Freud - Complete Works (606 page)

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3648

   This first phase of the
beating-phantasy is therefore completely represented by the phrase:
‘
My father is beating the child
.’ I am betraying
a great deal of what is to be brought forward later when instead of
this I say: ‘ My father is beating the child
whom I
hate
.’ Moreover, one may hesitate to say whether the
characteristics of a ‘phantasy’ can yet be ascribed to
this first step towards the later beating-phantasy. It is perhaps
rather a question of recollections of events which have been
witnessed, or of desires which have arisen on various occasions.
But these doubts are of no importance.

   Profound transformations have
taken place between this first phase and the next. It is true that
the person beating remains the same (that is, the father); but the
child who is beaten has been changed into another one and is now
invariably the child producing the phantasy. The phantasy is
accompanied by a high degree of pleasure, and has now acquired a
significant content, with the origin of which we shall be concerned
later. Now, therefore, the wording runs: ‘
I am being
beaten by my father
.’ It is of an unmistakably
masochistic character.

   This second phase is the most
important and the most momentous of all. But we may say of it in a
certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never
remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a
construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that
account.

   The third phase once more
resembles the first. It has the wording which is familiar to us
from the patient’s statement. The person beating is never the
father, but is either left undetermined just as in the first phase,
or turns in a characteristic way into a representative of the
father, such as a teacher. The figure of the child who is producing
the beating-phantasy no longer itself appears in it. In reply to
pressing enquiries the patients only declare: ‘I am probably
looking on.’ Instead of the one child that is being beaten,
there are now a number of children present as a rule. Most
frequently it is boys who are being beaten (in girls’
phantasies), but none of them is personally known to the subject.
The situation of being beaten, which was originally simple and
monotonous, may go through the most complicated alterations and
elaborations; and punishments and humiliations of another kind may
be substituted for the beating itself. But the essential
characteristic which distinguishes even the simplest phantasies of
this phase from those of the first, and which establishes the
connection with the intermediate phase, is this: the phantasy now
has strong and unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it, and so
provides a means for masturbatory satisfaction. But this is
precisely what is puzzling. By what path has the phantasy of
strange and unknown boys being beaten (a phantasy which has by this
time become sadistic) found its way into the permanent possession
of the little girl’s libidinal trends?

   Nor can we conceal from ourselves
that the interrelations and sequence of the three phases of the
beating-phantasy, as well as all its other peculiarities, have so
far remained quite unintelligible.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3649

IV

   If the analysis is carried
through the early period to which the beating-phantasies are
referred and from which they are recollected, it shows us the child
involved in the agitations of its parental complex.

   The affections of the little girl
are fixed on her father, who has probably done all he could to win
her love, and in this way has sown the seeds of an attitude of
hatred and rivalry towards her mother. This attitude exists side by
side with a current of affectionate dependence on her, and as years
go on it may be destined to come into consciousness more and more
clearly and forcibly, or else to give an impetus to an excessive
reaction of devotion to her. But it is not with the girl’s
relation to her mother that the beating-phantasy is connected.
There are other children in the nursery, only a few years older or
younger, who are disliked on all sorts of other grounds, but
chiefly because the parents’ love has to be shared with them,
and for this reason they are repelled with all the wild energy
characteristic of the emotional life of those years. If the child
in question is a younger brother or sister (as in three of my four
cases) it is despised as well as hated; yet it attracts to itself
the share of affection which the blinded parents are always ready
to give the youngest child, and this is a spectacle the sight of
which cannot be avoided. One soon learns that being beaten, even if
it does not hurt very much, signifies a deprivation of love and a
humiliation. And many children who believed themselves securely
enthroned in the unshakable affection of their parents have by a
single blow been cast down from all the heavens of their imaginary
omnipotence. The idea of the father beating this hateful child is
therefore an agreeable one, quite apart from whether he has
actually been seen doing so. It means: ‘My father does not
love this other child,
he loves only me
.’

   This then is the content and
meaning of the beating-phantasy in its first phase. The phantasy
obviously gratifies the child’s jealousy and is dependent
upon the erotic side of its life, but is also powerfully reinforced
by the child’s egoistic interests. Doubt remains, therefore,
whether the phantasy ought to be described as purely
‘sexual’, nor can one venture to call it
‘sadistic’.

   As is well known, all the signs
on which we are accustomed to base our distinctions tend to lose
their clarity as we come nearer to the source. So perhaps we may
say in terms recalling the prophecy made by the Three Witches to
Banquo: ‘Not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet
the stuff from which both will later come.’ In any case,
however, there is no ground for suspecting that in this first phase
the phantasy is already at the service of an excitation which
involves the genitals and finds its outlet in a masturbatory
act.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3650

   It is clear that the
child’s sexual life has reached the stage of genital
organization, now that its incestuous love has achieved this
premature choice of an object. This can be demonstrated more easily
in the case of boys, but is also indisputable in the case of girls.
Something like a premonition of what are later to be the final and
normal sexual aims governs the child’s libidinal trends. We
may justly wonder why this should be so, but we may regard it as a
proof of the fact that the genitals have already begun playing
their part in the process of excitation. With boys the wish to
beget a child from their mother is never absent, with girls the
wish to have a child by their father is equally constant; and this
in spite of their being completely incapable of forming any clear
idea of the means for fulfilling these wishes. The child seems to
be convinced that the genitals have something to do with the
matter, even though in its constant brooding it may look for the
essence of the presumed intimacy between its parents in relations
of another sort, such as in their sleeping together, micturating in
each other’s presence, etc.; and material of the latter kind
can be more easily apprehended in verbal images than the mystery
that is connected with the genitals.

   But the time comes when this
early blossoming is nipped by the frost. None of these incestuous
loves can avoid the fate of repression. They may succumb to it on
the occasion of some discoverable external event which leads to
disillusionment - such as unexpected slights, the unwelcome birth
of a new brother or sister (which is felt as faithlessness), etc.;
or the same thing may happen owing to internal conditions apart
from any such events, perhaps simply because their yearning remains
unsatisfied too long. It is unquestionably true that such events
are not the
effective
causes, but that these love-affairs
are bound to come to grief sooner or later, though we cannot say on
what particular stumbling block. Most probably they pass away
because their time is over, because the children have entered upon
a new phase of development in which they are compelled to
recapitulate from the history of mankind the repression of an
incestuous object-choice, just as at an earlier stage they were
obliged to effect an object-choice of that very sort.¹ In the
new phase no mental product of the incestuous love-impulses that is
present unconsciously is taken over by consciousness; and anything
that has already come into consciousness is expelled from it. At
the same time as this process of repression takes place, a sense of
guilt appears. This is also of unknown origin, but there is no
doubt whatever that it is connected with the incestuous wishes, and
that it is justified by the persistence of those wishes in the
unconscious.²

  
¹
Compare the part played by Fate in the myth
of Oedipus.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1924:] See the
continuation of this line of thought in ‘The Dissolution of
the Oedipus Complex’ (1924
d
).

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3651

   The phantasy of the period of
incestuous love had said: ‘He (my father) loves only me, and
not the other child, for he is beating it.’ The sense of
guilt can discover no punishment more severe than the reversal of
this triumph: ‘No, he does not love you, for he is beating
you.’ In this way the phantasy of the second phase, that of
being beaten by her father, is a direct expression of the
girl’s sense of guilt, to which her love for her father has
now succumbed. The phantasy, therefore, has become masochistic. So
far as I know, this is always so; a sense of guilt is invariably
the factor that transforms sadism into masochism. But this is
certainly not the whole content of masochism. The sense of guilt
cannot have won the field alone; a share must also fall to the
love-impulse. We must remember that we are dealing with children in
whom the sadistic component was able for constitutional reasons to
develop prematurely and in isolation. We need not abandon this
point of view. It is precisely such children who find it
particularly easy to hark back to the pregenital, sadistic-anal
organization of their sexual life. If the genital organization,
when it has scarcely been effected, is met by repression, the
result is not only that every psychical representation of the
incestuous love becomes unconscious, or remains so, but there is
another result as well: a regressive debasement of the genital
organization itself to a lower level. ‘My father loves
me’ was meant in a genital sense; owing to the regression it
is turned into ‘My father is beating me (I am being beaten by
my father)’. This being beaten is now a convergence of the
sense of guilt and sexual love.
It is not only the punishment
for the forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive
substitute for that relation
, and from this latter source it
derives the libidinal excitation which is from this time forward
attached to it, and which finds its outlet in masturbatory acts.
Here for the first time we have the essence of masochism.

   This second phase - the
child’s phantasy of being itself beaten by its father -
remains unconscious as a rule, probably in consequence of the
intensity of the repression. I cannot explain why nevertheless in
one of my six cases, that of a male, it was consciously remembered.
This man, now grown up, had preserved the fact clearly in his
memory that he used to employ the idea of being beaten by his
mother for the purpose of masturbation, though to be sure he soon
substituted for his own mother the mothers of his school-fellows or
other women who in some way resembled her. It must not be forgotten
that when a boy’s incestuous phantasy is transformed into the
corresponding masochistic one, one more reversal has to take place
than in the case of a girl, namely the substitution of passivity
for activity; and this additional degree of distortion may save the
phantasy from having to remain unconscious as a result of
repression. In this way the sense of guilt would be satisfied by
regression instead of by repression. In the female cases the sense
of guilt, in itself perhaps more exacting, could be appeased only
by a combination of the two.

'A Child Is Being Beaten'

3652

   In two of my four female cases an
elaborate superstructure of day-dreams, which was of great
significance for the life of the person concerned, had grown up
over the masochistic beating-phantasy. The function of this
superstructure was to make possible a feeling of satisfied
excitation, even though the masturbatory act was abstained from. In
one of these cases the content - being beaten by the father - was
allowed to venture again into consciousness, so long as the
subject’s own ego was made unrecognizable by a thin disguise.
The hero of these stories was invariably beaten (or later only
punished, humiliated, etc.) by his father.

   I repeat, however, that as a rule
the phantasy remains unconscious, and can only be reconstructed in
the course of the analysis. This fact perhaps vindicates patients
who say they remember that with them masturbation made its
appearance before the third phase of the beating-phantasy (shortly
to be discussed), and that this phase was only a later addition,
made perhaps under the impression of scenes at school. Every time I
have given credit to these statements I have felt inclined to
assume that the masturbation was at first under the dominance of
unconscious phantasies and that conscious ones were substituted for
them later.