Freud - Complete Works (514 page)

   Between Rebecca’s first
refusal and her confession something occurs which has a decisive
influence on her future destiny. Rector Kroll arrives one day at
the house on purpose to humiliate Rebecca by telling her that he
knows she is an illegitimate child, the daughter of the very Dr.
West who adopted her after her mother’s death. Hate has
sharpened his perceptions, yet he does not suppose that this is any
news to her. ‘I really did not suppose you were ignorant of
this, otherwise it would have been very odd that you should have
let Dr. West adopt you . . .’ ‘And then
he takes you into his house - as soon as your mother dies. He
treats you harshly. And yet you stay with him. You know that he
won’t leave you a halfpenny - as a matter of fact you got
only a case of books - and yet you stay on; you bear with him; you
nurse him to the last.’ . . .  ‘I
attribute your care for him to the natural filial instinct of a
daughter. Indeed, I believe your whole conduct is a natural result
of your origin.’

   But Kroll is mistaken. Rebecca
had no idea at all that she could be Dr. West’s daughter.
When Kroll began with dark hints at her past, she must have thought
he was referring to something else. After she has gathered what he
means, she can still retain her composure for a while, for she is
able to suppose that her enemy is basing his calculations on her
age, which she had given falsely on an earlier visit of his. But
Kroll demolishes this objection by saying: ‘Well, so be it,
but my calculation may be right, none the less; for Dr. West was up
there on a short visit the year before he got the
appointment.’ After this new information, she loses her
self-possession. ‘It is not true!’ She walks about
wringing her hands. ‘It is impossible. You want to cheat me
into believing it. This can never, never be true. It cannot be
true. Never in this world! - Her agitation is so extreme that Kroll
cannot attribute it to his information alone.

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   ‘
KROLL
: But, my dear Miss West - why
in Heaven’s name are you so terribly excited? You quite
frighten me. What am I to think - to believe--?

   ‘
REBECCA
: Nothing. You are to think
and believe nothing.

   ‘
KROLL
: Then you must really tell me
how you can take this affair - this possibility - so terribly to
heart.

   ‘
REBECCA
(
controlling
herself
): It is perfectly simple, Rector Kroll. I have no wish
to be taken for an illegitimate child.’

   The enigma of Rebecca’s
behaviour is susceptible of only one solution. The news that Dr.
West was her father is the heaviest blow that can befall her, for
she was not only his adopted daughter, but had been his mistress.
When Kroll began to speak, she thought that he was hinting at these
relations, the truth of which she would probably have admitted and
justified by her emancipated ideas. But this was far from the
Rector’s intention; he knew nothing of the love-affair with
Dr. West, just as she knew nothing of Dr. West’s being her
father. She
cannot
have had anything else in her mind but
this love-affair when she accounted for her final rejection of
Rosmer on the ground that she had a past which made her unworthy to
be his wife. And probably, if Rosmer had consented to hear of that
past, she would have confessed half her secret only and have kept
silence on the more serious part of it.

   But now we understand, of course,
that this past must seem to her the more serious obstacle to their
union - the more serious crime.

   After she has learnt that she has
been the mistress of her own father, she surrenders herself wholly
to her now overmastering sense of guilt. She makes the confession
to Rosmer and Kroll which stamps her as a murderess; she rejects
for ever the happiness to which she has paved the way by crime, and
prepares for departure. But the true motive of her sense of guilt,
which results in her being wrecked by success, remains a secret. As
we have seen, it is something quite other than the atmosphere of
Rosmersholm and the refining influence of Rosmer.

   At this point no one who has
followed us will fail to bring forward an objection which may
justify some doubts. Rebecca’s first refusal of Rosmer occurs
before Kroll’s second visit, and therefore before his
exposure of her illegitimate origin and at a time when she as yet
knows nothing of her incest - if we have rightly understood the
dramatist. Yet this first refusal is energetic and seriously meant.
The sense of guilt which bids her renounce the fruit of her actions
is thus effective before she knows anything of her cardinal crime;
and if we grant so much, we ought perhaps entirely to set aside her
incest as a source of that sense of guilt.

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   So far we have treated Rebecca
West as if she were a living person and not a creation of
Ibsen’s imagination, which is always directed by the most
critical intelligence. We may therefore attempt to maintain the
same position in dealing with the objection that has been raised.
The objection is valid: before the knowledge of her incest,
conscience was already in part awakened in Rebecca; and there is
nothing to prevent our making the influence which is acknowledged
and blamed by Rebecca herself responsible for this change. But this
does not exempt us from recognizing the second motive.
Rebecca’s behaviour when she hears what Kroll has to tell
her, the confession which is her immediate reaction, leave no doubt
that then only does the stronger and decisive motive for
renunciation begin to take effect. It is in fact a case of multiple
motivation, in which a deeper motive comes into view behind the
more superficial one. Laws of poetic economy necessitate this way
of presenting the situation, for this deeper motive could not be
explicitly enunciated. It had to remain concealed, kept from the
easy perception of the spectator or the reader; otherwise serious
resistances, based on the most distressing emotions, would have
arisen, which might have imperilled the effect of the drama.

   We have, however, a right to
demand that the explicit motive shall not be without an internal
connection with the concealed one, but shall appear as a mitigation
of, and a derivation from, the latter. And if we may rely on the
fact that the dramatist’s conscious creative combination
arose logically from unconscious premisses, we may now make an
attempt to show that he has fulfilled this demand. Rebecca’s
feeling of guilt has its source in the reproach of incest, even
before Kroll, with analytical perspicacity, has made her conscious
of it. If we reconstruct her past, expanding and filling in the
author’s hints, we may feel sure that she cannot have been
without some inkling of the intimate relation between her mother
and Dr. West. It must have made a great impression on her when she
became her mother’s successor with this man. She stood under
the domination of the Oedipus complex, even though she did not know
that this universal phantasy had in her case become a reality. When
she came to Rosmersholm, the inner force of this first experience
drove her into bringing about, by vigorous action, the same
situation which had been realized in the original instance through
no doing of hers - into getting rid of the wife and mother, so that
she might take her place with the husband and father. She describes
with a convincing insistence how, against her will, she was obliged
to proceed, step by step, to the removal of Beata.

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   ‘You think then that I was
cool and calculating and self-possessed all the time! I was not the
same woman then that I am now, as I stand here telling it all.
Besides, there are two sorts of will in us, I believe! I wanted
Beata away, by one means or another; but I never really believed
that it would come to pass. As I felt my way forward, at each step
I ventured, I seemed to hear something within me cry out: No
farther! Not a step farther! And yet I
could
not stop, I
had
to venture the least little bit farther. And only one
hair’s-breadth more. And then one more - and always one more.
And then it happened. - That is the way such things come
about.’

   That is not an embellishment, but
an authentic description. Everything that happened to her at
Rosmersholm, her falling in love with Rosmer and her hostility to
his wife, was from the first a consequence of the Oedipus complex -
an inevitable replica of her relations with her mother and Dr.
West.

   And so the sense of guilt which
first causes her to reject Rosmer’s proposal is at bottom no
different from the greater one which drives her to her confession
after Kroll has opened her eyes. But just as under the influence of
Dr. West she had become a freethinker and despiser of religious
morality, so she is transformed by her love for Rosmer into a being
of conscience and nobility. This much of the mental processes
within her she herself understands, and so she is justified in
describing Rosmer’s influence as the motive for her change -
the motive that had become accessible to her.

   The practising psycho-analytic
physician knows how frequently, or how invariably, a girl who
enters a household as servant, companion or governess, will
consciously or unconsciously weave a day-dream, which derives from
the Oedipus complex, of the mistress of the house disappearing and
the master taking the newcomer as his wife in her place.
Rosmersholm
is the greatest work of art of the class that
treats of this common phantasy in girls. What makes it into a
tragic drama is the extra circumstance that the heroine’s
day-dream had been preceded in her childhood by a precisely
corresponding reality.¹

   After this long digression into
literature, let us return to clinical experience - but only to
establish in a few words the complete agreement between them.
Psycho-analytic work teaches that the forces of conscience which
induce illness in consequence of success, instead of, as normally,
in consequence of frustration, are closely connected with the
Oedipus complex, the relation to father and mother - as perhaps,
indeed, is our sense of guilt in general.

  
¹
The presence of the theme of incest in
Rosmersholm
has already been demonstrated by the same
arguments as mine in Otto Rank’s extremely comprehensive
Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage
(1912).

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III

CRIMINALS FROM A SENSE OF GUILT

In telling me about their early youth,
particularly before puberty, people who have afterwards often
become very respectable have informed me of forbidden actions which
they committed at that time - such as thefts, frauds and even
arson. I was in the habit of dismissing these statements with the
comment that we are familiar with the weakness of moral inhibitions
at that period of life, and I made no attempt to find a place for
them in any more significant context. But eventually I was led to
make a more thorough study of such incidents by some glaring and
more accessible cases in which the misdeeds were committed while
the patients were actually under my treatment, and were no longer
so youthful. Analytic work then brought the surprising discovery
that such deeds were done principally because they were forbidden,
and because their execution was accompanied by mental relief for
their doer. He was suffering from an oppressive feeling of guilt,
of which he did not know the origin, and after he had committed a
misdeed this oppression was mitigated. His sense of guilt was at
least attached to something.

   Paradoxical as it may sound, I
must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the
misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely - the
misdeed arose from the sense of guilt. These people might justly be
described as criminals from a sense of guilt. The pre-existence of
the guilty feeling had of course been demonstrated by a whole set
of other manifestations and effects.

   But scientific work is not
satisfied with the establishment of a curious fact. There are two
further questions to answer: what is the origin of this obscure
sense of guilt before the deed, and is it probable that this kind
of causation plays any considerable part in human crime?

   An examination of the first
question held out the promise of bringing us information about the
source of mankind’s sense of guilt in general. The invariable
outcome of analytic work was to show that this obscure sense of
guilt derived from the Oedipus complex and was a reaction to the
two great criminal intentions of killing the father and having
sexual relations with the mother. In comparison with these two, the
crimes committed in order to fix the sense of guilt to something
came as a relief to the sufferers. We must remember in this
connection that parricide and incest with the mother are the two
great human crimes, the only ones which, as such, are pursued and
abhorred in primitive communities. And we must remember, too, how
close other investigations have brought us to the hypothesis that
the conscience of mankind, which now appears as an inherited mental
force, was acquired in connection with the Oedipus complex.

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   In order to answer the second
question we must go beyond the scope of psycho-analytic work. With
children it is easy to observe that they are often
‘naughty’ on purpose to provoke punishment, and are
quiet and contented after they have been punished. Later analytic
investigation can often put us on the track of the guilty feeling
which induced them to seek punishment. Among adult criminals we
must no doubt except those who commit crimes without any sense of
guilt, who have either developed no moral inhibitions or who, in
their conflict with society, consider themselves justified in their
action. But as regards the majority of other criminals, those for
whom punitive measures are really designed, such a motivation for
crime might very well be taken into consideration; it might throw
light on some obscure points in the psychology of the criminal, and
furnish punishment with a new psychological basis.