Freud - Complete Works (575 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3467

   I have now led you into the
region in which the next advances in the work of analysis are to be
expected. Since we have ventured to operate with the concept of
ego-libido the narcissistic neuroses have become accessible to us;
the task before us is to arrive at a dynamic elucidation of these
disorders and at the same time to complete our knowledge of mental
life by coming to understand the ego. The ego-psychology after
which we are seeking must not be based on the data of our
self-perceptions but (as in the case of the libido) on the analysis
of disturbances and disruptions of the ego. It is likely that we
shall have a low opinion of our present knowledge of the
vicissitudes of the libido, which we have gained from a study of
the transference neuroses, when we have achieved this greater task.
But hitherto we have not made much progress with it. The
narcissistic neuroses can scarcely be attacked with the technique
that has served us with the transference neuroses. You will soon
learn why. What always happens with them is that, after proceeding
for a short distance, we come up against a wall which brings us to
a stop. Even with the transference neuroses, as you know, we met
with barriers of resistance, but we were able to demolish them bit
by bit. In the narcissistic neuroses the resistance is
unconquerable; at the most, we are able to cast an inquisitive
glance over the top of the wall and spy out what is going on on the
other side of it. Our technical methods must accordingly be
replaced by others; and we do not know yet whether we shall succeed
in finding substitute. Nevertheless, we have no lack of material
with these patients either. They make a large number of remarks,
even if they do not answer our questions, and for the time being it
is our business to interpret these remarks with the help of the
understanding we have gained from the symptoms of the transference
neuroses. The agreement is great enough to guarantee us some
initial advantage. It remains to be seen how far this technique
will take us.

   There are difficulties in
addition which hold up our advance. The narcissistic disorders and
the psychoses related to them can only be deciphered by observers
who have been trained through the analytic study of the
transference neuroses. But our psychiatrists are not students of
psycho-analysis and we psycho-analysts see too few psychiatric
cases. A race of psychiatrists must first grow up who have passed
through the school of psycho-analysis as a preparatory science. A
start in that direction is now being made in America, where very
many leading psychiatrists lecture to students on the theories of
psycho-analysis and where the proprietors of institutions and the
directors of insane asylums endeavour to observe their patients in
conformity with those theories. Nevertheless we too, over here,
have succeeded sometimes in casting a glance over the narcissistic
wall and in what follows I shall tell you a little of what we think
we have detected.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3468

   The form of disease known as
paranoia, chronic systematic insanity, occupies an unsettled
position in the attempts at classification made by present-day
psychiatry. There is, however, no doubt of its close affinity to
dementia praecox. I once ventured to suggest that paranoia and
dementia praecox should be brought together under the common
designation of ‘paraphrenia’. The forms of paranoia are
described according to their content as megalomania, persecution
mania, erotomania, delusions of jealousy, and so on. We shall not
expect anything much in the way of an attempt at an explanation
from psychiatry. Here is an example of one, though, it is true, one
that is out of date and does not carry much weight - an attempt to
derive one symptom from another by means of an intellectual
rationalization: it is suggested that the patient, who, owing to a
primary disposition, believes that he is being persecuted, infers
from his persecution that he must be someone of quite particular
importance and so develops megalomania. According to our analytic
view the megalomania is the direct result of a magnification of the
ego due to the drawing in of he libidinal object-cathexes - a
secondary narcissism which is a return of the original early
infantile one. We have, however, made a few observations of
persecution mania which have induced us to follow a particular
track. The first thing that struck us was that in the large
majority of cases the persecutor was of the same sex as the
persecuted patient. This was still open to an innocent explanation;
but in a few cases that were thoroughly studied it was clear that
the person of the same sex whom the patient loved most had, since
his illness, been turned into his persecutor. This made a further
development possible: namely, the replacement of the beloved
person, along the line of familiar resemblances, by someone else -
for instance, a father by a schoolmaster or by some superior.
Experiences of this kind in ever increasing numbers led us to
conclude that
paranoia persecutoria
is the form of the
disease in which a person is defending himself against a homosexual
impulse which has become too powerful. The change over from
affection to hatred, which, it is well known, may become a serious
threat to the life of the loved and hated object, corresponds in
such cases to the transformation of libidinal impulses into anxiety
which is a regular outcome of the process of repression. Listen,
for instance, to what is, once again, the most recent instance of
my observations in this connection.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3469

   A young doctor had to be expelled
from the town in which. he lived because he had threatened the life
of the son of a university professor residing there, who had up
till then been his greatest friend. He attributed really fiendish
intentions and demonic power to this former friend, whom he
regarded as responsible for all the misfortunes that had befallen
his family in recent years, for every piece of ill-luck whether in
his home or in his social life. But that was not all. He believed
that this bad friend and the friend’s father, the Professor,
had caused the war, too, and brought the Russians into the country.
His friend had forfeited his life a thousand times, and our patient
was convinced that the criminal’s death would put an end to
every evil. Yet his affection for him was still so strong that it
had paralysed his hand when, on one occasion, he had an opportunity
of shooting down his enemy at close range. In the course of the
short conversations I had with the patient, it came to light that
their friendship went back far into their schooldays. Once at least
it had overstepped the bounds of friendship: a night which they had
spent together had been an occasion for complete sexual
intercourse. Our patient had never acquired the emotional relation
to women which would have corresponded to his age and his
attractive personality. He had once been engaged to a beautiful
young girl of good social position; but she had broken off the
engagement because she found that her
fiancé
was
without any affection. Years later, his illness broke out just at
the moment when he had succeeded for the first time in satisfying a
woman completely. When this woman embraced him in gratitude and
devotion, he suddenly had a mysterious pain that went round the top
of his head like a sharp cut. Later on he interpreted this
sensation as though an incision were being made at an autopsy for
exposing the brain. And as his friend had become a pathological
anatomist, it slowly dawned on him that he alone could have sent
this last woman to him to seduce him- From that point onwards his
eyes were opened to the other persecutions to which he believed he
had been made a victim by the machinations of his one-time
friend.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3470

   But what about the cases in which
the persecutor is not of the same sex as the patient and which
appear, therefore, to contradict our explanation of their being a
defence against homosexual libido? A little time ago I had an
opportunity of examining such a case and was able to derive a
confirmation from the apparent contradiction. A girl, who believed
she was being persecuted by a man with whom she had had
affectionate assignations on two occasions, had in fact first had a
delusion that was directed against a woman who could be looked on
as a substitute for her mother. It was only after her second
assignation that she took the step of detaching the delusion from
the woman and transferring it to the man. To begin with, therefore,
the precondition of the persecutor being of the same sex as the
patient was fulfilled in this case too. In making a complaint to a
lawyer and to a doctor, the patient made no mention of this
preliminary stage of her delusion and thus gave rise to an
appearance of there being a contradiction of our explanation of
paranoia.

   Homosexual object-choice
originally lies closer to narcissism than does the heterosexual
kind. When it is a question, therefore, of repelling an undesirably
strong homosexual impulse, the path back to narcissism is made
particularly easy. Hitherto I have had very little opportunity of
talking to you about the foundations of erotic life so far as we
have discovered them, and it is too late now to catch up on the
omission. This much, however, I can emphasize to you.
Object-choice, the step forward in the development of the libido
which is made after the narcissistic stage, can take place
according to two different types: either according to the
narcissistic type
, where the subject’s own ego is
replaced by another one that is as similar as possible, or
according to the
attachment type
, where people who have
become precious through satisfying the other vital needs are chosen
as objects by the libido as well. A strong libidinal fixation to
the narcissistic type of object-choice is to be included in the
predisposition to manifest homosexuality.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3471

   You will recall that at our first
meeting of the present academic year I described a case to you of a
woman suffering from delusions of jealousy. Now that we are so near
its end you would no doubt like to hear how delusions are explained
by psycho-analysis. But I have less to tell you about that than you
expect. The fact that a delusion cannot be shaken by logical
arguments or real experiences is explained in the same way as in
the case of an obsession - by its relation to the unconscious,
which is represented and held down by the delusion or by the
obsession. The difference between the two is based on the
difference between the topography and dynamics of the two
illnesses.

   As with paranoia, so also with
melancholia (of which, incidentally, many different clinical forms
have been described) we have found a point at which it has become
possible to obtain some insight into the internal structure of the
disease. We have discovered that the self-reproaches, with which
these melancholic patients torment themselves in the most merciless
fashion, in fact apply to another person, the sexual object which
they have lost or which has become valueless to them through its
own fault. From this we can conclude that the melancholic has, it
is true, withdrawn his libido from the object, but that, by a
process which we must call ‘narcissistic
identification’, the object has been set up in the ego
itself, has been as it were, projected on to the ego. (Here I can
only give you a pictorial description and not an ordered account on
topographical and dynamic lines.) The subject’s own ego is
then treated like the object that has been abandoned, and it is
subjected to all the acts of aggression and expressions of
vengefulness which have been aimed at the object. A
melancholic’s propensity to suicide is also made more
intelligible if we consider that the patient’s embitterment
strikes with a single blow at his own ego and at the loved and
hated object. In melancholia, as well as in other narcissistic
disorders, a particular trait in the patient’s emotional life
emerges with peculiar emphasis - what, since Bleuler, we have been
accustomed to describe as ‘ambivalence’. By this we
mean the direction towards the same person of contrary -
affectionate and hostile - feelings. Unluckily I have been unable
in the course of these lectures to tell you more about this
emotional ambivalence.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3472

   In addition to narcissistic
identification, there is a hysterical kind, which has been familiar
to us very much longer. I wish it were possible to illustrate for
you the differences between the two forms by a few clear
specifications. There is something I can tell you about the
periodic and cyclical forms of melancholia which I am sure you will
be glad to hear. For in favourable circumstances - I have
experienced this twice - it is possible by analytic treatment in
the lucid intervals to prevent the return of the condition in the
same or the opposite emotional mood. We learn from such cases that
in melancholia and mania we are concerned once more with a special
method of dealing with a conflict whose underlying determinants
agree precisely with those of the other neuroses. You can imagine
how much more there is for psycho-analysis to learn in this field
of knowledge.

   I told you too that we hoped that
the analysis of the narcissistic disorders would give us an insight
into the way in which our ego is put together and built up out of
different agencies. We have already made a start with this at one
point. From the analysis of delusions of observation we have drawn
the conclusion that there actually exists in the ego an agency
which unceasingly observes, criticizes and compares, and in that
way sets itself over against the other part of the ego. We believe,
therefore, that the patient is betraying a truth to us which is not
yet sufficiently appreciated when he complains that he is spied
upon and observed at every step he takes and that every one of his
thoughts is reported and criticized. His only mistake is in
regarding this uncomfortable power as something alien to him and
placing it outside himself. He senses an agency holding sway in his
ego which measures his actual ego and each of its activities by an
ideal ego
that he has created for himself in the course of
his development. We believe, too, that this creation was made with
the intention of re-establishing the self-satisfaction which was
attached to primary infantile narcissism but which since then has
suffered so many disturbances and mortifications. We know the
self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this
that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which
the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed. When in
delusions of observation it becomes split up, it reveals to us its
origin from the influences of parents, educators and social
environment - from an identification with some of these model
figures.