Freud - Complete Works (414 page)

   These considerations therefore
lend an added weight to the circumstance that we are in point of
fact driven by experience to attribute to homosexual wishful
phantasies an intimate (perhaps an invariable) relation to this
particular form of disease. Distrusting my own experience on the
subject, I have during the last few years joined with my friends C.
G. Jung of Zurich and Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest in
investigating upon this single point a number of cases of paranoid
disorder which have come under observation. The patients whose
histories provided the material for this enquiry included both men
and women, and varied in race, occupation, and social standing. Yet
we were astonished to find that in all of these cases defence
against a homosexual wish was clearly recognizable at the very
centre of the conflict which underlay the disease and that it was
in an attempt to master an unconsciously reinforced current of
homosexuality that they had all of them come to grief.¹ This
was certainly not what we had expected. Paranoia is precisely a
disorder in which a sexual aetiology is by no means obvious; far
from this, the strikingly prominent features in the causation of
paranoia, especially among males, are social humiliations and
slights. But if we go into the matter only a little more deeply, we
shall be able to see that the really operative factor in these
social injuries lies in the part played in them by the homosexual
components of emotional life. So long as the individual is
functioning normally and it is consequently impossible to see into
the depths of his mental life, we may doubt whether his emotional
relations to his neighbours in society have anything to do with
sexuality, either actually or in their genesis. But delusions never
fail to uncover these relations and to trace back the social
feelings to their roots in a directly sensual erotic wish. So long
as he was healthy, Dr. Schreber, too, whose delusions culminated in
a wishful phantasy of an unmistakably homosexual nature, had, by
all accounts, shown no signs of homosexuality in the ordinary sense
of the word.

  
¹
Further confirmation is afforded by
Maeder’s analysis of a paranoid patient J. B. (1910). The
present paper, I regret to say, was completed before I had an
opportunity of reading Maeder’s work.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2430

   I shall now endeavour (and I
think the attempt is neither unnecessary nor unjustifiable) to show
that the knowledge of psychological processes, which, thanks to
psycho-analysis, we now possess, already enables us to understand
the part played by a homosexual wish in the development of
paranoia. Recent investigations¹ have directed our attention
to a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through
on the way from auto-erotism to object-love.² This stage has
been given the name of narcissism. What happens is this. There
comes a time in the development of the individual at which he
unifies his sexual instincts (which have hitherto been engaged in
auto-erotic activities) in order to obtain a love-object; and he
begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and
only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person
other than himself as his object. This half-way phase between
auto-erotism and object-love may perhaps be indispensable normally;
but it appears that many people linger unusually long in this
condition, and that many of its features are carried over by them
into the later stages of their development. What is of chief
importance in the subject’s self thus chosen as a love object
may already be the genitals. The line of development then leads on
to the choice of an external object with similar genitals - that
is, to homosexual object-choice - and thence to heterosexuality.
People who are manifest homosexuals in later life have, it may be
presumed, never emancipated themselves from the binding condition
that the object of their choice must possess genitals like their
own; and in this connection the infantile sexual theories which
attribute the same kind of genitals to both sexes exert much
influence.

  
¹
Sadger (1910) and Freud
(1910
c
).

  
²
Freud,
Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality
(1905
d
).

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2431

   After the stage of heterosexual
object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not,
as might be supposed, done away with or brought to a stop; they are
merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses.
They now combine with portions of the ego-instincts and, as
‘attached’ components, help to constitute the social
instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and
comradeship, to
esprit de corps
and to the love of mankind
in general. How large a contribution is in fact derived from erotic
sources (with the sexual aim inhibited) could scarcely be
guessed from the normal social relations of mankind. But it is not
irrelevant to note that it is precisely manifest homosexuals, and
among them again precisely those that set themselves against an
indulgence in sensual acts, who are distinguished by taking a
particularly active share in the general interests of humanity -
interests which have themselves sprung from a sublimation of erotic
instincts.

   In my
Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality
I have expressed the opinion that each
stage in the development of psychosexuality affords a possibility
of ‘fixation, and thus of a dispositional point. People who
have not freed themselves completely from the stage of narcissism -
who, that is to say, have at that point a fixation which may
operate as a disposition to a later illness - are exposed to the
danger that some unusually intense wave of libido, finding no other
outlet, may lead to a sexualization of their social instincts and
so undo the sublimations which they had achieved in the course of
their development. This result may be produced by anything that
causes the libido to flow backwards (i.e. that causes a
‘regression’): whether, on the one hand, the libido
becomes collaterally reinforced owing to some disappointment over a
woman, or is directly dammed up owing to a mishap in social
relations with other men - both of these being instances of
‘frustration’; or whether, on the other hand, there is
a general intensification of the libido, so that it becomes too
powerful to find an outlet along the channels which are already
open to it, and consequently bursts through its banks at the
weakest spot. Since our analyses show that paranoics
endeavour
to protect themselves against any such sexualization of their
social instinctual cathexes
, we are driven to suppose that the
weak spot in their development is to be looked for somewhere
between the stages of auto-erotism, narcissism and homosexuality,
and that their disposition to illness (which may perhaps be
susceptible of more precise definition) must be located in that
region. A similar disposition would have to be assigned to patients
suffering from Kraepelin’s dementia praecox or (as Bleuler
has named it)
schizophrenia
; and we shall hope later on to
find clues which will enable us to trace back the differences
between the two disorders (as regards both the form they take and
the course they run) to corresponding differences in the
patients’ dispositional fixations.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2432

   In taking the view, then, that
what lies at the core of the conflict in cases of paranoia among
males is a homosexual wishful phantasy of
loving a man
, we
shall certainly not forget that the confirmation of such an
important hypothesis can only follow upon the investigation of a
large number of instances of every variety of paranoic disorder. We
must therefore be prepared, if need be, to limit our assertion to a
single type of paranoia. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable fact that
the familiar principal forms of paranoia can all be represented as
contradictions of the single proposition: ‘
I
(a man)
love him
(a man)’; and indeed that they exhaust all
the possible ways in which such contradictions could be
formulated.

   The proposition ‘I (a man)
love him’ is contradicted by:

   (
a
) Delusions of
persecution
; for they loudly assert:

   ‘I do not
love
him -
I
hate
him.’

   This contradiction, which must
have run thus in the unconscious,¹ cannot, however, become
conscious to a paranoiac in this form. The mechanism of
symptom-formation in paranoia requires that internal perceptions -
feelings - shall be replaced by external perceptions. Consequently
the proposition ‘I hate him’ becomes transformed by
projection
into another one: ‘
He hates
(persecutes)
me
, which will justify me in hating him.’
And thus the impelling unconscious feeling makes its appearance as
though it were the consequence of an external perception:

   ‘I do not
love
him -
I
hate
him, because
HE
PERSECUTES ME
.’

   Observation leaves room for no
doubt that the persecutor is some one who was once loved.

   (
b
) Another element is
chosen for contradiction in
erotomania
, which remains
totally unintelligible on any other view:

   ‘I do not love
him
-
I love
her
.’

   And in obedience to the same need
for projection, the proposition is transformed into: ‘I
observe that
she
loves me.’

   ‘I do not love
him
-
I love
her
, because
SHE LOVES
ME
.’

   Many cases of erotomania might
give an impression that they could be satisfactorily explained as
being exaggerated or distorted heterosexual fixations, if our
attention were not attracted by the circumstance that these
infatuations invariably begin, not with any internal perception of
loving, but with an external perception of being loved. But in this
form of paranoia the intermediate proposition ‘I love
her
’ can also become conscious, because the
contradiction between it and the original proposition is not a
diametrical one, not so irreconcilable as that between love and
hate: it is, after all, possible to love
her
as well as
him
. It can thus come about that the proposition which has
been substituted by projection (‘
she loves me
’)
may make way again for the ‘basic language’ proposition
‘I love
her
’.

  
¹
Or in the ‘basic language’, as
Schreber would say.

Psycho-Analytic Notes On An Autobiographical Account Of A Case Of Paranoia

2433

   (
c
) The third way in which
the original proposition can be contradicted would be by delusions
of
jealousy
, which we can study in the characteristic forms
in which they appear in each sex.

   (
α
)
Alcoholic delusions of jealousy. The part played by alcohol in this
disorder is intelligible in every way. We know that that source of
pleasure removes inhibitions and undoes sublimations. It is not
infrequently disappointment over a woman that drives a man to drink
- but this means, as a rule, that he resorts to the public-house
and to the company of men, who afford him the emotional
satisfaction which he has failed to get from his wife at home. If
now these men become the objects of a strong libidinal cathexis in
his unconscious, he will ward it off with the third kind of
contradiction:

   ‘It is not
I
who
love the man -
she
loves him’, and he suspects the
woman in relation to all the men whom he himself is tempted to
love.

   Distortion by means of projection
is necessarily absent in this instance, since, with the change of
the subject who loves, the whole process is in any case thrown
outside the self. The fact that the woman loves the men is a matter
of external perception to him; whereas the facts that he himself
does not love but hates, or that he himself loves not this but that
person, are matters of internal perception.

   (
β
)
Delusions of jealousy in women are exactly analogous.

   ‘It is not
I
who
love the women -
he
loves them.’ The jealous woman
suspects her husband in relation to all the women by whom she is
herself attracted owing to her homosexuality and the dispositional
effect of her excessive narcissism. The influence of the time of
life at which her fixation occurred is clearly shown by the
selection of the love-objects which she imputes to her husband;
they are often old and quite inappropriate for a real love relation
- revivals of the nurses and servants and girls who were her
friends in childhood, or sisters who were her actual rivals.

   [(
d
)] Now it might be
supposed that a proposition consisting of three terms, such as
‘
I love him
’, could only be contradicted in
three different ways. Delusions of jealousy contradict the subject,
delusions of persecution contradict the verb, and erotomania
contradicts the object. But in fact a fourth kind of contradiction
is possible - namely, one which rejects the proposition as a
whole: