Freud - Complete Works (699 page)

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

4301

   Another objection is that in an
attempt at flight from an impending external danger all that the
subject is doing is to increase the distance between himself and
what is threatening him. He is not preparing to defend himself
against it or attempting to alter anything about it, as would be
the case if he attacked the wolf with a stick or shot at it with a
gun. But the defensive process seems to do something more than
would correspond to an attempt at flight. It joins issue with the
threatening instinctual process and somehow suppresses it or
deflects it from its aims and thus renders it innocuous. This
objection seems unimpeachable and must be given due weight. I think
it is probable that there are some defensive processes which can
truly be likened to an attempt at flight, while in others the ego
takes a much more active line of self-protection and initiates
vigorous counter-measures. But perhaps the whole analogy between
defence and flight is invalidated by the fact that both the ego and
the instinct in the id are parts of the same organization, not
separate entities like the wolf and the child, so that any kind of
behaviour on the part of the ego will result in an alteration in
the instinctual process as well.

   This study of the determinants of
anxiety has, as it were, shown the defensive behaviour of the ego
transfigured in a rational light. Each situation of danger
corresponds to a particular period of life or a particular
developmental phase of the mental apparatus and appears to be
justifiable for it. In early infancy the individual is really not
equipped to master psychically the large sums of excitation that
reach him whether from without or from within. Again, at a certain
period of life his most important interest really is that the
people he is dependent on should not withdraw their loving care of
him. Later on in his boyhood, when he feels that his father is a
powerful rival in regard to his mother and becomes aware of his own
aggressive inclinations towards him and of his sexual intentions
towards his mother, he really is justified in being afraid of his
father; and his fear of being punished by him can find expression
through phylogenetic reinforcement in the fear of being castrated.
Finally, as he enters into social relationships, it really is
necessary for him to be afraid of his super-ego, to have a
conscience; and the absence of that factor would give rise to
severe conflicts, dangers and so on.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

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   But this last point raises a
fresh problem. Instead of the affect of anxiety let us take, for a
moment, another affect - that of pain, for instance. It seems quite
normal that at four years of age a girl should weep painfully if
her doll is broken; or at six, if her governess reproves her; or at
sixteen, if she is slighted by her young man; or at twenty-five,
perhaps, if a child of her own dies. Each of these determinants of
pain has its own time and each passes away when that time is over.
Only the final and definitive determinants remain throughout life.
We should think it strange if this same girl, after she had grown
to be a wife and mother, were to cry over some worthless trinket
that had been damaged. Yet that is how the neurotic behaves.
Although all the agencies for mastering stimuli have long ago been
developed within wide limits in his mental apparatus, and although
he is sufficiently grown up to satisfy most of his needs for
himself and has long ago learnt that castration is no longer
practised as a punishment, he nevertheless behaves as though the
old danger-situations still existed, and keeps hold of all the
earlier determinants of anxiety.

   Why this should be so calls for a
rather long reply. First of all, we must sift the facts. In a great
number of cases the old determinants of anxiety do really lapse,
after having produced neurotic reactions. The phobias of very young
children, fears of being alone or in the dark or with strangers -
phobias which can almost be called normal - usually pass off later
on; the child ‘grows out of them’, as we say about some
other disturbances of childhood. Animal phobias, which are of such
frequent occurrence, undergo the same fate and many conversion
hysterias of early years find no continuation in later life.
Ceremonial actions appear extremely often in the latency period,
but only a very small percentage of them develop later into a full
obsessional neurosis. In general, so far as we can tell from our
observations of town children belonging to the white races and
living according to fairly high cultural standards, the neuroses of
childhood are in the nature of regular episodes in a child’s
development, although too little attention is still being paid to
them. Signs of childhood neuroses can be detected in
all
adult neurotics without exception; but by no means all children who
show those signs become neurotic in later life. It must be,
therefore, that certain determinants of anxiety are relinquished
and certain danger-situations lose their significance as the
individual becomes more mature. Moreover, some of these
danger-situations manage to survive into later times by modifying
their determinants of anxiety so as to bring them up to date. Thus,
for instance, a man may retain his fear of castration in the guise
of a syphilidophobia, after he has come to know that it is no
longer customary to castrate people for indulging their sexual
lusts, but that, on the other hand, severe diseases may overtake
anyone who thus gives way to his instincts. Other determinants of
anxiety, such as fear of the super-ego, are destined not to
disappear at all but to accompany people throughout their lives. In
that case the neurotic will differ from the normal person in that
his reactions to the dangers in question will he unduly strong.
Finally, being grown-up affords no absolute protection against a
return of the original traumatic anxiety-situation. Each individual
has in all probability a limit beyond which his mental apparatus
fails in its function of mastering the quantities of excitation
which require to be disposed of.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

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   These minor rectifications cannot
in any way alter the fact which is here under discussion, that a
great many people remain infantile in their behaviour in regard to
danger and do not overcome determinants of anxiety which have grown
out of date. To deny this would be to deny the existence of
neurosis, for it is precisely such people whom we call neurotics.
But how is this possible? Why are not all neuroses episodes in the
development of the individual which come to a close when the next
phase is reached? Whence comes the element of persistence in these
reactions to danger? Why does the affect of anxiety alone seem to
enjoy the advantage over all other affects of evoking reactions
which are distinguished from the rest in being abnormal and which,
through their inexpediency, run counter to the movement of life? In
other words, we have once more come unawares upon the riddle which
has so often confronted us: whence does neurosis come - what is its
ultimate, its own peculiar
raison d’être
? After
tens of years of psycho-analytic labours, we are as much in the
dark about this problem as we were at the start.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

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X

   Anxiety is the reaction to
danger. One cannot, after all, help suspecting that the reason why
the affect of anxiety occupies a unique position in the economy of
the mind has something to do with the essential nature of danger.
Yet dangers are the common lot of humanity; they are the same for
everyone. What we need and cannot lay our finger on is some factor
which will explain why some people are able to subject the affect
of anxiety, in spite of its peculiar quality, to the normal
workings of the mind, or which decides who is doomed to come to
grief over that task. Two attempts to find a factor of this kind
have been made; and it is natural that such efforts should meet
with a sympathetic reception, since they promise help to meet a
tormenting need. The two attempts in question are mutually
complementary; they approach the problem at opposite ends. The
first was made by Alfred Adler more than ten years ago. His
contention, reduced to its essence, was that the people who came to
grief over the task set them by danger were those who were too
greatly impeded by some organic inferiority. If it were true that
simplex sigillum veri
, we should welcome such a solution as
a deliverance. But on the contrary, our critical studies of the
last ten years have effectively demonstrated the total inadequacy
of such an explanation - an explanation, moreover, which sets aside
the whole wealth of material that has been discovered by
psycho-analysis.

   The second attempt was made by
Otto Rank in 1923 in his book,
The Trauma of Birth
. It would
be unjust to put his attempt on the same level as Adler’s
except in this single point which concerns us here, for it remains
on psycho-analytic ground and pursues a psycho-analytic line of
thought, so that it may be accepted as a legitimate endeavour to
solve the problems of analysis. In this matter of the relation of
the individual to danger Rank moves away from the question of
organic defect in the individual and concentrates on the variable
degree of intensity of the danger. The process of birth is the
first situation of danger, and the economic upheaval which it
produces becomes the prototype of the reaction of anxiety. We have
already traced the line of development which connects this first
danger-situation and determinant of anxiety with all the later
ones, and we have seen that they all retain a common quality in so
far as they signify in a certain sense a separation from the mother
- at first only in a biological sense, next as a direct loss of
object and later as a loss of object incurred indirectly. The
discovery of this extensive concatenation is an undoubted merit of
Rank’s construction. Now the trauma of birth overtakes each
individual with a different degree of intensity, and the violence
of his anxiety-reaction varies with the strength of the trauma; and
it is the initial amount of anxiety generated in him which,
according to Rank, decides whether he will ever learn to control it
- whether he will become neurotic or normal.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

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   It is not our business to
criticize Rank’s hypothesis in detail here. We have only to
consider whether it helps to solve our particular problem. His
formula - that those people become neurotic in whom the trauma of
birth was so strong that they have never been able completely to
abreact it - is highly disputable from a theoretical point of view.
We do not rightly know what is meant by abreacting the trauma.
Taken literally, it implies that the more frequently and the more
intensely a neurotic person reproduces the affect of anxiety the
more closely will he approach to mental health - an untenable
conclusion. It was because it did not tally with the facts that I
gave up the theory of abreaction which had played such a large part
in the cathartic method. To lay so much stress, too, on the
variability in the strength of the birth trauma is to leave no room
for the legitimate claims of hereditary constitution as an
aetiological factor. For this variability is an organic factor
which operates in an accidental fashion in relation to the
constitution and is itself dependent on many influences which might
be called accidental - as, for instance, on timely assistance in
child-birth. Rank’s theory completely ignores constitutional
factors as well as phylogenetic ones. If, however, we were to try
to find a place for the constitutional factor by qualifying his
statement with the proviso, let us say, that what is really
important is the extent to which the individual reacts to the
variable intensity of the trauma of birth, we should be depriving
his theory of its significance and should be relegating the new
factor introduced by him to a position of minor importance: the
factor which decided whether a neurosis should supervene or not
would lie in a different, and once more in an unknown, field.

Inhibitions, Symptoms And Anxiety

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   Moreover, the fact that while man
shares the process of birth with the other mammals he alone has the
privilege over them of possessing a special disposition to neurosis
is hardly favourable to Rank’s theory. But the main objection
to it is that it floats in the air instead of being based upon
ascertained observations. No body of evidence has been collected to
show that difficult and protracted birth does in fact coincide with
the development of a neurosis, or even that children so born
exhibit the phenomena of early infantile apprehensiveness more
strongly and over a longer period than other children. It might be
rejoined that induced labour and births that are easy for the
mother may possibly involve a severe trauma for the child. But we
can still point out that births which lead to asphyxia would be
bound to give clear evidence of the results which are supposed to
follow. It should be one of the advantages of Rank’s
aetiological theory that it postulates a factor whose existence can
be verified by observation. And so long as no such attempt at
verification has been made it is impossible to assess the
theory’s value.

   On the other hand I cannot
identify myself with the view that Rank’s theory contradicts
the aetiological importance of the sexual instincts as hitherto
recognized by psycho-analysis. For his theory only has reference to
the individual’s relation to the danger-situation, so that it
leaves it perfectly open to us to assume that if a person has not
been able to master his first dangers he is bound to come to grief
as well in later situations involving sexual danger and thus be
driven into a neurosis.