eading Freud clear version in English

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCfION 553 cathexis of the ego with libido exceeds a certain amount. A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. This follows somewhat on the lines of Heine's picture of the psychogenesis of the Creation: Krankheit ist wohl der letzte Grund Des ganzen Sch6pferdrangs gewesen; Erschaffend konnte ich genesen, Erschaffend wurde ich gesund. 5 We have recognized our mental apparatus as being first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind helps remarkably towards an internal draining away of excitations which are incapable of direct discharge outwards, or for which such a discharge is for the moment undesirable. In the first instance, however, it is a matter of indifference whether this internal process of working-over is carried out upon real or imaginary objects. The differ- ence does not appear till later-if the turning of the libido on to unreal objects (introversion) has led to its being dammed up. In paraphrenics, megalomania allows of a similar internal working-over of libido which has returned to the ego; perhaps it is only when the megalomania fails that the damming-up of libido in the ego becomes pathogenic and starts the process of recovery which gives us the impression of being a disease. * * * A third way in which we may approach the study of narcissism is by observing the erotic life of human beings, with its many kinds of dif- ferentiation in man and woman. Just as object-libido at first concealed ego-libido from our observation, so too in connection with the object- choice of infants (and of growing children) what we first noticed was that they derived their sexual objects from their experiences of satis- faction. The first autoerotic sexual satisfactions are experienced in con- nection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation. The sexual instincts are at the outset attached to the satisfaction of the ego-instincts; only later do they become independent of these, and even then we have an indication of that original attachment in the fact that the persons who are concerned with a child's feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects: that is to say, in the first instance his mother or a substitute for her. Side by side, however, with this type and source of object-choice, which may be called the 5. [God is imagined as saying: 'Illness was no healthy.' {Heinrich Heine.} Neue Gedichte, doubt the final cause of the whole urge to create. 'SchOpfungslieder VII\".] By creating, I could recover; by creating, [ became

554 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS 'anaclitic' or 'attachment' type,6 psycho-analytic research has revealed a second type, which we were not prepared for finding. We have discov- ered, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suf- fered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love- object, and exhibiting a type of object-choice which must be termed 'narcissistic'. In this observation we have the strongest of the reasons which have led us to adopt the hypothesis of narcissism. We have, however, not concluded that human beings are divided into two sharply differentiated groups, according as their object-choice conforms to the anaclitic or to the narcissistic type; we assume rather that both kinds of object-choice are open to each individual, though he may show a preference for one or the other. We say that a human being has originally two sexual objects--himself and the woman who nurses him-and in doing so we are postulating a primary narcissism in every- one, which may in some cases manifest itself in a dominating fashion in his object-choice. A comparison of the male and female sexes then shows that there are fundamental differences between them in respect of their type of object- choice, although these differences are of course not universal. Complete object-love of the attachment type is, properly speaking, characteristic of the male. It displays the marked sexual overvaluation which is doubt- less derived from the child's original narcissism and thus corresponds to a transference of that narcissism to the sexual object. This sexual over- valuation is the origin of the peculiar state of being in love, a state suggestive of a neurotic compulsion, which is thus traceable to an im- poverishment of the ego as regards libido in favour of the love-object. A different course is followed in the type of female most frequently met with, which is probably the purest and truest one. With the onset of puberty the maturing of the female sexual organs, which up till then have been in a condition of latency, seems to bring about an intensi- fication of the original narcissism, and this is unfavourable to the de- velopment of a true object-choice with its accompanying sexual overvaluation. Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object. Strictly speaking, it is only themselves that such women love with an intensity comparable to that of the man's love for them. Nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and the man who 6. {The editors comment here, in an elaborate alien-sounding jargon, James Strachey and his col- footnote, that they have rendered Freud's \"An- laborators have been severely criticized for this and lehnungstypus\"-which, literally, means \"lean- related failings-not wholly without justice, But ing-against type\"-by this awkward invention, the difficulties of finding appropriate English This is one instance of Freud's English translators equivalents for Freud's coinages were formidable, converting his energetic German, which nearly and the Standard Edition remains a heroic always draws on ordinary speech, into technical, achievement}

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION 555 fulfils this condition is the one who finds favour with them. The im- portance of this type of woman for the erotic life of mankind is to be rated very high. Such women have the greatest fascination for men, not only for aesthetic reasons, since as a rule they are the most beautiful, but also because of a combination of interesting psychological factors. For it seems very evident that another person's narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love. The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey. Indeed, even great criminals and humorists, as they are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it. It is as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind-an unassailable libidinal position which we ourselves have since abandoned. The great charm of narcissistic women has, however, its reverse side; a large part of the lover's dissatisfaction, of his doubts of the woman's love, of his complaints of her enigmatic nature, has its root in this incongruity between the types of object-choice. Perhaps it is not out of place here to give an assurance that this description of the feminine form of erotic life is not due to any tenden- tious desire on my part to depreciate women. Apart from the fact that tendentiousness is quite alien to me, I know that these different lines of development correspond to the differentiation of functions in a highly complicated biological whole; further, I am ready to admit that there are quite a number of women who love according to the masculine type and who also develop the sexual overvaluation proper to that type. Even for narcissistic women, whose attitude towards men remains cool, there is a road which leads to complete object-love. In the child which they bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an ex- traneous object, to which, starting out from their narcissism, they can then give complete object-love. There are other women, again, who do not have to wait for a child in order to take the step in development from (secondary) narcissism to object-love. Before puberty they feel mas- culine and develop some way along masculine lines; after this trend has been cut short on their reaching female maturity, they still retain the capacity of longing for a masculine ideal-an ideal which is in fact a survival of the boyish nature that they themselves once possessed. What I have so far said by way of indication may be concluded by a short summary of the paths leading to the choice of an object. A person may love:- (1) According to the narcissistic type: (a) what he himself is (i.e. himself), (b) what he himself was,

556 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS (c) what he himself would like to be, (d) someone who was once part of himself. (2) According to the anaclitic (attachment) type: (a) the woman who feeds him, (b) the man who protects him, and the succession of substitutes who take their place. The inclusion of case (c) of the first type cannot be justified till a later stage of this discussion. * * * The primary narcissism of children which we have assumed and which forms one of the postulates of our theories of the libido, is less easy to grasp by direct observation than to corifirm by inference from elsewhere. If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents towards their children, we have to recognize that it is a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. The trustworthy pointer constituted by overvaluation, which we have already recognized as a narcissistic stigma in the case of object-choice, dominates, as we all know, their emotional attitude. Thus they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child-which sober observation would find no occasion to do-and to conceal and forget all his shortcomings. (Incidentally, the denial of sexuality in children is connected with this.) Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in the child's favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death, re- nunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of creation-'His Majesty the Baby',1 as we once fancied ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out-the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father's place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child. Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents' narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature. 7. [In English in the original. Perhaps a reference two London policemen holding up the crowded to a well-known Royal Academy picture of the traffic to allow a nursery-maid to wheel a peram- Edwardian age, which bore that title and showed bulator across the street.)

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION 557 III * * * Psycho-analytic research ordinarily enables us to trace the vi- cissitudes undergone by the libidinal instincts when these, isolated from the ego-instincts, are placed in opposition to them; but in the particular field of the castration complex, it allows us to infer the existence of an epoch and a psychical situation in which the two groups of instincts, still operating in unison and inseparably mingled, make their appearance as narcissistic interests. It is from this context that Adler [1910] has derived his concept of the 'masculine protest', which he has elevated almost to the position of the sole motive force in the formation of character and neurosis alike and which he bases not on a narcissistic, and therefore still a libidinal, trend, but on a social valuation. Psycho- analytic research has from the very beginning recognized the existence and importance of the 'masculine protest', but it has regarded it, in opposition to Adler, as narcissistic in nature and derived from the cas- tration complex. The 'masculine protest' is concerned in the formation of character, into the genesis of which it enters along with many other factors, but it is completely unsuited for explaining the problems of the neuroses, with regard to which Adler takes account of nothing but the manner in which they serve the ego-instincts. I find it quite impossible to place the genesis of neurosis upon the narrow basis of the castration complex, however powerfully it may come to the fore in men among their resistances to the cure of a neurosis. * * * Observation of normal adults shows that their former megalomania has been damped down and that the psychical characteristics from which we inferred their infantile narcissism have been effaced. What has be- come of their ego-libido? Are we to suppose that the whole amount of it has passed into object-cathexes? Such a possibility is plainly contrary to the whole trend of our argument; but we may find a hint at another answer to the question in the psychology of repression. We have learnt that libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicis- situde of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the sub- ject's cultural and ethical ideas. By this we never mean that the individual in question has a merely intellectual knowledge of the existence of such ideas; we always mean that he recognizes them as a standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on him. Repression, we have said, proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater precision that it proceeds from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over con- sciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness. The difference between the two, which contains the conditioning factor of repression, can easily be ex- pressed in terms which enable it to be explained by the libido theory. We can say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which

558 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS he measures his actual ego, while the other has formed no such ideal. For the ego the formation of an ideal would be the conditioning factor of repression. This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject's narcissism makes its ap- pearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself in- capable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal. We are naturally led to examine the relation between this forming of an ideal and sublimation. Sublimation is a process that concerns object- libido and consists in the instinct's directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality. Idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject's mind. Idealization is possible in the sph@re of ego-libido as well as in that of object-libido. For example, the sexual overvaluation of an object is an idealization of it. In so far as sublimation describes something that has to do with the instinct and idealization something to do with the object, the two concepts are to be distinguished from each other. The formation of an ego ideal is often confused with the sublimation of instinct, to the detriment of our understanding of the facts. A man who has exchanged his narcissism for homage to a high ego ideal has not necessarily on that account succeeded in sublimating his libidinal instincts. It is true that the ego ideal demands such sublimation, but it cannot enforce it; sublimation remains a special process which may be prompted by the ideal but the execution of which is entirely independent of any such prompting. It is precisely in neurotics that we find the highest differences of potential between the developrllent of their ego ideal and the amount of sublimation of their primitive libidinal instincts; and in general it is far harder to convince an idealist of the inexpedient location of his libido than a plain man whose pretensions have remained more moderate. Further, the formation of an ego ideal and sublimation are quite differently related to the causation of neurosis. As we have learnt, the formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression; sublimation is a way out, a way by which those demands can be met without involving repression.

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION 559 It would not surprise us if we were to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal. If such an agency does exist, we cannot possibly come upon it as a discovery-we can only recognize it; for we may reflect that what we call our 'conscience' has the required characteristics. Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so-called 'delusions of being noticed' or more correctly, of being watched, which are such striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases and which may .also occur as an isolated form of illness, or intercalated in a transference neurosis. Patients of this sort complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and super- vised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person ('Now she's thinking of that again', 'now he's going out'). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in normal life. Delusions of being watched present this power in a regressive form, thus revealing its genesis and the reason why the patient is in revolt against it. For what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment-his fellow-men-and public opjnion. In this way large amounts of libido of an essentially homosexual kind are drawn into the formation of the narcissistic ego ideal and find outlet and satisfaction in maintaining it. The institution of conscience was at bottom an embodiment, first of parental criticism, and subsequently of that of society-a process which is repeated in what takes place when a tendency towards repression develops out of a prohibition or obstacle that came in the first instance from without. The voices, as well as the undefined multitude, are brought into the foreground again by the dis- ease, and so the evolution of comcience is reproduced regressively. But the revolt against this 'censoring agency' arises out of the subject's desire (in accordance with the fundamental character of his illness) to liberate himself from all these influences, beginning with the parental one, and out of his withdrawal of homosexual libido from them. His conscience then confronts him in a regressive form as a hostile influence from without. The complaints made by paranoics also show that at bottom the self- criticism of conscience coincides with the self-observation on which it is based. Thus the activity of the mind which has taken over the function of conscience has also placed itself at the service of internal research,

560 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS which furnishes philosophy with the material for its intellectual oper- ations. lnis may have some bearing on the characteristic tendency of paranoics to construct speculative systems. * * * We may here recall that we have found that the formation of dreams takes place under the dominance of a censorship which compels dis- tortion of the dream-thoughts. We did not, however, picture this cen- sorship as a special power, but chose the term to designate one side of the repressive trends that govern the ego, namely the side which is turned towards the dream-thoughts. If we enter further into the structure of the ego, we may recognize in the ego ideal and in the dynamic utterances of conscience the dream-censor as well. If this censor is to some extent on the alert even during sleep, we can understand how it is that its suggested activity of self-observation and self-critic ism-with such thoughts as, 'now he is too sleepy to think', 'now he is waking up'- makes a contribution to the content of the dream. At this point we may attempt some discussion of the self-regarding attitude in normal people and in neurotics. In the first place self-regard appears to us to be an expression of the size of the ego; what the various elements are which go to determine that size is irrelevant. Everything a person possesses or achieves, every remnant of the primitive feeling of omnipotence which his experience has confirmed, helps to increase his self-regard. Applying our distinction between sexual and ego-instincts, we must recognize that self-regard has a specially intimate dependence on nar- cissistic libido. Here we are supported by two fundamental facts; that in paraphrenics self-regard is increased, while in the transference neuroses it is diminished; and that in love-relations not being loved lowers the self-regarding feelings, while being loved raises them. As we have in- dicated, the aim and the satisfaction in a narcissistic object-choice is to be loved. Further, it is easy to observe that libidinal object-cathexis does not raise self-regard. The effect of dependence upon the loved object is to lower that feeling: a person in love is humble. A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved. In all these respects self-regard seems to remain related to the narcissistic element in love. The realization of impotence, of one's own inability to love, in con- sequence of mental or physical disorder, has an exceedingly lowering effect upon self-regard. Here, in my judgement, we must look for one of the sources of the feelings of inferiority which are experienced by patients suffering from the transference neuroses and which they are so ready to report. The main source of these feelings is, however, the

ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCfION 561 impoverishment of the ego, due to the extraordinarily large libidinal cathexes which have been withdrawn from it-due, that is to say, to the injury sustained by the ego through sexual trends which are no longer subject to control. Adler is right in maintaining that when a person with an active mental life recognizes an inferiority in one of his organs, it acts as a spur and calls out a higher level of performance in him through overcompen- sation. But it would be altogether an exaggeration if, following Adler's example, we sought to attribute every successful achievement to this factor of an original inferiority of an organ. Not all artists are handicapped with bad eyesight, nor were all orators originally stammerers. And there are plenty of instances of excellent achievements springing from superior organic endowment. In the aetiology of neuroses organic inferiority and imperfect development play an insignificant part-much the same as that played by currently active perceptual material in the formation of dreams. Neuroses make use of such inferiorities as a pretext, just as they do of every other suitable factor . We may be tempted to believe a neurotic woman patient when she tells us that it was inevitable she should fall ill, since she is ugly, deformed or lacking in charm, so that no one could love her; but the very next neurotic will teach us better-for she persists in her neurosis and in her aversion to sexuality, although she seems more desirable, and is more desired, than the average woman. The majority of hysterical women are among the attractive and even beauti- ful representatives of their sex, while, on the other hand, the fre- quency of ugliness, organic defects and infirmities in the lower classes of society does not increase the incidence of neurotic illness among them. The relations of self-regard to erotism-that is, to libidinal object- cathexes-may be expressed concisely in the following way. Two cases must be distinguished, according to whether the erotic cathexes are ego- syntonic, or, on the contrary, have suffered repression. In the former case (where the use made of the libido is ego-syntonic), love is assessed like any other activity of the ego. Loving in itself, in so far as it involves longing and deprivation, lowers self-regard; whereas being loved, having one's love returned, and possessing the loved object, raises it once more. When libido is repressed, the erotic cathexis is felt as a severe depletion of the ego, the satisfaction of love is impossible, and the re-enrichment of the ego can be effected only by a withdrawal of libido from its objects. The return of the object-libido to the ego and its transformation into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once more; and, on the other hand, it is also true that a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be dis- tinguished. * * *

562 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS The importance and extensiveness of the topic must be my justification for adding a few more remarks which are somewhat loosely strung together. * * The ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation. It binds not only a person's narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of his homosexual libido, which is in this way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction which arises from the non-fulfilment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido, and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety). Originally this sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents, or, more correctly, the fear of losing their love; later the parents are replaced by an indefinite number of fellow- men. The frequent causation of paranoia by an injury to the ego, by a frustration of satisfaction within the sphere of the ego ideal, is thus made more intelligible, as is the convergence of ideal-formation and subli- mation in the ego ideal, as well as the involution of sublimations and the possible transformation of ideals in paraphrenic disorders. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes The general war that erupted in early August 1914 was a catastrophe for the culture in which Freud had lived, more or less securely, up to then. Europe, one may say, never really quite recovered from this calamity. Not unnat- urally, the war had marked consequences for Freud himself. It was not just that it brought shortages in food and fuel and made his beloved cigars hard to obtain. His private life was severely disrupted as he worried about his three sons in the army; at least two of them, Martin and Ernst, were serving on the Russian front, often in danger. Psychoanalysis, too, suffered, as analytic publications came to a virtual standstill; most of Freud's associates were drafted into the army as physicians; and Freud's schedule of analysands, normally full to bursting, showed sizable gaps. The belligerent powers with their ugly chauvinism, and the military campaigns with their brutality and seemingly interminable blood-letting, gave Freud much to think about. He professed not to be astonished at the dismal scene, with German professors returning English honorary degrees and French publicists maligning Ger- mans as huns, but he confessed to his sadness and disappointment. True, Freud started the war as something of an Austrian patriot and hoped for a victory of the Central Powers. But his enthusiasm gradually waned, and it is significant that throughout the war, he remained in touch with his \"en- emy\" Ernest Jones through neutral channels. It should surprise no one that the prolonged, increasingly senseless slaughter had an impact on Freud's thought, but that impact should not be exaggerated. In any event, it did not manifest itself until well after the conclusion of hostilities in November 1918.

INSTINCTS AND THEIR VICISSITUDES 563 Yet the war proved a boon to Freud in one respect: it gave him a good deal of unexpected, unwelcome, free time. Hence he began to draft a major book on metapsychology that would summarize, and establish, the essential elements of psychoanalytic theory. During the spring and summer of 1915, he wrote the twelve essays he intended to include in the book, rapidly and with little difficulty. Then something happened. Between 1915 and 1917, he did publish the first five of these papers, but after that he resisted persistent pressure by his friends for the whole work. At some point, indeed, he destroyed the other seven. (In 1983, the German psychoanalyst and editor lise Grubrich-Simitis discovered in the Ferenczi papers a draft of Freud's twelfth paper, a bold \"historical\" study of the transference neuroses. It proved a fascinating glimpse into Freud, the speculative thinker. The draft has been beautifully edited by Grubrich-Simitis and is available in an English trans- lation by Alex and Peter T. Hoifer, as A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses [1987].) Freud's unwillingness to let the book appear remains mysterious, though it seems most likely that he was increas- ingly dissatisfied with his old \"topographic\" scheme and not yet ready to publish the new \"structural\" theory. The paper of 1914 on narcissism (see above, pp. 545-62) had signalized the need for some rethinking of psy- choanalytic theory; Freud's refusal to publish his book on metapsychology strongly hints that he was now fully aware of that need. (See Gay, Freud, pp. 373-74.) The present paper, on the drives, published in late 1915, with its orderly classification of fundamentals and its opening remarks on the nature of psychoanalysis as a science, retains more than historical interest. Yet it, more than the others, would have had to be rewritten if Freud had conceived it in the 1920s. We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone. Such ideas-which will later become the basic concepts of the science-are still more indispen- sable as the material is further worked over. They must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; there can be no question of any clear delimitation of their content. So long as they remain in this coh- dition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions-although everything depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant relations to the empirical material, relations

564 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS that we seem to sense before we can clearly recognize and demonstrate them. It is only after more thorough investigation of the field of obser- vation that we are able to formulate its basic scientific concepts with increased precision, and progressively so to modify them that they be- come serviceable and consistent over a wide area. Then, indeed, the time may have come to confine them in definitions. The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions. Physics furnishes an excellent illustration of the way in which even 'basic concepts' that have been established in the form of definitions are con- stantly being altered in their content. A conventional basic concept of this kind, which at the moment is still somewhat obscure but which is indispensable to us in psychology, is that of an 'instinct. 'I Let us try to give a content to it by approaching it from different angles. First, from the angle of physiology. This has given us the concept of a 'stimulus' and the pattern of the reflex arc, according to which a stimulus applied to living tissue (nervous substance) from the outside is discharged by action to the outside. This action is expedient in so far as it withdraws the stimulated substance from the influence of the stim- ulus, removes it out of its range of operation. What is the relation of 'instinct' to 'stimulus'? There is nothing to prevent our subsuming the concept of 'instinct' under that of 'stimulus' and saying that an instinct is a stimulus applied to the mind. But we are immediately set on our guard against equating instinct and mental stimulus. There are obviously other stimuli to the mind besides those of an instinctual kind, stimuli which behave far more like physiological ones. For example, when a strong light falls on the eye, it is not an instinctual stimulus; it is one, however, when a dryness of the mucous membrane of the pharynx or an irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach makes itself felt. We have now obtained the material necessary for distinguishing be- tween instinctual stimuli and other (physiological) stimuli that operate on the mind. In the first place, an instinctual stimulus does not arise from the external world but from within the organism itself. For this reason it operates differently upon the mind and different actions are necessary in order to remove it. Further, all that is essential in a stimulus is covered if we assume that it operates with a single impact, so that it can be disposed of by a single expedient action. A typical instance of this is motor flight from the source of stimulation. These impacts may, of course, be repeated and summated, but that makes no difference to our notion of the process and to the conditions for the removal of the stimulus. An instinct, on the other hand, never operates as a force giving I. ['Trieb' in the original.] {There is much re- in meaning. to Freud's intentions. Some analysts spectable psychoanalytic opinion that supports the have compromised by using the term \"instinctual editors' choice of \"instinct\" for ''Trieb,'' even drives.\" In any event, \"instinct\" and \"drive\" should though \"drive\" is closer linguistically and, I think, be treated as synonyms in this Reader.}

INSTINCTS AND THEIR VICISSITUDES 565 a momentary impact but always as a constant one. Moreover, since it impinges not from without but from within the organism, no flight can avail against it. A better term for an instinctual stimulus is a 'need'. What does away with a need is 'satisfaction'. This can be attained only by an appropriate (,adequate') alteration of the internal source of stimulation. Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living organism, as yet unorientated in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in a position to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one hand, it will be aware of stimuli which can be avoided by muscular action (flight); these it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will also be aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose character of constant pressure persists in spite of it; these stimuli are the signs of an internal world, the evidence of instinctual needs. The perceptual substance of the living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular activity a basis for distinguishing between an 'outside' and an 'inside'. We thus arrive at the essential nature of instincts in the first place by considering their main characteristics-their origin in sources of stim- ulation within the organism and their appearance as a constant force- and from this we deduce one of their further features, namely, that no actions of flight avail against them. In the course of this discussion, however, we cannot fail to be struck by something that obliges us to make a further admission. In order to guide us in dealing with the field of psychological phenomena, we do not merely apply certain conven- tions to our empirical material as basic concepts; we also make use of a number of complicated postulates. We have already alluded to the most important of these, and all we need now do is to state it expressly. This postulate is of a biological nature, and makes use of the concept of 'purpose' (or perhaps of expediency) and runs as follows: the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition. Let us for the present not take exception to the indefiniteness of this idea and let us assign to the nervous system the task-speaking in general terms-of mastering stimuli. We then see how greatly the simple pattern of the physiological reflex is complicated by the intro- duction of instincts. External stimuli impose only the single task of withdrawing from them; this is accomplished by muscular movements, one of which eventually achieves that aim and thereafter, being the expedient movement; becomes a hereditary disposition. Instinctual stim- uli, which originate from within the organism, cannot be dealt with by this mechanism. Thus they make far higher demands on the nervous system and cause it to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the

566 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS internal source of stimulation. Above all, they oblige the nervous system to renounce its ideal intention of keeping off stimuli, for they maintain an incessant and unavoidable afflux of stimulation. We may therefore well conclude that instincts and not external stimuli are the true motive forces behind the advances that have led the nervous system, with its unlimited capacities, to its present high level of development. There is naturally nothing to prevent our supposing that the instincts themselves are, at least in part, precipitates of the effects of external stimulation, which in the course of phylogenesis have brought about modifications in the living substance. When we further find that the activity of even the most highly de- veloped mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i.e. is automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series, we can hardly reject the further hypothesis that these feelings reflect the manner in which the process of mastering stimuli takes place-certainly in the sense that un pleasurable feelings are connected with an increase and pleasurable feelings with a decrease of stimulus. We will, however, carefully preserve this assumption in its present highly indefinite form, until we succeed, if that is possible, in discovering what sort of relation exists between pleasure and unpleasure, on the one hand, and fluctuations in the amounts of stimulus affecting mental life, on the other. It is certain that many very various relations of this kind, and not very simple ones, are possible. If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an 'instinct' appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in conse- quence of its connection with the body. We are now in a position to discuss certain terms which are used in reference to the concept of an instinct-for example, its 'pressure', its 'aim', its 'object' and its 'source'. By the pressure [Drang] of an instinct we understand its motor factor, the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all instincts; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean in- stincts whose aim is passive. The aim [Ziel] of an instinct is in every instance satisfaction, which can only be obtained by removing the state of stimulation at the source of the instinct. But although the ultimate aim of each instinct remains unchangeable, there may yet be different paths leading to the same ultimate aim; so that an instinct may be found to have various nearer or intermediate aims, which are combined or interchanged with one another. Experience permits us also to speak of instincts which are

INSTINCTS AND THEIR VICISSITUDES 567 'inhibited in their aim', in the case of processes which are allowed to make some advance towards instinctual satisfaction but are then inhibited or deflected. We may suppose that even processes of this kind involve a partial satisfaction. The object [Obiekt] of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about an instinct and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible. The object is not necessarily something ex- traneous: it may equally well be a part of the subject's own body. It may be changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes which the instinct undergoes during its existence; and highly important parts are played by this displacement of instinct. It may happen that the same object serves for the satisfaction of several instincts simultaneously, a phenomenon which Adler has called a 'confluence' of instincts [Trieb- verschriinkung]. A particularly close attachment of the instinct to its object is distinguished by the term 'fixation'. This frequently occurs at very early periods of the development of an instinct and puts an end to its mobility through its intense opposition to detachment. By the source [QueUe] of an instinct is meant the somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by an instinct. We do not know whether this process is invariably of a chemical nature or whether it may also cor- respond to the release of other, e.g. mechanical, forces. The study of the sources of instincts lies outside the scope of psychology. Although instincts are wholly determined by their origin in a somatic source, in mental life we know them only by their aims. An exact knowledge of the sources of an instinct is not invariably necessary for purposes of psychological investigation; sometimes its source may be inferred from its aim. Are we to suppose that the different instincts which originate in the body and operate on the mind are also distinguished by different qual- ities, and that that is why they behave in qualitatively different ways in mental life? This supposition does not seem to be justified; we are much more likely to find the simpler assumption sufficient-that the instincts are all qualitatively alike and owe the effect they make only to the amount of excitation they carry, or perhaps, in addition, to certain functions of that quantity. What distinguishes from one another the mental effects produced by the various instincts may be traced to the difference in their sources. * * * What instincts should we suppose there are, and how many? There is obviously a wide opportunity here for arbitrary choice. No objection can be made to anyone's employing the concept of an instinct of play or of destruction or of gregariousness, when the subject-matter demands it and the limitations of psychological analysis allow of it. Nevertheless,

568 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS we should not neglect to ask ourselves whether instinctual motives like these, which are so highly specialized on the one hand, do not admit of further dissection in accordance wih the sources of the instinct, so that only primal instincts-those which cannot be further dissected- can lay claim to importance. I have proposed that two groups of such primal instincts should be distinguished: the ego, or self-preservative, instincts and the sexual in- stincts. But this supposition has not the status of a necessary postulate, as has, for instance, our assumption about the biological purpose of the mental apparatus; it is merely a working hypothesis, to be retained only so long as it proves useful, and it will make little difference to the results of our work of description and classification if it is replaced by another. The occasion for this hypothesis arose in the course of the evolution of psycho-analysis, which was first employed upon the psychoneuroses, or, more precisely, upon the group described as 'transference neuroses' (hys- teria and obsessional neurosis); these showed that at the root of all such affections there is to be found a conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego. It is always possible that an exhaustive study of the other neurotic affections (especially of the narcissistic psychoneu- roses, the schizophrenias) may oblige us to alter this formula and to make a different classification of the primal instincts. But for the present we do not know of any such formula, nor have we met with any argument unfavourable to drawing this contrast between sexual and ego-instincts. 2 We may sum up by saying that the essential feature in the vicissitudes undergone by instincts lies in the subjection of the instinctual impulses to the influences of the three great polarities that dominate mental life. Of these three polarities we might describe that of activity-passivity as the biological, that of ego-external world as the real, and finally that of pleasure-unpleasure as the economic polarity. The instinctual vicissitude of repression will form the subject of an inquiry which follows. Repression Freud was very proud of his discovery of repression. We will recall that in his \"Autobiographical Study,\" he linked it to his analysands' resistance: \"The expenditure of force on the part of the physician was evidently the measure of a resistance on the part of the patient. It was only necessary to translate into words what I myself had observed, and I was in possession of the theory of repression . ... It was a novelty, and nothing like it had ever before been recognized in mental life\" (see above, p. 18). He found the concept so 2. fIbis is precisely what Freud did find it necessary to revise.}

REPRESSION 569 significant that for some years he used it very broadly, to include defensive stratagems of all sorts. Later, he would return to the term \"defense\" and recognize repression as its archetypal, probably most significant, but not exclusive expression. He published this paper in the issue of the Zeitschrift following the one in which its introductory predecessor, \"Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,\" had appeared. One of the vicissitudes an instinctual impulse may undergo is to meet with resistances which seek to make it inoperative. Under certain con- ditions, which we shall presently investigate more closely, the impulse then passes into the state of 'repression' ['Verdriingung']. If what was in question was the operation of an external stimulus, the appropriate method to adopt would obviously be flight; with an instinct, flight is of no avail, for the ego cannot escape from itself. At some later period, rejection based on judgement (condemnation) will be found to be a good method to adopt against an instinctual impulse. Repression is a prelim- inary stage of condemnation, something between flight and condem- nation; it is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psycho-analytic studies. It is not easy in theory to deduce the possibility of such a thing as repression. Why should an instinctual impulse undergo a vicissitude like this? A necessary condition of its happening must clearly be that the instinct's attainment of its aim should produce unpleasure instead of pleasure. But we cannot well imagine such a contingency. There are no such instincts: satisfaction of an instinct is always pleasurable. We should have to assume certain peculiar circumstances, some sort of process by which the pleasure of satisfaction is changed into unpleasure. * * Let us * * * confine ourselves to clinical experience, as we meet with it in psycho-analytic practice. We then learn that the satisfaction of an instinct which is under repression would be quite possible, and further, that in every instance such a satisfaction would be pleasurable in itself; but it would be irreconcilable with other claims and intentions. It would, therefore, cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another. It has consequently become a condition for repression that the motive force of unpleasure shall have acquired more strength than the pleasure obtained from satisfaction. Psycho-analytic observation of the transference neuroses, moreover, leads us to conclude that repression is not a defensive mechanism which is present from the very beginning, and that it cannot arise until a sharp cleavage has occurred between conscious and unconscious mental activity-that the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance,

570 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS from the conscious. This view of repression would be made more com- plete by assuming that, before the mental organization reaches this stage, the task of fending off instinctual impulses is dealt with by the other vicissitudes which instincts may undergo-e. g. reversal into the opposite or turning round upon the subject's own self. * * We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) repre- sentative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a {zxation is established; the representative in question persists un- altered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it. This is due to the properties of unconscious processes of which we shall speak later. The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental de- rivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure. Moreover, it is a mistake to emphasize only the re- pulsion which operates from the direction of the conscious upon what is to be repressed; quite as important is the attraction exercised by what was primally repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection. Probably the trend towards repression would fail in its pur- pose if these two forces did not co-operate, if there were not something previously repressed ready to receive what is repelled by the conscious. Under the influence of the study of the psychoneuroses, which brings before us the important effects of repression, we are inclined to overvalue their psychological bearing and to forget too readily that repression does not hinder the instinctual representative from continuing to exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out derivatives and establishing connections. Repression in fact interferes only with the relation of the instinctual representative to one psychical system, namely, to that of the conscious. Psycho-analysis is able to show us other things as well which are important for understanding the effects of repression in the psychoneu- roses. It shows us, for instance, that the instinctual representative de- velops with less interference and more profusely if it is withdrawn by repression from conscious influence. It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraor- dinary and dangerous strength of instinct. This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in phantasy and of

REPRESSION 571 the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction. The fact that this last result is bound up with repression points the direction in which the true significance of repression has to be looked for. Reverting once more, however, to the opposite aspect of repression, let us make it clear that it is not even correct to suppose that repression withholds from the conscious all the derivatives of what was primally repressed. If these derivatives have become sufficiently far removed from the repressed representative, whether owing to the adoption of distortions or by reason of the number of intermediate links inserted, they have free access to the conscious. It is as though the resistance of the conscious against them was a function of their distance from what was originally repressed. In carrying out the technique of psycho-analysis, we contin- ually require the patient to produce such derivatives of the repressed as, in consequence either of their remoteness or of their distortion, can pass the censorship of the conscious. Indeed, the associations which we require him to give without being influenced by any conscious purposive idea and without any criticism, and from which we reconstitute a con- scious translation of the repressed representative-these associations are nothing else than remote and distorted derivatives of this kind. During this process we observe that the patient can go on spinning a thread of such associations, till he is brought up against some thought, the relation of which to what is repressed becomes so obvious that he is compelled to repeat his attempt at repression. Neurotic symptoms, too, must have fulfilled this same condition, for they are derivatives of the repressed, which has, by their means, finally won the access to consciousness which was previously denied to it. We can lay down no general rule as to what degree of distortion and remoteness is necessary before the resistance on the part of the conscious is removed. A delicate balancing is here taking place, the play of which is hidden from us; its mode of operation, however, enables us to infer that it is a question of calling a halt when the cathexis of the unconscious reaches a certain intensity-an intensity beyond which the unconscious would break through to satisfaction. Repression acts, therefore, in a highly individual manner. Each single derivative of the repressed may have its own special vicissitude; a little more or a little less distortion alters the whole outcome. In this connection we can understand how it is that the objects to which men give most preference, their ideals, proceed from the same perceptions and experiences as the objects which they most abhor, and that they were originally only distinguished from one another through slight modifications. Indeed, as we found in tracing the origin of the fetish, it is possible for the original instinctual repre- sentative to be split in two, one part undergoing repression, while the remainder, precisely on account of this intimate connection, undergoes idealization. The same result as follows from an increase or a decrease in the degree

572 TRANsmONS AND REVISIONS of distortion may also be achieved at the other end of the apparatus, so to speak, by a modification in the condition for the production of pleasure and unpleasure. Special techniques have been evolved, with the purpose of bringing about such changes in the play of mental forces that what would otherwise give rise to unpleasure may on this occasion result in pleasure; and, whenever a technical device of this sort comes into op- eration, the repression of an instinctual representative which would otherwise be repudiated is removed. These techniques have till now only been studied in any detail in jokes. As a rule the repression is only temporarily removed and is promptly reinstated. Observations like this, however, enable us to note some further char- acteristics of repression. Not only is it, as we have just shown, individual in its operation, but it is also exceedingly mobile. The process of repres- sion is not to be regarded as an event which takes place once, the results of which are permanent, as when some living thing has been killed and from that time onward is dead; repression demands a persistent expen- diture of force, and if this were to cease the success of the repression would be jeopardized, so that a fresh act of repression would be necessary. We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure. Thus the maintenance of a repression involves an uninterrupted expenditure of force, while its removal results in a saving from an economic point of view. The mobility of repression, incidentally, also finds expression in the psychical characteristics of the state of sleep, which alone renders possible the formation of dreams. With a return to waking life the repressive cathexes which have been drawn in are once more sent out. * * * The Unconscious It is significant that among Freud's five published papers on metapsychology, that on the unconscious is by far the longest. \"If the series of 'Papers on Metapsychology,' \" Freud's English editors write, \"may perhaps be regarded as the most important of all Freud's theoretical writings, there can be no doubt that the present essay on 'The Unconscious' is the culmination of that series\" (SE XIV, 161). Of all the \"shibboleths\" of psychoanalysis, this is doubtless the one truly indispensable one: it explains how Freud can confidently assert that the mind, which appears so chaotic, contradictory, beyond causation, is ruled by inexorable laws. Mental events are like pearls on an invisible chain, a chain largely invisible precisely because many of the links are unconscious. The evidence for the unconscious, Freud had been arguing since the 1890s, is too powerful to be ignored, and it was one of his grievances against the philosophers that they, he claimed, equated

THE UNCONSCIOUS 573 mind with consciousness. He published this long paper in two successive issues of the Zeitschrift toward the end of 1915. We have learnt from psycho-analysis that the essence of the process of repression lies, not in putting an end to, in annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious. When this happens we say of the idea that it is in a state of being 'unconscious', and we can produce good evidence to show that even when it is unconscious it can produce effects, even including some which finally reach consciousness. Everything that is repressed must remain unconscious; but let us state at the very outset that the repressed does not cover everything that is unconscious. The unconscious has the wider compass: the repressed is a part of the unconscious. How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translati.on into something conscious. Psycho-analytic work shows us every day that translation of this kind is possible. In order that this should come about, the person under analysis must overcome certain resistances--the same resistances as those which, earlier, made the material concerned into something repressed by rejecting it from the conscious. I. Justification for the Concept of the Unconscious Our right to assume the existence of something mental that is un- conscious and to employ that assumption for the purposes of scientific work is disputed in many quarters. To this we can reply that our as- sumption of the unconscious is necessary and legitimate, and that we possess numerous proofs of its existence. It is necessary because the data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people psychical acts often occur which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless, consciousness affords no evidence. These not only include parapraxes and dreams in healthy people, and every- thing described as a psychical symptom or an obsession in the sick; our most personal daily experience acquaints us with ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how. All these conscious acts remain dis- connected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every mental act that occurs in us must also necessarily be experienced by us through consciousness; on the other hand, they fall into a demonstrable con- nection if we interpolate between them the unconscious acts which we have inferred. A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience. When, in addition, it turns

574 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS out that the assumption of there being an unconscious enables us to construct a successful procedure by which we can exert an effective influence upon the course of conscious processes, this success will have given us an incontrovertible proof of the existence of what we have assumed. This being so, we must adopt the position that to require that whatever goes on in the mind must also be known to consciousness is to make an untenable claim. We can go further and argue, in support of there being an unconscious psychical state, that at any given moment consciousness includes only a small content, so that the greater part of what we call conscious knowledge must in any case be for very considerable periods of time in a state of latency, that is to say, of being psychically unconscious. When all our latent memories are taken into consideration it becomes totally incomprehensible how the existence of the unconscious can be denied. But here we encounter the objection that these latent recollections can no longer be described as psychical, but that they correspond to residues of somatic processes from which what is psychical can once more arise. The obvious answer to this is that a latent memory is, on the contrary, an unquestionable residuum of a psychical process. But it is more im- portant to realize clearly that this objection is based on the equation- not, it is true, explicitly stated but taken as axiomatic-of what is con- scious with what is mental. This equation is either a petitio principii which begs the question whether everything that is psychical is also necessarily conscious; or else it is a matter of convention, of nomen- clature. In this latter case it is, of course, like any other convention, not open to refutation. The question remains, however, whether the convention is so expedient that we are bound to adopt it. To this we may reply that the conventional equation of the psychical with the conscious is totally inexpedient. It disrupts psychical continuities, plunges us into the insoluble difficulties of psycho-physical parallelism, is open to the reproach that for no obvious reason it over-estimates the part played by consciousness, and that it forces us prematurely to aban- don the field of psychological research without being able to offer us any compensation from other fields. It is clear in any case that this question-whether the latent states of mental life, whose existence is undeniable, are to be conceived of as conscious mental states or as physical ones-threatens to resolve itself into a verbal dispute. We shall therefore be better advised to focus our attention on what we know with certainty of the nature of these debatable states. As far as their physical characteristics are concerned, they are totally inaccessible to us: no physiological concept or chemical process can give us any notion of their nature. On the other hand, we know for certain that they have abundant points of contact with conscious mental processes; with the help of a certain amount of work they can be transformed into, or replaced by, conscious mental processes, and all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts,

THE UNCONSCIOUS 575 such as ideas, purposes, resolutions and so on, can be applied to them. Indeed, we are obliged to say of some of these latent states that the only respect in which they differ from conscious ones is precisely in the absence of consciousness. Thus we shall not hesitate to treat them as objects of psychological research, and to deal with them in the most intimate connection with conscious mental acts. The stubborn denial of a psychical character to latent mental acts is accounted for by the circumstance that most of the phenomena con- cerned have not been the subject of study outside psycho-analysis. Any- one who is ignorant of pathological facts, who regards the parapraxes of normal people as accidental, and who is content with the old saw that dreams are froth ['Triiume sind Schiiume'] has only to ignore a few more problems of the psychology of consciousness in order to spare himself any need to assume an unconscious mental activity. Incidentally, even before the time of psycho-analysis, hypnotic experiments, and especially post-hypnotic suggestion, had tangibly demonstrated the existence and mode of operation of the mental unconscious. The assumption of an unconscious is, moreover, a perfectly legitimate one, inasmuch as in postulating it we are not departing a single step from our customary and generally accepted mode of thinking. Con- sciousness makes each of us aware only of his own states of mind; that other people, too, possess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their observable utterances and actions, in order to make this behaviour of theirs intelligible to us. (It would no doubt be psychologically more correct to put it in this way: that without any special reflection we attribute to everyone else our own constitution and there- fore our consciousness as well, and that this identification is a sine qua non of our understanding.) This inference (or this identification) was formerly extended by the ego to other human beings, to animals, plants, inanimate objects and to the world at large, and proved serviceable so long as their similarity to the individual ego was overwhelmingly great; but it became more untrustworthy in proportion as the difference be- tween the ego and these 'others' widened. To-day, our critical judgement is already in doubt on the question of consciousness in animals; we refuse to admit it in plants and we regard the assumption of its existence in inanimate matter as mysticism. But even where the original incli- nation to identification has withstood criticism-that is, when the 'others' are our fellow-men-the assumption of a consciousness in them rests upon an inference and cannot share the immediate certainty which we have of our own consciousness. Psycho-analysis demands nothing more than that we should apply this process of inference to ourselves also-a proceeding to which, it is true, we are not constitutionally inclined. If we do this, we must say: all the acts and manifestations which I notice in myself and do not know how to link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they belonged to someone else: they are to be explained by a mental life

576 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS ascribed to this other person. Furthermore, experience shows that we understand very well how to interpret in other people (that is, how to fit into their chain of mental events) the same acts which we refuse to acknowledge as being mental in ourselves. Here some special hindrance evidently deflects our investigations from our own self and prevents our obtaining a true knowledge of it. This process of inference, when applied to oneself in spite of internal opposition, does not, however, lead to the disclosure of an unconscious; it leads logically to the assumption of another, second consciousness which is united in one's self with the consciousness one knows. But at this point, certain criticisms may fairly be made. In the first place, a consciousness of which its own possessor knows nothing is something very different from a consciousness belonging to another person, and it is questionable whether such a consciousness, lacking, as it does, its most important characteristic, deserves any discussion at all. Those who have resisted the assumption of an unconscious psychical are not likely to be ready to exchange it for an unconscious consciousness. In the second place, analysis shows that the different latent mental processes inferred by us enjoy a high degree of mutual independence, as though they had no connection with one another, and knew nothing of one another. We must be prepared, if so, to assume the existence in us not only of a second consciousness, but of a third, fourth, perhaps of an unlimited number of states of consciousness, all unknown to us and to one another. In the third place-and this is the most weighty argument of all-we have to take into account the fact that analytic investigation reveals some of these latent processes as having characteristics and pe- culiarities which seem alien to us, or even incredible, and which run directly counter to the attributes of consciousness with which we are familiar. Thus we have grounds for modifying our inference about our- selves and saying that what is proved is not the existence of a second consciousness in us, but the existence of psychical acts which lack con- sciousness. We shall also be right in rejecting the term 'subconscious- 1 ness' as incorrect and misleading. The well-known cases of 'double conscience'2 (splitting of consciousness) prove nothing against our view. We may most aptly describe them as cases of a splitting of the mental activities into two groups, and say that the same consciousness turns to one or the other of these groups alternately. In psycho-analysis there is no choice for us but to assert that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and to liken the perception of them by means of consciousness to the perception of the external world by means of the sense-organs. We can even hope to gain fresh knowledge from the comparison. The psycho-analytic assumption of unconscious 1. {Freud virtual1y never uses \"subconscious\" or \"Freudian,\" it is proof that the writer has not read \"subconsciousness.\" But the term has retained its his Freud.} popularity. When it is employed to say something 2. [The French tenn for 'dual consciousness'.]

THE UNCONSCIOUS 577 mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, as a further expansion of the primitive animism which caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant of our views on external percep- tion. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will tum out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external per- ception-that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world. II. Various Meanings of 'the Unconscious'- The Topographical Point of View Before going any further, let us state the important, though incon- venient, fact that the attribute of being unconscious is only one feature that is found in the psychical and is by no means sufficient fully to characterize it. There are psychical acts of very varying value which yet agree in possessing the characteristic of being unconscious. The uncon- scious comprises, on the one hand, acts which are merely latent, tem- porarily unconscious, but which differ in no other respect from conscious ones and, on the other hand, processes such as repressed ones, which if they were to become conscious would be bound to stand out in the crudest contrast to the rest of the conscious processes. It would put an end to all misunderstandings if, from now on, in describing the various kinds of psychical acts we were to disregard the question of whether they were conscious or unconscious, and were to classify and correlate them only according to their relation to instincts and aims, according to their composition and according to which of the hierarchy of psychical systems they belong to. This, however, is for various reasons impracticable, so that we cannot escape the ambiguity of using the words 'conscious' and 'unconscious' sometimes in a descriptive and sometimes in a systematic sense, in which latter they signify inclusion in particular systems and possession of certain characteristics. We might attempt to avoid con- fusion by giving the psychical systems which we have distinguished certain arbitrarily chosen names which have no reference to the attribute of being conscious. Only we should first have to specify what the grounds are on which we distinguish the systems, and in doing this we should not be able to evade the attribute of being conscious, seeing that it forms the point of departure for all our investigations. Perhaps we may look for some assistance from the proposal to employ, at any rate in writing,

578 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS the abbreviation Cs. for consciousness and Ucs. for what is unconscious, when we are using the two words in the systematic sense. ' Proceeding now to an account of the positive findings of psycho- analysis, we may say that in general a psychical act goes through two phases as regards its state, between which is interposed a kind of testing (censorship). In the first phase the psychical act is unconscious and belongs to the system Ucs.; if, on testing, it is rejected by the censorship, it is not allowed to pass into the second phase; it is then said to be 'repressed' and must remain unconscious. If, however, it passes this testing, it enters the second phase and thenceforth belongs to the second system, which we will call the system Cs. But the fact that it belongs to that system does not yet unequivocally determine its relation to con- sciousness. It is not yet conscious, but it is certainly capable of becoming conscious (to use Breuer's expression)-that is, it can now, given certain conditions, become an object of consciousness without any special re- sistance. In consideration of this capacity for becoming conscious we also cal! the system Cs. the 'preconscious'. If it should turn out that a certain censorship also plays a part in determining whether the pre- conscious becomes conscious, we shall discriminate more sharply be- tween the systems Pes. and Cs. For the present let it suffice us to bear in mind that the system Pes. shares the characteristics of the system Cs. and that the rigorous censorship exercises its office at the point of tran- sition from the Ucs. to the Pes. (or Cs.). By accepting the existence of these two (or three) psychical systems, psycho-analysis has departed a step further from the descriptive 'psy- chology of consciousness' and has raised new problems and acquired a new content. Up till now, it has differed from that psychology mainly by reason of its dynamic view of mental processes; now in addition it seems to take account of psychical topography as well, and to indicate in respect of any given mental act within what system or between what systems it takes place. On account of this attempt, too, it has been given the name of 'depth-psychology'. We shall hear that it can be further enriched by taking yet another point of view into account. If we are to take the topography of mental acts seriously we must direct our interest to a doubt which arises at this point. When a psychical act (let us confine ourselves here to one which is in the nature of an idea) is transposed from the system Ucs. into the system Cs. (or Pes.), are we to suppose that this transposition involves a fresh record-as it were, a second registration-of the idea in question, which may thus be situated as well in a fresh psychical locality, and alongside of which the original unconscious registration continues to exist? Or are we rather to believe that the transposition consists in a change in the state of the idea, a change involving the same material and occurring in the same 3. {These abbreviations are among the very few concessions Freud made to technical language.}

THE UNCONSCIOUS 579 locality? This question may appear abstruse, but it must be raised if we wish to form a more definite conception of psychical topography, of the dimension of depth in the mind. It is a difficult one because it goes beyond pure psychology and touches on the relations of the mental apparatus to anatomy. We know that in the very roughest sense such relations exist. Research has given irrefutable proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the brain as it is with no other organ. We are taken a step further-we do not know how much-by the dis- covery of the unequal importance of the different parts of the brain and their special relations to particular parts of the body and to particular mental activities. But every attempt to go on from there to discover a localization of mental processes, every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve- fibres, has miscarried completely. The same fate would await any theory which attempted to recognize, let us say, the anatomical position of the system Cs.-conscious mental activity-as being in the cortex, and to localize the unconscious processes in the subcortical parts of the brain. There is a hiatus here which at present cannot be filled, nor is it one of the tasks of psychology to fill it. Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy; it has reference not to anatomical localities, but to regions in the mental apparatus, wherever they may be situated in the body. In this respect, then, our work is untrammelled and may proceed according to its own requirements. It will, however, be useful to remind ourselves that as things stand our hypotheses set out to be no more than graphic illustrations. The first of the two possibilities which we consid- ered-namely, that the Cs. phase of an idea implies a fresh registration of it, which is situated in another place-is doubtless the cruder but also the more convenient. The second hypothesis-that of a merely functional change of state-is a priori more probable, but it is less plastic, less easy to manipulate. With the first, or topographical, hypothesis is bound up that of a topographical separation of the systems Ucs. and Cs. and also the possibility that an idea may exist simultaneously in two places in the mental apparatus-indeed, that if it is not inhibited by the censorship, it regularly advances from the one position to the other, possibly without losing its first location or registration. This view may seem odd, but it can be supported by observations from psycho-analytic practice. If we communicate to a patient some idea which he has at one time repressed but which we have discovered in him, our telling him makes at first no change in his mental condition. Above all, it does not remove the repression nor undo its effects, as might perhaps be expected from the fact that the previously unconscious idea has now become conscious. On the contrary, all that w,; shall achieve at first will be a fresh rejection of the repressed idea. But now the patient has in actual fact the same idea in two forms in different places in his mental apparatus: first, he has the conscious memory of

580 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS the auditory trace of the idea, conveyed in what we told him; and secondly, he also has-as we know for certain-the unconscious memory of his experience as it was in its earlier form. Actually there is no lifting of the repression until the conscious idea, after the resistances have been overcome, has entered into connection with the unconscious memory- trace. It is only through the making conscious of the latter itself that success is achieved. On superficial consideration this would seem to show that conscious and unconscious ideas are distinct registrations, topographically separated, of the same content. But a moment's reRec- tion shows that the identity of the information given to the patient with his repressed memory is only apparent. To have heard something and to have experienced something are in their psychological nature two quite different things, even though the content of both is the same. So for the moment we are not in a position to decide between the two possibilities that we have discussed. Perhaps later on we shall come upon factors which may turn the balance in favour of one or the other. Perhaps we shall make the discovery that our question was inadequately framed and that the difference between an unconscious and a conscious idea has to be defined in quite another way. * N. Topography and Dynamics of Repression We have arrived at the conclusion that repression is essentially a process affecting ideas on the border between the systems Ucs. and Pes. (Cs.), and we can now make a fresh attempt to describe the process in greater detail. It must be a matter of a withdrawal of cathexis: but the question is, in which system does the withdrawal take place and to which system does the cathexis that is withdrawn belong? The repressed idea remains capable of action in the Ucs., and it must therefore have retained its cathexis. What has been withdrawn must be something else. Let us take the case of repression proper ('after-pressure'), as it affects an idea which is preconscious or even actually conscious. Here repression can only consist in withdrawing from the idea the (pre)conscious cathexis which belongs to the system Pes. The idea then either remains uncathected, or receives cathexis from the Ucs., or retains the Ucs. cathexis which it already had. Thus there is a withdrawal of the preconscious cathexis, retention of the unconscious cathexis, or replacement of the precon- scious cathexis by an unconscious one. We notice, moreover, that we have based these reRections (as it were, without meaning to) on the assumption that the transition from the system Ucs. to the system next to it is not effected through the making of a new registration but through a change in its state, an alteration in its cathexis. The functional hy- pothesis has here easily defeated the topographical one.

THE UNCONSCIOUS 581 But this process of withdrawal oflibido is not adequate to make another characteristic of repression comprehensible to us. It is not clear why the idea which has remained cathected or has received cathexis from the Ucs. should not, in virtue of its cathexis, renew the attempt to penetrate into the system Pes. If it could do so, the withdrawal of libido from it would have to be repeated, and the same performance would go on endlessly; but the outcome would not be repression. So, too, when it comes to describing primal repression, the mechanism just discussed of withdrawal of preconscious cathexis would fail to meet the case; for here we are dealing with an unconscious idea which has as yet received no cathexis from the Pes. and therefore cannot have that cathexis withdrawn from it. What we require, therefore, is another process which maintains the repression in the first case [i. e. the case of after-pressure] and, in the second [i.e. that of primal repression], ensures its being established as well as continued. This other process can only be found in the as- sumption of an anticathexis, by means of which the system Pes. protects itself from the pressure upon it of the unconscious idea. We shall see from clinical examples how such an anticathexis, operating in the system Pes., manifests itself. It is this which represents the permanent expend- iture [of energy] of a primal repression, and which also guarantees the permanence of that repression. Anticathexis is the sole mechanism of primal repression; in the case of repression proper (,after-pressure') there is in addition withdrawal of the Pes. cathexis. It is very possible that it is precisely the cathexis which is withdrawn from the idea that is used for anticathexis. We see how we have gradually been led into adopting a third point of view in our account of psychical phenomena. Besides the dynamic and the topographical points of view, we have adopted the economic one. This endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude. It will not be unreasonable to give a special name to this whole way of regarding our subject-matter, for it is the consummation of psycho- analytic research. I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a metapsychologicaI presentation. We must say at once that in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in this. * V. The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs. The distinction we have made between the two psychical systems receives fresh significance when we observe that processes in the one

582 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS system, the Ucs., show characteristics which are not met with again in the system immediately above it. The nucleus of the Ucs. consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses. These instinctual impulses are co-ordinate with one another, exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction. When two wishful impulses whose aims must appear to us incompatible become simultaneously active, the two impulses do not diminish each other or cancel each other out, but combine to form an intermediate aim, a compromise. There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty: all this is only introduced by the work of the censorship between the Ucs. and the Pes. Negation is a substitute, at a higher level, for repression. In the Ucs. there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength. The cathectic intensities [in the Ucs.] are much more mobile. By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis; by the process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas. I have proposed to regard these two processes as distinguishing marks of the so-called primary psychical process. In the system Pes. the secondary process is dominant. When a primary process is allowed to take its course in connection with elements belonging to the system Pes., it appears' comic' and excites laughter. The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, with the work of the system es. The Ucs. processes pay just a little regard to reality. They are subject to the pleasure principle; their fate depends only on how strong they are and on whether they fulfil the demands of the pleasure-unpleasure regulation. To sum up: exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psy- chical reality---these are the characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system Ucs. Unconscious processes only become cognizable by us under the con- ditions of dreaming and of neurosis-that is to say, when the processes of the higher, Pes., system are set back to an earlier stage by being lowered (by regression). In themselves they cannot be cognized, indeed are even incapable of carrying on their existence; for the system Ucs. is at a very early moment overlaid by the Pes. which has taken over access to consciousness and to motility. Discharge from the system Ucs. passes into somatic innervation that leads to development of affect; but even this path of discharge is, as we have seen, contested by the Pes. By itself, the system Ucs. would not in normal conditions be able to bring about

THE UNCONSCIOUS 583 any expedient muscular acts, with the exception of those already orga- nized as reflexes. The full significance of the characteristics of the system Ues. described above could only be appreciated by us if we were to contrast and compare them with those of the system Pes. But this would take us so far afield that I propose that we should once more call a halt and not undertake the comparison of the two till we can do so in connection with our discussion of the higher system. Only the most pressing points of all will be mentioned at this stage. The processes of the system Pes. display-no matter whether they are already conscious or only capable of becoming conscious--an inhibition of the tendency of cathected ideas towards discharge. When a process passes from one idea to another, the first idea retains a part of its cathexis and only a small portion undergoes displacement. Displacements and condensations such as happen in the primary process are excluded or very much restricted. This circumstance caused Breuer to assume the existence of two different states of cathectic energy in mental life: one in which the energy is tonically 'bound' and the other in which it is freely mobile and presses towards discharge. In my opinion this dis- tinction represents the deepest insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous energy, and I do not see how we can avoid making it. A meta psychological presentation would most urgently call for further discussion at this point, though perhaps that would be too daring an undertaking as yet. Further, it devolves upon the system Pes. to make communication possible between the different ideational contents so that they can in- fluence one another, to give them an order in time, and to set up a censorship or several censorships; 'reality-testing' too, and the reality- principle, are in its province. Conscious memory, moreover, seems to depend wholly on the Pes. This should be clearly distinguished from the memory-traces in which the experiences of the Ues. are fixed, and probably corresponds to a special registration such as we proposed (but later rejected) to account for the relation of conscious to unconscious ideas. In this connection, also, we shall find means for putting an end to our oscillations in regard to the naming of the higher system-which we have hitherto spoken of indifferently, sometimes as the Pes. and sometimes as the Cs. Nor\" will it be out of place here to utter a warning against any over- hasty generalization of what we have brought to light concerning the distribution of the various mental functions between the two systems. We are describing the state of affairs as it appears in the adult human being, in whom the system Ues. operates, strictly speaking, only as a preliminary stage of the higher organization. The question of what the content and connections of that system are during the development of the individual, and of what significance it possesses in animals--these

584 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS are points on which no conclusion can be deduced from our description: they must be investigated independently. Moreover, in human beings we must be prepared to find possible pathological conditions under which the two systems alter, or even exchange, both their content and their characteristics. Mourning and Melancholia As early as the mid-1890s, Freud had noted the self-reproaches many feel upon the death of loved ones. Such reproaches, he thought, might eventuate in hysteria, obsessions-or depressions, which he called, then and later, by the resonant, tradition-laden term \"melancholia.\" Once he had discovered the mental agency that he called, at this time, the ego ideal-that strict, highly self-critical internal guardian-he could return to methods the mind devises for self-punishment. The idea of the super-ego was not far away. As so often, so here, Freud gains clarity by means of comparing the mental condition he wishes to understand with another, similar, but distinct state. Written like the other metapsychological papers in 1915, it was published in 1917. In mourning we found that the inhibition and loss of interest are fully accounted for by the work of mourning in which the ego is absorbed. In melancholia, the unknown loss will result in a similar internal work and will therefore be responsible for the melancholic inhibition. The difference is that the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely. The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning-an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impov- erishment of his ego on a grand scale. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy. He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better. This picture of a delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and-what is psycholog- ically very remarkable-by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life. It would be equally fruitless from a scientific and a therapeutic point of view to contradict a patient who brings these accusations against his ego. He must surely be right in some way and be describing something

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 585 that is as it seems to be to him. * * • {Yet it is not} difficult to see that there is no correspondence, so far as we can judge, between the degree of self-abasement and its real justification. A good, capable, conscien- tious woman will speak no better of herself after she develops melancholia than one who is in fact worthless; indeed, the former is perhaps more likely to fall ill of the disease than the latter, of whom we too should have nothing good to say. Finally, it must strike us that after all the melancholic does not behave in quite the same way as a person who is crushed by remorse and self-reproach in a normal fashion. Feelings of shame in front of other people, which would more than anything char- acterize this latter condition, are lacking in the melancholic, or at least they are not prominent in him. One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure. The essential thing, therefore, is not whether the melancholic's dis- tressing self-denigration is correct, in the sense that his self-criticism agrees with the opinion of other people. The point must rather be that he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation. He has lost his self-respect and he must have good reason for this. It is true that we are then faced with a contradiction that presents a problem which is hard to solve. The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego. Before going into this contradiction, let us dwell for a moment on the view which the melancholic's disorder affords of the constitution of the human ego. We see how in him one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object. Our suspicion that the critical agency which is here split off from the ego might also show its independence in other circumstances will be confirmed by every further observation. We shall really find grounds for distinguishing this agency from the rest of the ego. What we are here becoming acquainted with is the agency commonly called 'conscience'; we shall count it, along with the censorship of consciousness and reality- testing, among the major institutions of the ego, and we shall come upon evidence to show that it can become diseased on its own account. In the clinical picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature. The patient's self-eval- uation concerns itself much less frequently with bodily infirmity, ugliness or weakness, or with social inferiority; of this category, it is only his fears and asseverations of becoming poor that occupy a prominent position. There is one observation, not at all difficult to make, which leads to the explanation of the contradiction mentioned above [at the end of the last paragraph but one]. If one listens patiently to a melancholic's many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit

586 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love. Every time one examines the facts this conjecture is confirmed. So we find the key to the clinical picture: we perceive that the self- reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient's own ego. The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incap- able, in whatever sense she may mean this. There is no need to be greatly surprised that a few genuine self-reproaches are scattered among those that have been transposed back. These are allowed to obtrude themselves, since they help to mask the others and make recognition of the true state of affairs impossible. Moreover, they derive from the pros and cons of the conflict of love that has led to the loss of love. The behaviour of the patients, too, now becomes much more intelligible. Their complaints are really 'plaints' in the old sense of the word. They are not ashamed and do not hide themselves, since everything derogatory that they say about themselves is at bottom said about someone else. Moreover, they are far from evincing towards those around them the attitude of humility and submissiveness that would alone befit such worthless people. On the contrary, they make the greatest nuisance of themselves, and always seem as though they felt slighted and had been treated with great injustice. All this is possible only because the reactions expressed in their behaviour still proceed from a mental constellation of revolt, which has then, by a certain process, passed over into the crushed state of melancholia. There is no difficulty in reconstructing this process. An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different, for whose coming-about various conditions seem to be necessary. The object- cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this wayan object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. One or two things may be directly inferred with regard to the pre- conditions and effects of a process such as this. On the one hand, a strong fixation to the loved object must have been present; on the other hand, in contradiction to this, the object-cathexis must have had little

MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA 587 power of resistance. * * * The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up. This substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the narcissistic affections; Karl Landauer (1914) has lately been able to point to it in the process of recovery in a case of schizophrenia. It represents, of course, a regression from one type of object-choice to original narcissism. We have elsewhere shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way-and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion-in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase oflibidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it. Abraham is undoubtedly right in attributing to this connection the refusal of nourishment met with in severe forms of melancholia. The conclusion which our theory would require-namely, that the disposition to fall ill of melancholia (or some part of that disposition) lies in the predominance of the narcissistic type of object-choice-has unfortunately not yet been confirmed by observation. In the opening remarks of this paper, I admitted that the empirical material upon which this study is founded is insufficient for our needs. If we could assume an agreement between the results of observation and what we have inferred, we should not hesitate to include this regression from object- cathexis to the still narcissistic oral phase of the libido in our charac- terization of melancholia. Identifications with the object are by no means rare in the transference neuroses either; indeed, they are a well-known mechanism of symptom-formation, especially in hysteria. The differ- ence, however, between narcissistic and hysterical identification may be seen in this: that, whereas in the former the object-cathexis is abandoned, in the latter it persists and manifests its influence, though this is usually confined to certain isolated actions and innervations. In any case, in the transference neuroses, too, identification is the expression of there being something in common, which may signify love. Narcissistic iden- tification is the older of the two and it paves the way to an understanding of hysterical identification, which has been less thoroughly studied. Melancholia, therefore, borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object- choice to narcissism. It is on the one hand, like mourning, a reaction to the real loss of a loved object; but over and above this, it is marked by a determinant which is absent in normal mourning or which, if it is present, transforms the latter into pathological mourning. The loss of a love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love- relationships to make itself effective and come into the open. Where there is a disposition to obsessional neurosis the conflict due to ambiv- alence gives a pathological cast to mourning and forces it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches to the effect that the mourner himself is

588 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS to blame for the loss of the loved object, i. e. that he has willed it. These obsessional states of depression following upon the death of a loved person show us what the conflict due to ambivalence can achieve by itself when there is no regressive drawing-in of libido as well. In mel- ancholia, the occasions which give rise to the illness extend for the most part beyond the clear case of a loss by death, and include all those situations of being slighted, neglected or disappointed, which can import opposed feelings of love and hate into the relationship or reinforce an already existing ambivalence. This conflict due to ambivalence, which sometimes arises more from real experiences, sometimes more from constitutional factors, must not be overlooked among the preconditions of melancholia. If the love for the object-a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up-takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable, signifies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subject's own self in the ways we have been discussing. In both disorders the patients usually still succeed, by the circuitous path of self-punishment, in taking revenge on the original object and in tormenting their loved one through their illness, having resorted to it in order to avoid the need to express their hostility to him openly. After all, the person who has occasioned the patient's emotional disorder, and on whom his illness is centred, is usually to be found in his immediate environment. The melancholic's erotic cathexis in regard to his object has thus undergone a double vicissitude: part of it has regressed to identification, but the other part, under the influence of the conflict due to ambivalence, has been carried back to the stage of sadism which is nearer to that conflict. It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide which makes melancholia so interesting-and so dangerous. So im- mense is the ego's self-love, which we have come to recognize as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges at a threat to life, that we cannot conceive how that ego can consent to its own destruction. We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others, but we have never been able to explain what interplay of forces can carry such a purpose through to execution. The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object- cathexis, it can treat itself as an object-if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego's original reaction to objects in the external world. Thus in regression

SOME CHARACTER-TYPES 589 from narcissistic object-choice the object has, it is true, been got rid of, but it has nevertheless proved more powerful than the ego itself. In the two opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways. As regards one particular striking feature of melancholia that we have mentioned, the prominence of the fear of becoming poor, it seems plausible to suppose that it is derived from anal erotism which has been torn out of its context and altered in a regressive sense. Melancholia confronts us with yet other problems, the answer to which in part eludes us. The fact that it passes off after a certain time has elapsed without leaving traces of any gross changes is a feature it shares with mourning. We found by way of explanation that in mourning time is needed for the command of reality-testing to be carried out in detail, and that when this work has been accomplished the ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object. We may imagine that the ego is occupied with analogous work during the course of a melancholia; in neither case have we any insight into the economics of the course of events. The sleeplessness in melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition, the impossibility of effecting the general drawing-in of cathexes necessary for sleep. The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies-which in the transference neuroses we have called 'anticathexes'-from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. It can easily prove resistant to the ego's wish to sleep. What is probably a somatic factor, and one which cannot be explained psychogenically, makes itself visible in the regular amelioration in the condition that takes place towards evening. These considerations bring up the question whether a loss in the ego irrespectively of the object- a purely narcissistic blow to the ego-may not suffice to produce the picture of melancholia and whether an impoverishment of ego-libido direclty due to toxins may not be able to produce certain forms of the disease. * * Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work: [The Exceptions] In his practice, though intent on grouping his cases under collective diag- nostic rubrics like hysteria or paranoia, Freud also cherished the individual differences that made each of his analysands unique or placed them into small, well-defined classes of mental aberrations. Late in 1916, he published three short papers devoted to certain interesting patients, the first of which, on the so-called \"exceptions,\" is reproduced here. The second deals with \"Those Wrecked by Success,\" which draws heavily on Shakespeare's Mac-

590 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS beth and Ibsen's Rosmersholm, and the last, very brief but meaty, with \"Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,\" which once more considers some im- plications of guilt f(\"elings. The concluding paragraph of the paper on the exceptions raises que~tions of female psychology that Freud would explore in morp depth (and even more controversially) in the following years (see I:>elow, ,.' 670-78). When a doctor carries out the psycho-analytic treatment of a neurotic, his interest is by no means directed in the first instance to the patient's character. He would much rather know what the symptoms mean, what instinctual impulses are concealed behind them and are satisfied by them, and what course was followed by the mysterious path that has led from the instinctual wishes to the symptoms. But the technique which he is obliged to follow soon compels him to direct his immediate curiosity towards other objectives. He observes that his investigation is threatened by resistances set up against him by the patient, and these resistances he may justly count as part of the latter's character. This now acquires the first claim on his interest. What opposes the doctor's efforts is not always those traits of character which the patient recognizes in himself and which are attributed to him by people round him. Peculiarities in him which he had seemed to possess only to a modest degree are often brought to light in surprisingly increased intensity, or attitudes reveal themselves in him which had not been betrayed in other relations of life. The pages which follow will be devoted to describing and tracing back a few of these surprising traits of characters. THE 'EXCEPTIONS' Psycho-anal}tic work is continually confronted with the task of in- ducing the patient to renounce an immediate and directly attainable yield of pleasure. He is not asked to renounce all pleasure; that could not, perhaps, be expected of any human being, and even religion is obliged to support its demand that earthly pleasure shall be set aside by promising that it will provide instead an incomparably greater amount of superior pleasure in another world. No, the patient is only asked to renounce such satisfactions as will inevitably have detrimental conse- quences. His privation is only to be temporary; he has only to learn to exchange an immediate yield of pleasure for a better assured, even though a postponed one. Or, in other words, under the doctor's guidance he is asked to make the advance from the pleasure principle to the reality principle by which the mature human being is distinguished from the child. In this educative process, the doctor's clearer insight can hardly

SOME CHARACfER-TypES 591 be said to playa decisive part; as a rule, he can only tell his patient what the latter's own reason can tell him. But it is not the same to know a thing in one's own mind and to hear it from someone outside. The doctor plays the part of this effective outsider; he makes use of the influence which one human being exercises over another. Or-recalling that it is the habit of psycho-analysis to replace what is derivative and etiolated by what is original and basic-let us say that the doctor, in his educative work , makes use of one of the components of love. In this work of after-education, he is probably doing no more than repeat the process which made education of any kind possible in the first instance. Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator; and it is by the love of those nearest him that the incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of necessity and to spare himself the punishment that follows any infringement of them. When in this way one asks the patient to make a provisional re- nunciation of some pleasurable satisfaction, to make a sacrifice, to show his readiness to accept some temporary suffering for the sake of a better end, or even merely to make up his mind to submit to a necessity which applies to everyone, one comes upon individuals who resist such an appeal on a special ground. They say that they have renounced enough and suffered enough, and have a claim to be spared any further demands; they will submit no longer to any disagreeable necessity, for they are exceptions and, moreover, intend to remain so. In one such patient this claim was magnified into a conviction that a special providence watched over him, which would protect him from any painful sacrifices of the sort. The doctor's arguments will achieve nothing against an inner con- fidence which expresses itself as strongly as this; even his influence, indeed, is powerless at first, and it becomes clear to him that he must discover the sources from which this damaging prepossession is being fed. Now it is no doubt true that everyone would like to consider himself an 'exception' and claim privileges over others. But precisely because of this there must be a particular reason, and one not universally present, if someone actually proclaims himself an exception and behaves as such. This reason may be of more thar. one kind; in the cases I investigated I succeeded in discovering a common peculiarity in the earlier experi- ences of these patients' lives. Their neuroses were connected with some experience or suffering to which they had been subjected in their earliest childhood, one in respect of which they knew themselves to be guiltless, and which they could look upon as an unjust disadvantage imposed upon them. The privileges that they claimed as a result of this injustice, and the rebelliousness it engendered, had contributed not a little to intensifying the conflicts leading to the outbreak of their neurosis. In one of these patients, a woman, the attitude towards life which I am discussing came to a head when she learnt that a painful organic trouble, which had hindered her from attaining her aims in life, was of congenital

592 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS origin. So long as she looked upon this trouble as an accidental and late acquisition, she bore it patiently; as soon as she found that it was part of an innate inheritance, she became rebellious. The young man who believed that he was watched over by a special providence had in his infancy been the victim of an accidental infection from his wet-nurse, and had spent his whole later life making claims for compensation, an accident pension, as it were, without having any idea on what he based those claims. In his case the analysis, which constructed this event out of obscure mnemic residues and interpretations of the symptoms, was confirmed objectively by information from his family. For reasons which will be easily understood I cannot communicate very much about these or other case histories. Nor do I propose to go into the obvious analogy between deformities of character resulting from protracted sickliness in childhood and the behavior of whole nations whose past history has been full of suffering. Instead, however, I will take the opportunity of pointing to a figure created by the greatest of poets-a figure in whose character the claim to be an exception is closely bound up with and is motivated by the circumstance of congenital disadvantage. In the opening soliloquy to Shakespeare's Richard III, Gloucester, who subsequently becomes King, says: But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature, Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable, That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; * And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain, And hate the idle pleasures of these days. At a first glance this tirade may perhaps seem unrelated to our present theme. Richard seems to say nothing more than: 'I find these idle times tedious, and I want to enjoy myself. As I cannot play the lover on account of my deformity, I will play the villain; I will intrigue, murder and do anything else I please.' Such a frivolous motivation could not but stifle any stirring of sympathy in the audience, if it were not a screen for something much more serious. Otherwise the play would be psy-

SOME CHARACTER-TyPES 593 chologically impossible, for the writer must know how to furnish us with a secret background of sympathy for his hero, if we are to admire his boldness and adroitness without inward protest; and such sympathy can only be based on understanding or on a sense of a possible inner fellow- feeling for him. I think, therefore, that Richard's soliloquy does not say everything; it ~erely gives a hint, and leaves us to fill in what it hints at. When we 10 so, however, the appearance of frivolity vanishes, the bitterness and minuteness with which Richard has depicted his deformity make their full effect, and we clearly perceive the fellow-feeling which compels our sympathy even with a villain like him. What the soliloquy thus means is: 'Nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me the beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to me.' And now we feel that we ourselves might become like Richard, that on a small scale, indeed, we are already like him. Richard is an enormous magnification of something we find in ourselves as well. We all think we have reason to reproach Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love. Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of Balder or the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of genius or the noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a middle-class home instead of in a royal palace? We could carry off beauty and distinction quite as well as any of those whom we are now obliged to envy for these qualities. It is, however, a subtle economy of art in the poet that he does not permit his hero to give open and complete expression to all his secret motives. By this means he obliges us to supplement them; he engages our intellectual activity, diverts it from critical reflection and keeps us firmly identified with his hero. A bungler in his place would give con- scious expression to all that he wishes to reveal to us, and would then find himself confronted by our cool, untrammelled intelligence, which would preclude any deepening of the illusion. Before leaving the 'exceptions', however, we may point out that the claim of women to privileges and to exemption from so many of the importunities of life rests upon the same foundation. As we learn from psycho-analytic work, women regard themselves as having been damaged in infancy, as having been undeservedly cut short of something and unfairly treated; and the embitterment of so many daughters against their mother derives, ultimately, from the reproach against her of having brought them into the world as women instead of as men.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle While Freud did not explicitly make this claim, one may regard Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as the first, still somewhat tentative resolution of the troubling theoretical problem he had raised in the paper on narcissism (see above, pp. 545-62). The Ego and the Id, published three years later, was his second, definitive response. He now replaced the pairing of drives- libidinal and egoistic-that had served him for more than a decade of psychoanalvtic theorizing and that he had called into question not long before the World War, with a new, more dramatic pair of contestants: life against death. Aggression, to which Freud had earlier devoted a measure of attention that he now deemed inadequate, became from 1920 on the equal adversary of Eros. As critics have not failed to note, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is more remote from Freud's clinical experience than earlier theoretical papers. Freud does adduce some \"case material,\" including veterans suffering from war neuroses, and that famous \"fort-da\" game that his eighteen-month-old grandson, Ernst Halberstadt-his daughter Sophie's eldest-played wbile his observant grandfather was watching. But for the rest, as Freud frankly noted, there is a good deal of conjecture in this little, path-breaking book: \"What follows,\" Freud writes after giving his concrete instances of the \"compulsion to repeat,\" is \"speculation, often far-fetched speculation.\" But he thought such speculation unavoidable in the uncharted terrain he was now entering. (In the selections that follow, much of this material, especially about specula- tive biology, has been omitted.) The essay is a difficult text, but as the first statement of the new \"structural\" theory of the mind, it is indispensable to an understanding of fundamental shifts in psychoanalytic thinking. Freud's preoccupation with death, marked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and much of his later writing, has invited the suggestion that his thinking was colored darkly by the death of his charming and attractive daughter Sophie in January 1920, during the great influenza epidemic that claimed so many vic- tims across Europe and the United States. Indeed, Fritz Wittels, an early associate of the Vienna psychoanalytic circle, said so explicitly in his biog- raphy of Freud (the first), of which he sent an advance copy to his subject in late 1923. Freud acknowledged that Wittels's argument was plausible enough. But he vigorously denied that he had developed his theory of the death drive as a consequence of grieving for his Sophie: the chronology was against it. He had in fact virtually completed Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1919, and circulated the manuscript among a few intimates, while Sophie was still flourishing and enjoying perfect health. The essay must be read not as an exercise in autobiography, but as a turning point in theory. In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE 595 events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension-that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. In taking that course into account in our consideration of the mental processes which are the subject of our study, we are intro- ducing an 'economic' point of view into our work; and if, in describing those processes, we try to estimate this 'economic' factor in addition to the 'topographical' and 'dynamic' ones, we shall, I think, be giving the most complete description of them of which we can at present conceive, and one which deserves to be distinguished by the term 'meta- psychological' . It is of no concern to us in this connection to enquire how far, with this hypothesis of the pleasure principle, we have approached or adopted any particular, historically established, philosophical system. We have arrived at these speculative assumptions in an attempt to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation in our field of study. Priority and originality are not among the aims that psycho-analytic work sets itself; and the impressions that underlie the hypothesis of the pleasure principle are so obvious that they can scarcely be overlooked. On the other hand we would readily express our gratitude to any philosophical or psychological theory which was able to inform us of the meaning of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which act so imperatively upon us. But on this point we are, alas, offered nothing to our purpose. This is the most obscure and inaccessible region of the mind, and, since we cannot avoid contact with it, the least rigid hypothesis, it seems to me, will be the best. We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation that is present in the mind but is not in any way 'bound'; and to relate them in such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution. What we are implying by this is not a simple relation between the strength of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure and the corresponding modifications in the quantity of excitation; least of all- in view of all we have been taught by psycho-physiology-are we sug- gesting any directly proportional ratio: the factor that determines the feeling is probably the amount of increase or diminution in the quantity of excitation in a given period of time. Experiment might possibly play a part here; but it is not advisable for us analysts to go into the problem further so long as our way is not pointed by quite definite observations. * * * The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleasure principle; for if the work of the mental apparatus is directed towards keeping the quantity

596 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS of excitation low, then anything that is calculated to increase that quan- tity is bound to be felt as adverse to the functioning of the apparatus, that is as unpleasurable. The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy: actually the latter principle was inferred from the facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure principle. * * * It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion. The most that can be said, therefore, is that there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency towards pleasure. * * * If we turn now to the question of what circumstances are able to prevent the pleasure principle from being carried into effect, we find ourselves once more on secure and well-trodden ground and, in framing our answer, we have at our disposal a rich fund of analytic experience. The first example of the pleasure principle being inhibited in this way is a familiar one which occurs with regularity. We know that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous. Under the influ- ence of the ego's instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless de- mands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the aban- donment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure. The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'ed- ucate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole. There can be no doubt, however, that the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle can only be made responsible for a small number, and by no means the most intense, of unpleasure ex- periences. Another occasion of the release of unpleasure, which occurs with no less regularity, is to be found in the conflicts and dissensions that take place in the mental apparatus while the ego is passing through its development into more highly composite organizations. Almost all the energy with which the apparatus is filled arises from its innate in- stinctual impulses. But these are not all allowed to reach the same phases of development. In the course of things it happens again and again that

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE 597 individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones, which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression, held back at lower levels of psychical development and cut off, to begin with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently, as can so easily happen with repressed sexual instincts, in struggling through, by roundabout paths, to a dired or to a substitutive satisfaction, that event, which would in other cases have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure. As a consequence of the old conflict which ended in repression, a new breach has occurred in the pleasure principle at the very time when certain instincts were endeavouring, in accordance with the principle, to obtain fresh pleasure. * * * The two sources of unpleasure which I have just indicated are very far from covering the majority of our unpleasurable experiences. But as regards the remainder it can be asserted with some show of justification that their presence does not contradict the dominance of the pleasure principle. Most of the unpleasure that we experience is perceptual un- pleasure. It may be perception of pressure by unsatisfied instincts; or it may be external perception which is either distressing in itself or which excites unpleasurable expectations in the mental apparatus--that is, which is recognized by it as a 'danger'. The reaction to these instinctual demands and threats of danger, a reaction which constitutes the proper activity of the mental apparatus, can then be directed in a correct manner by the pleasure principle or the reality principle by which the former is modified. This does not seem to necessitate any far-reaching limitation of the pleasure principle. Nevertheless the investigation of the mental reaction to external danger is precisely in a position to produce new material and raise fresh questions bearing upon our present problem. II A condition has long been known and described which occurs after several mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of 'traumatic neurosis'. The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force. 1 The symptomatic picture presented by traumatic neurosis approaches that of hysteria in the wealth of its similar motor symptoms, but surpasses it as a rule in its strongly marked signs of subjective ailment (in which it resembles hypochondria or mel- ancholia) as well as in the evidence it gives of a far more comprehensive general enfeeblement and disturbance of the mental capacities. No com- 1. Cf. the discussion on the psycho-analysis of war neuroses by Freud. Ferenczi. Abraham. Simmel and Jones {Psycho-Analysis and the War-Neuroses. [1919; tr. 1921]}.

598 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS plete explanation has yet been reached either of war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace. In the case of war neuroses, the fact that the same symptoms sometimes came about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force seemed at once enlightening and bewilder- ing. In the case of the ordinary traumatic neuroses, two characteristics emerge prominently: first, that the chief weight in their causation seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against the develop- ment of a neurosis. 'Fright', 'fear', and 'anxiety' are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their relation to danger. 'Anxiety' describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. 'Fear' requires a definite object of which to be afraid. 'Fright', however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise. I do not believe anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something about anxiety that protects its subject against fright and so against fright-neuroses. We shall retum to this point later. The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in trau- matic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the pa- tient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright. This astonishes people far too little. They think the fact that the traumatic experience is constantly forcing itself upon the patient even in his sleep is a proof of the strength of that experience: the patient is, as one might say, fixated to his trauma. Fixations to the experience which started the illness have long been familiar to us in hysteria. Breuer and Freud declared in 1893 that 'hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences'. In the war neuroses, too, observers like Ferenczi and Simmel have been able to explain certain motor symptoms by fixation to the moment at which the trauma occurred. I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neu- rosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it. Anyone who accepts it as something self-evident that their dreams should put them back at night into the situation that caused them to fall ill has misunderstood the nature of dreams. It would be more in harmony with their nature if they showed the patient pictures from his healthy past or of the cure for which he hopes. If we are not to be shaken in our belief in the wish-fulfilling tenor of dreams by the dreams of traumatic neu- rotics, we still have one resource open to us: we may argue that the function of dreaming, like so much else, is upset in this condition and diverted from its purposes, or we may be driven to reflect on the mys- terious masochistic trends of the ego. * *

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE 599 At this point I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working em- ployed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest nonnal activities-- I mean in children's play. * * * I have been able, through a chance opportunity which pre- sented itself, to throw some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a half and invented by himself. It was more than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated. The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a 'good boy'. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional dishirbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a bus- iness. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out '0-0-0-0', accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word 'fort' ['gone']. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play 'gone' with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive '0-0-0-0'. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful 'da' ['there']. This, then, was the complete game-disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. 2 2. A further observation subsequently confirmed itude the child had found a method of making this interpretation fully. One day the child's himulf disappear. He had discovered his rellection mother had been away for several hours and on in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach her return was met with the words 'Baby o-<Hl-Ot' to the ground, so that by crouching down he could which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned make his mirror-image 'gone'. out, however, that during this long period of sol-

600 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS The interpretation of the game then became obvious_ It was related to the child's great cultural achievement-the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course a matter of indif- ference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion. Our interest is directed to another point. The child cannot possibly have felt his mother's departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its plea- surable ending. No certain decision can be reached from the analysis of a single case like this. On an unprejudiced view one gets an impression that the child turned his experience into a game from another motive. At the outset he was in a passive situation-he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. But still another interpretation may be at- tempted. Throwing away the object so that it was 'gone' might satisfy an impulse of the child's, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: 'All right, then, go away! I don't need you. I'm sending you away myself.' A year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: 'Go to the fwont!' He had heard at that time that his absent father was 'at the front', and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother. 3 We know of other children who liked to express similar hostile impulses by throwing away objects instead of persons. We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some over- powering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expres- sions as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only 3. When this child was five and three..quarters, born and had roused him to violent jealousy. {This his mother died. Now that she was really 'gone' dry comment is the only direct reAection of So- (0-0-0), the little boy showed no signs of grief. It phie's death in the whole essay.} is true that in the interval a second child had been

BEYOND THE PLEAsuRE PRINCIPLE 601 have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one. Nor shall we be helped in our hesitation between these two views by further considering children's play. It is clear that in their play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation. But on the other hand it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time-the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do. It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks down a child's throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experi- ences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute. Nevertheless, it emerges from this discussion that there is no need to assume the existence of a special imitative instinct in order to provide a motive for play. Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children's, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the domi- nance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject-matter. They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it. III Twenty-five years of intense work have had as their result that the im- mediate aims of psycho-analytic technique are quite other to-day than they were at the outset. At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psycho-analysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly

602 TRANSITIONS AND REVISIONS came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory. In that endeavour the chief emphasis lay upon the patient's resistances: the art consisted now in uncovering these as quickly as possible, in pointing them out to the patient and in inducing him by human influence-this was where suggestion operating as 'trans- ference' played its part-to abandon his resistances. But it became ever clearer that the aim which had been set up-the aim that what was unconscious should become conscious--is not com- pletely attainable by that method. The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. Thus he acquires no sense of con- viction of the correctness of the construction that has been communi- cated to him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past. These repro- ductions, which emerge with such unwished-for exactitude, always have as their subject some portion of infantile sexual life-of the Oedipus complex, that is, and its derivatives; and they are invariably acted out in the sphere of the transference, of the patient's relation to the physician. When things have reached this stage, it may be said that the earlier neurosis has now been replaced by a fresh, 'transference neurosis'. It has been the physician's endeavour to keep this transference neurosis within the narrowest limits: to force as much as possible into the channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as repetition. The ratio between what is remembered and what is reproduced varies from case to case. The physician cannot as a rule spare his patient this phase of the treatment. He must get him to re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the patient retains some degree of aloofuess, which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognize that what appears to be reality is in fact only a reflection of a forgotten past. If this can be successfully achieved, the patient's sense of conviction is won, together with the therapeutic success that is dependent on it. 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