joe and Siân Phillips as Voice. I think it’s stunning, both MacGowran and Phillips are brilliant, but so is the staging and direction.

Is the Voice real? Is she the Voice of his conscience haunting him? Or an actual real exterior voice? Is she the product of Christian Guilt or a Freudian cathexis of guilt complexes or Jung’s idea that aspects of the individual’s personality can be hived off to become real, independent entities (the cause of much mental illness)? Or a ghost? Or a voice from beyond the grave, from some afterlife nagging ’till you join us’?

As so often, I don’t think it matters. It can be any or all of the above, plus whatever the viewer wishes to add. That is the point of art and literature, to free the mind from ‘interpretations’. In fact it’s easy to overlook but this is one of Beckett’s most accessible works. Anyone could watch this, with no special knowledge of Beckett, or avant-garde theatre, and simply be spooked. Watched cold with no prior knowledge, the play fits well enough into the tradition of great ghost stories, Gothic thrillers that go back to Dickens and beyond.

Looked at in the context of Beckett’s overall body of works, Eh Joe is an interesting variation on the theme of the Voice, the dominating controlling Voice which creates the narratives of The Unnameable and How It Is but feels quite a lot different. Those works explored a kind of psychologically and artistically extreme vision in which the so-called voices called into being the entire text, while at the same time throwing into doubt their own provenance and blocking or negating the text itself, in texts made up of self-interrogation which create a kind of hallucinatory strangeness.

There’s nothing that weird or difficult or challenging about Eh Joe. Even the quotes are straightforward references to the Bible designed to bring out the way Joe is a (hypocritical) Catholic and at the same time play on his sense of guilt and fear of punishment. I.e. they are easily recognisable accentuators of the guilt and psychological suffering hundreds of Catholic authors have described in such detail across a range of media.

Similarly, the voices in the novels I’ve mentioned are of indeterminable gender, if they even exist at all, which adds multiple layers of complexity and uncertainty. In this play a wronged woman is mocking and taunting her philandering lover i.e. it is a super-familiar genre, and takes its place in a huge line of works, and real life experiences’ Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ is a distortion of a quote from one of William Congreve’s Restoration comedies, an entire genre of drama devoted to the anger of spurned women lovers. It doesn’t matter whether that saying is true or not, it is a truism of the Restoration comedy genre: but it is obviously very applicable to this play.

Ghost story or woman wronged story or both, Eh Joe is so successful because, despite the technical dressing up of camera angles and creeping zooms etc, it in fact invokes some very familiar genres and employs so many familiar tropes.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on January 4, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 4, 2021

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