The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson
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the consequence of sexual repression. Accordingly, when an idea is repressed, “it’s quota of affect is regularly transformed into anxiety” (1964c, 83). Anxiety was conceived in terms of a transformation of libido and, so, served an unconscious purpose. The symptom of anxiety was a displacement of the repressed wish that was incapable of being fulfilled. Anxiety was thus unconsciously exciting. Freud eventually came to the conclusion, however, that this theory was untenable. Certain symptoms and conditions, such as phobias, showed that neurotics went to great lengths to avoid anxiety, so the view that anxiety was unconsciously experienced as pleasure wasn’t necessarily universal. Freud conjectured that at least some “symptoms are created in order to avoid the outbreak of the anxiety state. This is confirmed too by the fact that the first neuroses of childhood are phobias” (84). Earlier, Freud had defined real anxiety as a signal elicited from an external threat or danger. Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, was a derivative of the economics of sexual life. This suggested there was an ulterior motive in the neurotic experience of anxiety, similar, for example, to conversion hysteria. But Freud began to suspect that there was a real fear in neurotic anxiety as well. Yet, this fear was presumably located on the “inside” rather than “outside.” In other words, “what he is afraid of is evidendy his own libido. The difference between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two points: that the danger is an internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognized” (84). Freud concludes that “anxiety, it seems, in so far as it is an affective state, is the reproduction of an old event which brought a threat of danger; anxiety serves the purposes of self-preservation and is a signal of a new danger; it arises from libido that has in some way become unemployable and . . . is replaced by the formation of a symptom” (84).
Freud subsequently incorporated his formulation of the structural model into his new conception of anxiety. The ego is increasingly conceived as the seat of anxiety, whereas the id is the source of passion (85). Freud concluded that “it was not the repression that created anxiety; the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression” (86). Whereas neurotic anxiety was previously interpreted in terms of the (id’s) unconscious demand for pleasure, it is now understood—in the same way as normal anxiety—as a response to “a threatening external danger.” Freud resolves his apparent dilemma by proposing “castration” as the external danger, the inevitable consequence of the boy’s lust for his mother.
But we have not made any mention at all so far of what the real danger is that the child is afraid of as a result of being in love with his mother. “The danger is the punishment of being castrated, of losing his genital organ. You will of course object that after all that is not a real danger. Our boys are not castrated because they are in love with their mothers during the phase of the Oedipus complex. But the matter cannot be dismissed so simply. Above all, it is not a question of whether castration is really carried out; what is decisive is that the danger is one that threatens from outside and that the child believes in it” (86; emphasis added).
Castration—which is to say, the threat of castration—now becomes the source of all our (male) neurotic fears. This threat is “perceived” as a real danger, coming from outside. Yet, as Freud acknowledges, castration doesn’t ever really occur, so in what sense is it real? Keep in mind that what we’re talking about—the threat of castration—is a concept, not an event. Yet, children are said to experience, in phantasy, the possibility of danger, not because they perceive it, but because they believe it. But isn’t this how Freud characterized “internal” (i.e., hallucinatory) reality, as something we believe is so, in contrast to something that is actually the case? This presumably external, real threat is, fundamentally, a belief that is apparently derived from (a) noticing that girls lack a penis and (b) threats from adults to cut off one’s hands or penis for playing with oneself. In what sense, however, are threats and discoveries of this kind real, rather than a product of the imagination?
What about the situation with girls? Freud observes that “fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidendy a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds the mother absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety (87; emphasis added). We can see what these two forms of “castration” share in common: loss of penis for the boy; loss of mother for the girl. The penis and the mother are real, and their loss would truly prove catastrophic. But these losses are anticipated, not actually experienced, so in what sense can they be said to be real, unless we employ the “real” in a purely subjective, impressionistic way of speaking? In spite of this theoretical ambiguity, Freud insisted that reality was an outside, hostile force, represented by the father’s interference in his child’s libidinal strivings toward his (or her?) mother. Yet this position apparently conflicts with Freud’s observation in Civilization and Its Discontents that “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection” (1961a, 72). Loewald said that this apparently positive view of the father “harks back to Totem and Taboo where the longing for the father is described as ‘the root of every religion’” (1980, 8). Also, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggested that “the origins of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness” (1961a, 72). Loewald concludes that “religious feelings, thus, are understood as originating in an attempt to cope with hostile reality forces. . . . The longing for the father, seeking his help and protection, is a defensive compromise in order to come to terms with this superior, hostile power” (9; emphasis added).
Understand that “castration”—a concept—is supposed to symbolize in some concrete way the child’s encounter with reality, implemented by the fear of a threatening father. According to Freud, the ego was initially formed out of the infant’s experience of frustration. The ego is supposed to protect the infant from (a) its own wishes and (b) the reality of the world’s potential opposition. After Freud’s adoption of the structural model, the ego was conceived as the seat of identity that comes under assault from three sides: (a) the id (that is, the ego’s libidinal yearnings), (b) the superego (its—that is, its parents’—morality, right and wrong, conscience and ideals) and (c) the outside world, in other words—other people—what Freud calls “external reality.” Where is the rest or sanctuary for an existence so essentially at sea, at war with its environment and with itself, when even a son’s longing and positive regard for his father is merely a way of protecting himself from that very father? Freud was so confident that anxiety is always provoked by an external threat that he came to view our wishes as “external” also. In The Ego and the Id, he observed that “all the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself” (196Id, 55; emphasis added). And again, “Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id” (56; emphasis added). But, in what way can the id be conceived as real unless (a) reality is not objective or external, but rather experienced as such; and (b) reality is a metaphor? And why was Freud so insistent that (a) reality is always external; (b) that this reality, external or no, is always dangerous; and (c) that the prototypical embodiment of this reality is the father? Loewald summarizes Freud’s view:
Reality, then, is represented by the father who as an alien, hostile, jealous force interferes with the intimate ties between mother and child, forces the child into submission, so that he seeks the father’s protection. The threat of the hostile reality is met by unavoidable, if temporary, submission to its demands, namely to renounce the mother as a libidinal object, and to acknowledge and submit to paternal authority. (1980, 7)
How did Freud become convinced that reality accounts for neurotic conflict? What did he actually mean by reality? Remember the impact, the near-crippling effect, on Freud when he discovered that his patients’ accounts of seduction weren’t “real,” after all. Yet, when Freud, years later, was continuing his search for the cause of repression, he was still looking for something that really happens, something that concretely threatens the child in an actual way. Freud’s conception of castration, in its specifically anatomical