Freud - Complete Works (619 page)

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3724

   In order to make it easier to
understand this ‘compulsion to repeat’, which emerges
during the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics, we must above
all get rid of the mistaken notion that what we are dealing with in
our struggle against resistances is resistance on the part of the
unconscious
. The unconscious - that is to say, the
‘repressed’ - offers no resistance whatever to the
efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour
than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force
its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real
action. Resistance during treatment arises from the same higher
strata and systems of the mind which originally carried out
repression. But the fact that, as we know from experience, the
motives of the resistances, and indeed the resistances themselves,
are unconscious at first during the treatment, is a hint to us that
we should correct a shortcoming in our terminology. We shall avoid
a lack of clarity if we make our contrast not between the conscious
and the unconscious but between the coherent
ego
and the
repressed
. It is certain that much of the ego is itself
unconscious, and notably what we may describe as its nucleus; only
a small part of it is covered by the term
‘preconscious’. Having replaced a purely descriptive
terminology by one which is systematic or dynamic, we can say that
the patient’s resistance arises from his ego, and we then at
once perceive that the compulsion to repeat must be ascribed to the
unconscious repressed. It seems probable that the compulsion can
only express itself after the work of treatment has gone half-way
to meet it and has loosened the repression.¹

  
¹
I have argued elsewhere that what thus
comes to the help of the compulsion to repeat is the factor of
‘suggestion’ in the treatment - that is, the
patient’s submissiveness to the physician, which has its
roots deep in his unconscious parental complex.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3725

  
There is no doubt that
the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under
the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the
unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the
repressed.
Our
efforts, on the other hand, are directed
towards procuring the toleration of that unpleasure by an appeal to
the reality principle. But how is the compulsion to repeat - the
manifestation of the power of the repressed - related to the
pleasure principle? It is clear that the greater part of what is
re-experienced under the compulsion to repeat must cause the ego
unpleasure, since it brings to light activities of repressed
instinctual impulses. That, however, is unpleasure of a kind we
have already considered and does not contradict the pleasure
principle: unpleasure for one system and simultaneously
satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and remarkable
fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls from the
past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and
which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to
instinctual impulses which have since been repressed.

   The early efflorescence of
infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its wishes
are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of
development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes
to an end in the most distressing circumstances and to the
accompaniment of the most painful feelings. Loss of love and
failure leave behind them a permanent injury to self-regard in the
form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion, as well as in
Marcinowski’s (1918), contributes more than anything to the
‘sense of inferiority’ which is so common in neurotics.
The child’s sexual researches, on which limits are imposed by
his physical development, lead to no satisfactory conclusion; hence
such later complaints as ‘I can’t accomplish anything;
I can’t succeed in anything’. The tie of affection,
which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex,
succumbs to disappointment, to a vain expectation of satisfaction
or to jealousy over the birth of a new baby - unmistakable proof of
the infidelity of the object of the child’s affections. His
own attempt to make a baby himself, carried out with tragic
seriousness, fails shamefully. The lessening amount of affection he
receives, the increasing demands of education, hard words and an
occasional punishment - these show him at last the full extent to
which he has been scorned. These are a few typical and constantly
recurring instances of the ways in which the love characteristic of
the age of childhood is brought to a conclusion.

   Patients repeat all of these
unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and
revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They seek to bring about
the interruption of the treatment while it is still incomplete;
they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to oblige the
physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly; they
discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the
passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan
or a promise of some grand present - which turns out as a rule to
be no less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure
in the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less
unpleasure to-day if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of
taking the form of fresh experiences. They are of course the
activities of instincts intended to lead to satisfaction; but no
lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities
having led instead only to unpleasure. In spite of that, they are
repeated, under pressure of a compulsion.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3726

   What psycho-analysis reveals in
the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the
lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being
pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some
‘daemonic’ power; but psycho-analysis has always taken
the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by
themselves and determined by early infantile influences. The
compulsion which is here in evidence differs in no way from the
compulsion to repeat which we have found in neurotics, even though
the people we are now considering have never shown any signs of
dealing with a neurotic conflict by producing symptoms. Thus we
have come across people all of whose human relationships have the
same outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger
after a time by each of his
protégés
, however
much they may otherwise differ from one another, and who thus seems
doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose
friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time
after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a
position of great private or public authority and then, after a
certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by
a new one; or, again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a
woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same
conclusion. This ‘perpetual recurrence of the same
thing’ causes us no astonishment when it relates to
active
behaviour on the part of the person concerned and
when we can discern in him an essential character-trait which
always remains the same and which is compelled to find expression
in a repetition of the same experiences. We are much more impressed
by cases where the subject appears to have a
passive
experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets
with a repetition of the same fatality. There is the case, for
instance, of the woman who married three successive husbands each
of whom fell ill soon afterwards and had to be nursed by her on
their death-beds.¹ The most moving poetic picture of a fate
such as this is given by Tasso in his romantic epic
Gerusalemme
Liberata
. Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved
Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy
knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic
forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He
slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the
cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the
tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once
again.

   If we take into account
observations such as these, based upon behaviour in the
transference and upon the life-histories of men and women, we shall
find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a
compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle. Now
too we shall be inclined to relate to this compulsion the dreams
which occur in traumatic neuroses and the impulse which leads
children to play.

  
¹
Cf. the apt remarks on this subject by C.
G. Jung (1909).

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3727

   But it is to be noted that only
in rare instances can we observe the pure effects of the compulsion
to repeat, unsupported by other motives. In the case of
children’s play we have already laid stress on the other ways
in which the emergence of the compulsion may be interpreted; the
compulsion to repeat and instinctual satisfaction which is
immediately pleasurable seem to converge here into an intimate
partnership. The phenomena of transference are obviously exploited
by the resistance which the ego maintains in its pertinacious
insistence upon repression; the compulsion to repeat, which the
treatment tries to bring into its service is, as it were, drawn
over by the ego to
its
side (clinging as the ego does to the
pleasure principle). A great deal of what might be described as the
compulsion of destiny seems intelligible on a rational basis; so
that we are under no necessity to call in a new and mysterious
motive force to explain it.

   The least dubious instance is
perhaps that of traumatic dreams. But on maturer reflection we
shall be forced to admit that even in the other instances the whole
ground is not covered by the operation of the familiar motive
forces. Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a
compulsion to repeat - something that seems more primitive, more
elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it
overrides. But if a compulsion to repeat
does
operate in the
mind, we should be glad to know something about it, to learn what
function it corresponds to, under what conditions it can emerge and
what its relation is to the pleasure principle - to which, after
all, we have hitherto ascribed dominance over the course of the
processes of excitation in mental life.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3728

IV

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched
speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to
his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out
an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will
lead.

   Psycho-analytic speculation takes
as its point of departure the impression, derived from examining
unconscious processes, that consciousness may be, not the most
universal attribute of mental processes, but only a particular
function of them. Speaking in metapsychological terms, it asserts
that consciousness is a function of a particular system which it
describes as
Cs
. What consciousness yields consists
essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external
world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only
arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to
assign to the system
Pcpt.-Cs.
a position in space. It must
lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned
towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical
systems. It will be seen that there is nothing daringly new in
these assumptions; we have merely adopted the views on localization
held by cerebral anatomy, which locates the ‘seat’ of
consciousness in the cerebral cortex - the outermost, enveloping
layer of the central organ. Cerebral anatomy has no need to
consider why, speaking anatomically, consciousness should be lodged
on the surface of the brain instead of being safely housed
somewhere in its inmost interior. Perhaps
we
shall be more
successful in accounting for this situation in the case of our
system
Pcpt.-Cs
.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3729

   Consciousness is not the only
distinctive character which we ascribe to the processes in that
system. On the basis of impressions derived from our
psycho-analytic experience, we assume that all excitatory processes
that occur in the
other
systems leave permanent traces
behind in them which form the foundation of memory. Such
memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming
conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring
when the process which left them behind was one which never entered
consciousness. We find it hard to believe, however, that permanent
traces of excitation such as these are also left in the system
Pcpt.-Cs
. If they remained constantly conscious, they would
very soon set limits to the system’s aptitude for receiving
fresh excitations.¹ If, on the other hand, they were
unconscious, we should be faced with the problem of explaining the
existence of unconscious processes in a system whose functioning
was otherwise accompanied by the phenomenon of consciousness. We
should, so to say, have altered nothing and gained nothing by our
hypothesis relegating the process of becoming conscious to a
special system. Though this consideration is not absolutely
conclusive, it nevertheless leads us to suspect that becoming
conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes
incompatible with each other within one and the same system. Thus
we should be able to say that the excitatory process becomes
conscious in the system
Cs
. but leaves no permanent trace
behind there; but that the excitation is transmitted to the systems
lying next within and that it is in
them
that its traces are
left. I followed these same lines in the schematic picture which I
included in the speculative section of my
Interpretation of
Dreams
. It must be borne in mind that little enough is known
from other sources of the origin of consciousness; when, therefore,
we lay down the proposition that
consciousness arises instead of
a memory-trace
, the assertion deserves consideration, at all
events on the ground of its being framed in fairly precise
terms.