Freud - Complete Works (698 page)

   The progress which the child
makes in its development - its growing independence, the sharper
division of its mental apparatus into several agencies, the advent
of new needs - cannot fail to exert an influence upon the content
of the danger situation. We have already traced the change of that
content from loss of the mother as an object to castration. The
next change is caused by the power of the super-ego. With the
depersonalization of the parental agency from which castration was
feared, the danger becomes less defined. Castration anxiety
develops into moral anxiety - social anxiety - and it is not so
easy now to know what the anxiety is about. The formula,
‘separation and expulsion from the horde’, only applies
to that later portion of the super-ego which has been formed on the
basis of social prototypes, not to the nucleus of the super-ego,
which corresponds to the introjected parental agency. Putting it
more generally, what the ego regards as the danger and responds to
with an anxiety-signal is that the super-ego should be angry with
it or punish it or cease to love it. The final transformation which
the fear of the super-ego undergoes is, it seems to me, the fear of
death (or fear for life) which is a fear of the super-ego projected
on to the powers of destiny.

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   At one time I attached some
importance to the view that what was used as a discharge of anxiety
was the cathexis which had been withdrawn in the process of
repression. To-day this seems to me of scarcely any interest. The
reason for this is that whereas I formerly believed that anxiety
invariably arose automatically by an economic process, my present
conception of anxiety as a signal given by the ego in order to
affect the pleasure-unpleasure agency does away with the necessity
of considering the economic factor. Of course there is nothing to
be said against the idea that it is precisely the energy that has
been liberated by being withdrawn through repression which is used
by the ego to arouse the affect; but it is no longer of any
importance which portion of energy is employed for this
purpose.

   This new view of things calls for
an examination of another assertion of mine - namely, that the ego
is the actual seat of anxiety. I think this proposition still holds
good. There is no reason to assign any manifestation of anxiety to
the super-ego; while the expression ‘anxiety of the id’
would stand in need of correction, though rather as to its form
than its substance. Anxiety is an affective state and as such can,
of course, only be felt by the ego. The id cannot have anxiety as
the ego can; for it is not an organization and cannot make a
judgement about situations of danger. On the other hand it very
often happens that processes take place or begin to take place in
the id which cause the ego to produce anxiety. Indeed, it is
probable that the earliest repressions as well as most of the later
ones are motivated by an ego-anxiety of this sort in regard to
particular processes in the id. Here again we are rightly
distinguishing between two cases: the case in which something
occurs in the id which activates one of the danger-situations for
the ego and induces the latter to give the anxiety-signal for
inhibition to take place, and the case in which a situation
analogous to the trauma of birth is established in the id and an
automatic reaction of anxiety ensues. The two cases may be brought
closer together if it is pointed out that the second case
corresponds to the earliest and original danger-situation, while
the first case corresponds to any one of the later determinants of
anxiety that have been derived from it; or, as applied to the
disorders which we in fact come across, that the second case is
operative in the aetiology of the ‘actual’ neuroses,
while the first remains typical for that of the psychoneuroses.

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   We see, then, that it is not so
much a question of taking back our earlier findings as of bringing
them into line with more recent discoveries. It is still an
undeniable fact that in sexual abstinence, in improper interference
with the course of sexual excitation or if the latter is diverted
from being worked over psychically, anxiety arises directly out of
libido; in other words, that the ego is reduced to a state of
helplessness in the face of an excessive tension due to need, as it
was in the situation of birth, and that anxiety is then generated.
Here once more, though the matter is of little importance, it is
very possible that what finds discharge in the generating of
anxiety is precisely the surplus of unutilized libido. As we know,
a psychoneurosis is especially liable to develop on the basis of an
‘actual’ neurosis. This looks as though the ego were
attempting to save itself from anxiety, which it has learned to
keep in suspension for a while, and to bind it by the formation of
symptoms. Analysis of the traumatic war neuroses - a term which,
incidentally, covers a great variety of disorders - would probably
have shown that a number of them possess some characteristics of
the ‘actual’ neuroses.

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   In describing the evolution of
the various danger-situations from their prototype, the act of
birth, I have had no intention of asserting that every later
determinant of anxiety completely invalidates the preceding one. It
is true that, as the development of the ego goes on, the earlier
danger-situations tend to lose their force and to be set aside, so
that we might say that each period of the individual’s life
has its appropriate determinant of anxiety. Thus the danger of
psychical helplessness is appropriate to the period of life when
his ego is immature; the danger of loss of object, to early
childhood when he is still dependent on others; the danger of
castration, to the phallic phase; and the fear of his super-ego, to
the latency period. Nevertheless, all these danger-situations and
determinants of anxiety can persist side by side and cause the ego
to react to them with anxiety at a period later than the
appropriate one; or, again, several of them can come into operation
at the same time. It is possible, moreover, that there is a fairly
close relationship between the danger-situation that is operative
and the form taken by the ensuing neurosis.¹

  
¹
Since the differentiation of the ego and
the id, our interest in the problems of repression, too, was bound
to receive a fresh impetus. Up till then we had been content to
confine our interest to those aspects of repression which concerned
the ego - the keeping away from consciousness and from motility,
and the formation of substitutes (symptoms). With regard to the
repressed instinctual impulses themselves, we assumed that they
remained unaltered in the unconscious for an indefinite length of
time. But now our interest is turned to the vicissitudes of the
repressed and we begin to suspect that it is not self-evident,
perhaps not even usual, that those impulses should remain unaltered
and unalterable in this way. There is no doubt that the original
impulses have been inhibited and deflected from their aim through
repression. But has the portion of them in the unconscious
maintained itself and been proof against the influences of life
that tend to alter and depreciate them? In other words, do the old
wishes, about whose former existence analysis tells us, still
exist? The answer seems ready to hand and certain. It is that the
old, repressed wishes must still be present in the unconscious
since we still find their derivatives, the symptoms, in operation.
But this answer is not sufficient. It does not enable us to decide
between two possibilities: either that the old wish is now
operating only through its derivatives, having transferred the
whole of its cathectic energy to them, or that it is itself still
in existence too. If its fate has been to exhaust itself in
cathecting its derivatives, there is yet a third possibility. In
the course of the neurosis it may have become re-animated by
regression, anachronistic though it may now be. These are no idle
speculations. There are many things about mental life, both normal
and pathological, which seem to call for the raising of such
questions. In my paper, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus
Complex’ (1924
d
), I had occasion to notice the
difference between the mere repression and the real removal of an
old wishful impulse.

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   When, in an earlier part of this
discussion, we found that the danger of castration was of
importance in more than one neurotic illness, we put ourselves on
guard against overestimating that factor, since it could not be a
decisive one for the female sex, who are undoubtedly more subject
to neuroses than men. We now see that there is no danger of our
regarding castration anxiety as the sole motive force of the
defensive processes which lead to neurosis. I have shown elsewhere
how little girls, in the course of their development, are led into
making a tender object-cathexis by their castration complex. It is
precisely in women that the danger situation of loss of object
seems to have remained the most effective. All we need to do is to
make a slight modification in our description of their determinant
of anxiety, in the sense that it is no longer a matter of feeling
the want of, or actually losing the object itself, but of losing
the object’s love. Since there is no doubt that hysteria has
a strong affinity with femininity, just as obsessional neurosis has
with masculinity, it appears probable that, as a determinant of
anxiety, loss of love plays much the same part in hysteria as the
threat of castration does in phobias and fear of the super-ego in
obsessional neurosis.

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IX

   What is now left for us is to
consider the relationship between the formation of symptoms and the
generating of anxiety.

   There seem to be two very widely
held opinions on this subject. One is that anxiety is itself a
symptom of neurosis. The other is that there is a much more
intimate relation between the two. According to the second opinion,
symptoms are only formed in order to avoid anxiety: they bind the
psychical energy which would otherwise be discharged as anxiety.
Thus anxiety would be the fundamental phenomenon and main problem
of neurosis.

   That this latter opinion is at
least in part true is shown by some striking examples. If an
agoraphobic patient who has been accompanied into the street is
left alone there, he will produce an anxiety attack. Or if an
obsessional neurotic is prevented from washing his hands after
having touched something, he will become a prey to almost
unbearable anxiety. It is plain, then, that the purpose and the
result of the imposed condition of being accompanied in the street
and the obsessional act of washing the hands were to obviate
outbreaks of anxiety of this kind. In this sense every inhibition
which the ego imposes on itself can be called a symptom.

   Since we have traced back the
generating of anxiety to a situation of danger, we shall prefer to
say that symptoms are created in order to remove the ego from a
situation of danger. If the symptoms are prevented from being
formed, the danger does in fact materialize; that is, a situation
analogous to birth is established in which the ego is helpless in
the face of a constantly increasing instinctual demand - the
earliest and original determinant of anxiety. Thus in our view the
relation between anxiety and symptom is less close than was
supposed, for we have inserted the factor of the danger-situation
between them. We can also add that the generating of anxiety sets
symptom formation going and is, indeed, a necessary prerequisite of
it. For if the ego did not arouse the pleasure-unpleasure agency by
generating anxiety, it would not obtain the power to arrest the
process which is preparing in the id and which threatens danger.
There is in all this an evident inclination to limit to a minimum
the amount of anxiety generated and to employ it only as a signal;
for to do otherwise would only result in feeling in another place
the unpleasure which the instinctual process was threatening to
produce, and that would not be a success from the standpoint of the
pleasure principle, although it is one that occurs often enough in
the neuroses.

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   Symptom-formation, then, does in
fact put an end to the danger-situation. It has two aspects: one,
hidden from view, brings about the alteration in the id in virtue
of which the ego is removed from danger; the other, presented
openly, shows what has been created in place of the instinctual
process that has been affected - namely, the substitutive
formation.

   It would, however, be more
correct to ascribe to the
defensive process
what we have
just said about symptom-formation and to use the latter term as
synonymous with substitute-formation. It will then be clear that
the defensive process is analogous to the flight by means of which
the ego removes itself from a danger that threatens it from
outside. The defensive process is an attempt at flight from an
instinctual danger. An examination of the weak points in this
comparison will make things clearer.

   One objection to it is that loss
of an object (or loss of love on the part of the object) and the
threat of castration are just as much dangers coming from outside
as, let us say, a ferocious animal would be; they are not
instinctual dangers. Nevertheless, the two cases are not the same.
A wolf would probably attack us irrespectively of our behaviour
towards it; but the loved person would not cease to love us nor
should we be threatened with castration if we did not entertain
certain feelings and intentions within us. Thus such instinctual
impulses are determinants of external dangers and so become
dangerous in themselves; and we can now proceed against the
external danger by taking measures against the internal ones. In
phobias of animals the danger seems to be still felt entirely as an
external one, just as it has undergone an external displacement in
the symptom. In obsessional neuroses the danger is much more
internalized. That portion of anxiety in regard to the super-ego
which constitutes
social
anxiety still represents an
internal substitute for an external danger, while the other
portion-
moral
anxiety - is already completely
endopsychic.