/
 
 SEX IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
 
 RATIONAL SEX SERIES 
 
 SANE SEX LIFE AND SANE SEX LIVING, 
 
 by H. W. Long, M.D. 
 BI-SEXUAL LOVE, by Dr. William Stekel 
 SEX AND DREAMS, by Dr. William Stekel 
 THE HOMO-SEXUAL NEUROSIS, by Dr. 
 
 William Stekel 
 SEX AND THE SENSES, by James S. Van 
 
 Teslaar, M.D. 
 
 THE LAWS OF SEX, by Edith H. Hooker 
 MOTHERHOOD, by H. W. Long, M.D. 
 CHILDREN BY CHANCE OR BY CHOICE, by 
 
 William Hawley Smith 
 SEX IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS, by S. Fe- 
 
 renczi, M.D. 
 HISTORY AND PRACTICE OF PSYCHANALY- 
 
 sis, by Paul Bjerre, M.D, 
 TEMPERAMENT AND SEX, by Walter 
 
 Heaton 
 SEX AND SOCIETY, by W. I. Thomas 
 
 RICHARD G. BADGER, PUBLISHER, BOSTON
 
 SEX IN 
 PSYCHO ANALYSIS 
 
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 
 
 S. FERENCZI 
 
 [BUDAPEST] 
 
 Medical Adviser to 
 
 The Hungarian Law Courts 
 
 Authorized Translation by 
 ERNEST JONES M.D. 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 RICHARD G. BADGER 
 
 THE GORHAM PRESS 
 LONDON: STANLEY PHILLIPS
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1916. BT RICHARD G. BADGER 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
 The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.
 
 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 
 
 DR. FERENCZI is known as one of the leading 
 exponents of psycho-analysis, and apart, of 
 course, from Professor Freud, has perhaps made 
 more original contributions than anyone else to that 
 subject. Before taking up the study of psycho- 
 analysis he had for many years been engaged on 
 neurological, psychiatrical and medico-legal work, 
 and had made a number of contributions particularly 
 on neurological and psychotherapeutic subjects. 
 His extensive personal experience with the methods 
 of hypnotism and suggestion gave him a specially 
 favourable opportunity to compare and contrast the 
 results thus obtained with those he was able later 
 to obtain by the use of the psycho-analytic method. 
 The greater part of his work has been published only 
 in Hungarian; from that which has appeared in 
 German I have selected for translation, with Dr. 
 Ferenczi's approval, some fifteen papers, which are 
 here reproduced in the order of their original appear- 
 ance. Of these only two, forming Chapters I and 
 III, were written from the point of view of popular 
 exposition ; the others are all of a more technical and 
 advanced nature, being addressed to an audience 
 
 5
 
 6 Translator's Preface 
 
 already familiar with psycho-analytical principles. 
 While this fact increases their value for serious stu- 
 dents of the subject, there being little enough of 
 such literature in English, it exposes many of the 
 conclusions to ready misconception unless it be con- 
 stantly borne in mind that a considerable knowledge 
 of previous work is assumed throughout by the au- 
 thor. To those readers approaching the subject for 
 the first time the following books are recommended 
 as a preliminary study: Hitschmann, "Freud's 
 Theory of the Neuroses," Brill, "Psychanalysis," 
 and the translator's "Papers on Psycho-Analysis. " 
 In the translation I have tried to render the au- 
 thor's thought and language as closely and accu- 
 rately as possible, judging this to be the chief desid- 
 eratum in dealing with a scientific work, even at the 
 cost of retaining some foreignness of style. 
 
 I am indebted to Miss Barbara Low for read- 
 ing through both the manuscript and the proofs. 
 
 Portland Court. 
 London, W.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAI'TER PAQL 
 
 I. THE ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION AND TREATMENT OF 
 
 PSYCHOSEXUAL IMPOTENCE 11 
 
 II. INTBOJECTION AND TRANSFERENCE 35 
 
 I. INTROJECTION IN THE NEUROSES .... 35 
 II. THE PART PLAYED BY TRANSFERENCE IN 
 
 HYPNOTISM AND SUGGESTION .... 58 
 
 III. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DREAMS ... 94 
 
 IV. ON OBSCENE WORDS 132 
 
 V. ON THE PART PLAYED BY HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE 
 
 PATHOGENESIS OF PARANOIA . 154 
 
 VI. ON ONANISM 187 
 
 VII. TRANSITORY SYMPTOM-CONSTRUCTIONS DURING THE 
 
 ANALYSIS 193 
 
 VIII. STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE OF 
 
 REALITY . . 213 
 
 IX. A LITTLE CHANTICLEER 240 
 
 X. SYMBOLISM 263 
 
 I. THE SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION OF THE 
 PLEASURE AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLES IN 
 
 THE CEoiPUS MYTH 253 
 
 II. ON EYE SYMBOLISM 270 
 
 III. THE ONTOGENESIS OF SYMBOLS .... 276 
 XI. SOME CLINICAL OBSERVATIONS ON PARANOIA AND 
 
 PARAPHRENIA 282 
 
 XII. THE NOSOLOGY OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY (HOMO- 
 EROTISM) 296 
 
 XIII. THE ONTOGENESIS OF THE INTEREST IN MONEY . . 319 
 
 INDEX 333
 
 S E X I N 
 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION AND TREATMENT OF 
 PSYCHOSEXUAL IMPOTENCE 1 
 
 ONE of the few objective arguments brought 
 against the method of treatment of the psycho- 
 neuroses inaugurated by Freud is the criticism that 
 it effects only a symptomatic cure. It is said to 
 cause the pathological manifestations of hysteria 
 to disappear, but not the hysterical disposition it- 
 self. In regard to this Freud quite rightly directs 
 our attention to the fact that the same critics shew 
 much more indulgence towards other anti-hysterical 
 procedures, which cannot even effect a final cure of 
 one symptom. We may also bring forward against 
 the argument just mentioned the fact that the an- 
 alysis, penetrating into the depths of mental life (a 
 process which Freud tellingly compares with the ex- 
 cavating work of the archaeologist), not only effects 
 
 1 Published in the Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 
 1908, Jahrg. X. 
 
 11
 
 18 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 a cure of the symptoms, but also results in such 
 fundamental change in the patient's character that 
 we no longer have any right to call him a sick man. 2 
 We are the less justified in doing so, in that after 
 the analysis is finished he is well armed also against 
 new psychical conflicts and shocks, pretty much as 
 well as the non-analysed "healthy persons," who as 
 we now know with certainty carry about with them 
 throughout life a multitude of repressed ideational 
 complexes that are at all times ready to increase 
 and exaggerate with their affect-value the patho- 
 genic action of psychical traumata. 
 
 Besides this, the burden of proof completely dis- 
 appears in the cases where our medical task is com- 
 prised in the curing of a single symptom. Among 
 these tasks the treatment of psychical impotence has 
 constantly been regarded as one of the most difficult. 
 So many of my patients came with this complaint, 
 and so great have I found the mental misery due to 
 this symptom, that I have been untiring in the ap- 
 plication of the most diverse medicinal 3 and sugges- 
 tive 4 methods of treatment. Now and then I have 
 had success with both of these, but neither of them 
 proved to be reliable. I count myself all the more 
 fortunate to be able now to report much more suc- 
 
 *Jung and Muthmann in their works come to the same con- 
 clusion. 
 
 * Ferenczl. Arzneimittelschatz des Neurologen. Gy6gyaszat, 
 1906. 
 
 4 Ferenczi. Ueber den Heilwert der Hypnose. Gyogyaszat, 
 1904.
 
 Psycho sexual Impotence 13 
 
 cessful results, for which I have to thank Freud's 
 psycho-analytic method of treatment. 5 
 
 I will first relate, without any theoretical discus- 
 sion, the cases I have observed, and interpolate my 
 own remarks. 
 
 I was consulted by a workman, aged thirty-two, 
 whose apprehensive and almost abject appearance 
 allowed the "sexual neurasthenic" to be recognised 
 even at a distance. My first thought was that he was 
 being tormented by conscience-pangs due to mas- 
 turbation, but his complaint proved to be a much 
 more serious one. In spite of his age, and in spite 
 of innumerable attempts, he had never been able, so 
 he told me, properly to perform cohabitation; an 
 inadequate erection and ejaculatio praecox had al- 
 ways made the immissio impossible. He had sought 
 help from various physicians ; one of them ( a no- 
 torious newspaper-advertiser) spoke to him roughly, 
 saying "You have masturbated, that is why you 
 are impotent," and on this the patient, who in fact 
 had indulged in self-gratification from his fifteenth 
 to his eighteenth year, as the result of this consul- 
 tation went home convinced that the sexual capacity 
 was the well-deserved and irrevocable consequence 
 of the "sins of his youth." Nevertheless he made 
 
 5 Freud's works may be referred to in this connection, as well 
 as the following ones by two Vienna physicians: M. Steiner, 
 "Die funktionelle Impotenz des Mannes," Wiener med. Presse, 
 1907, Nr. 42 (also Die psychischen Storungen der mannlichen 
 Potenz, 1913, by the same author: Translator's Note), and W. 
 Stekel, Nervose Angstzustande, 1908.
 
 14 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 further efforts to be cured, and went through among 
 others a long hydriatic and electrical treatment, 
 without success. The patient would already have 
 bowed to the inevitable, but that he had recently be- 
 come attached to a very suitable girl; the wish to 
 marry her was the motive of his present attempt to 
 be cured. 
 
 The case is a very everyday one, nor did the an- 
 amnesic exploration and the examination of the pa- 
 tient bring out anything special in addition. It 
 became evident that besides the impotence he suffered 
 from a neurotic symptom-complex: various paraes- 
 thesias, auditory hyperaesthesia, pronounced hypo- 
 chondria, disturbed sleep with unpleasant dreams; 
 altogether, therefore, an anxiety-neurosis in Freud's 
 sense, for which an adequate explanation was to be 
 found in the lack of sexual gratification and the fre- 
 quent frustrated excitations. The patient, although 
 the coitus-mechanism completely failed at just the 
 critical moment, indulged in phantasies, both when 
 awake and when half-asleep, the content of which 
 was entirely comprised of sexual situations, and 
 during these experienced the most intense erections. 
 This circumstance aroused in me tHe suspicion that 
 besides the nervous results of the abstinence he might 
 also be suffering from a psychoneurosis, and that the 
 cause of the impotence itself would have to be sought 
 in the inhibiting, interdicting power of an uncon- 
 scious psychical complex, which became operative
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 15 
 
 just at the moment of the wished-for sexual union. 
 This pathological condition has, under the term 
 "psychical impotence," long been known to us, and 
 we have known that with it the inhibiting action 
 of morbid anxiety and fear makes impassable the 
 otherwise intact sexual reflex-arcs. It was formerly 
 believed, however, that such cases were fully ex- 
 plained by the "cowardice" of the patient or by the 
 conscious memory of a want of success sexually, and 
 our medical activity was confined to calming or en- 
 couraging the patient, with successful results in a 
 certain number of cases. With a knowledge of 
 Freud's psychology I could not remain content 
 with such superficial explanations ; I had to suppose 
 that not conscious fear, but unconscious mental 
 processes, having an absolutely definite content 
 and taking their origin in infantile memory-traces, 
 probably some childish sexual wish that in the course 
 of the individual cultural development had become 
 not only unobtainable, but even unthinkable, would 
 have to be made responsible for the symptom. I 
 received merely negative answers to the questions 
 put to him along these lines. Nothing special had 
 happened to him in a sexual connection ; his parents 
 and the family had always been very decent and re- 
 served in this respect, and as a child he had not 
 bothered himself in the least about "these matters ;" 
 he knew himself to be entirely free of homosexual 
 impulses ; the thought of the functioning of "erogen-
 
 16 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 ous zones" (anal- and oral-erotism) filled him with 
 repugnance; the doings of exhibitionists, voyeurs, 
 sadists and masochists were almost quite unknown 
 to him. At the most he had, rather unwillingly, to 
 admit a somewhat excessive fondness for the female 
 foot and its covering, without being able to give any 
 information as to the source of this fetishistic par- 
 tiality. I allowed the patient, of course, to relate 
 exactly how he had gained his knowledge of sexual 
 matters, what his phantasies consisted of during the 
 period of self-gratification, and how the first at- 
 tempts at cohabitation, unsuccessful from the start, 
 had passed off. Still even this detailed anamnesis 
 did not elicit anything that I would have been able 
 to accept as an adequate explanation of the psycho- 
 sexual inhibition. We know, however, since Freud's 
 work that such an account of the illness does not re- 
 produce the real story of the individual's develop- 
 ment, even with complete honesty and a keen mem- 
 ory on the part of the person questioned ; so cleverly 
 can consciousness "overlook" and "forget" thoughts 
 and memories that have become disagreeable that 
 they can be withdrawn from the repression or made 
 conscious only by laborious analytic work. I did not 
 hesitate, therefore, to apply the analytic method. 
 
 In the analysis it soon turned out that the sus- 
 picion as to the presence of a psychoneurosis was 
 justified. With closer attention the neurotic nature 
 of the paraesthesias mentioned above was recognis-
 
 Psycliosexual Impotence 17 
 
 able ("pains" and "crackling" in the tendons, "agi- 
 tation" in the abdominal and crural muscles, etc.), 
 but besides these there appeared a number of un- 
 doubtedly obsessive thoughts and feelings: he dared 
 not look people in the eyes ; he was a coward ; he felt 
 as if he had committed a crime ; he was always afraid 
 of getting laughed at. 
 
 Obsessive ideas and sensations of this kind are 
 typical of sexual impotence. The cowardice of the 
 sexually impotent person is explained by the radia- 
 tion over the whole individuality of the humiliating 
 consciousness of such an imperfection. Freud speaks 
 very appositely of the "prefigurativeness of sexu- 
 ality" for the rest of the psychical behaviour. The 
 degree of sureness in sexual efficiency becomes the 
 standard for the sureness in demeanour, in views, and 
 in conduct. The motiveless consciousness of guilt, 
 however, that seemed to play a not inconsiderable 
 part with our patient, made one suspect the presence 
 of deeper, suppressed, unconscious thought-pro- 
 cesses, which in a certain sense were really "sinful ;" 
 the analysis gradually yielded the psychical material 
 from which I was able to infer the nature of this 
 "sin." 
 
 It struck me above all that in his sexually coloured 
 dreams the patient occupied himself very frequently 
 with corpulent women whose faces he never saw, and 
 with whom he was unable to bring about sexual union 
 even in dreams ; on the contrary, instead of an emis-
 
 18 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 sion occurring, as might have been expected, he would 
 be overtaken by acute dread and would wake up in 
 alarm with such thoughts as : "This is impossible !" 
 "This situation is unthinkable." After such anxiety- 
 dreams he would wake up exhausted, bathed in sweat, 
 with palpitation, and usually had "a bad day." 
 
 The fact that in the dream he never saw the face 
 of the sexual-object I had to interpret as a dream- 
 distortion (Freud); it serves the purpose here of 
 making the person towards whom the libidinous 
 dream-wish was directed unrecognisable in conscious- 
 ness. The starting up in alarm signified that it was 
 nevertheless beginning to dawn in his consciousness 
 how "unthinkable this situation was" with the woman 
 hinted at by the dream. The anxiety-attack is the 
 effective reaction of consciousness against wish- 
 fulfilment of the unconscious. 6 
 
 The unconscious interdiction of full sexual gratifi- 
 cation was so strict in the patient that even in day 
 dreams, when he indulged in his sexual phantasies, 
 he had in a terrified way to pull himself together 
 
 The Hungarian poet Ignotus seems to have surmised the 
 existence of the distortion and censuring of dreams, as is evi- 
 dent from the following fragment of verse: 
 
 "... A coward's dreams betray the man: 
 So harshly can Fate ply her flail, 
 That of safety he dare not even dream." 
 
 It had occurred to me long ago (see the article on "Love and 
 Science" in Gy6gy6szat, 1901) that for any useful writings on 
 individual-psychology we have to go not to scientific literature, 
 but to belles-lettres.
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 19 
 
 and somehow divert his thoughts elsewhere in the 
 moment when he was about to imagine to himself 
 the act of cohabitation. 7 
 
 A certain active cruelty made its appearance sev- 
 eral times in his dreams ; for instance, he bit some- 
 one's finger off, or bit someone's face. It was not 
 hard to recognise the source of these cannibalistic 
 inclinations in the infantile hostility against a 
 brother, twenty years older, who in his time had 
 behaved much too strictly and not at all kindly 
 towards his little brothers. This propensity for 
 cruelty, by the way, also lurked in the waking state 
 behind the patient's "manifest" cowardice. Every 
 time it was discovered in how cowardly a manner he 
 had behaved in regard to this or that person (mostly 
 a superior) he would sink into phantasies that lasted 
 for several minutes, in which he depicted himself in 
 the greatest detail how he would conduct himself on 
 the next opportunity in a similar situation, what 
 bodily castigations and abusive language he would 
 
 1 Freud first called attention to the frequent occurrence of 
 anxious examination-dreams in those sexually impotent, and I 
 can fully confirm this observation. The dream phantasy of sit- 
 ting for an examination very often recurs with such people as 
 a "typical dream," and is constantly associated with the un- 
 pleasant feeling of not being ready, of making a fool of one- 
 self, etc. This feeling is a dream-displaced affect; it belongs 
 to the consciousness of the sexual incapacity. A synonym of 
 cohabitation that is commonly used in vulgar Hungarian ("to 
 shoot") is probably the reason why in the dreams of impotent 
 patients under my treatment situations so often recur in which 
 the chief part is played by the (mostly clumsy) use of weapons 
 (e. y. rusting of the rifle, missing the target, missing fire in 
 shooting, etc.).
 
 80 Contributions to Psycho- Analyst* 
 
 serve out. 8 This is an expression of the esprit 
 d'escalier so frequent amongst psychoneurotics, or, 
 as Freud terms it, "subsequentness." These high- 
 flown plans, however, remain for the most part otiose 
 phantasy-pictures ; dread or fear always paralyses 
 the patient's hand and tongue again and again in 
 the critical moment. The analysis finds a determin- 
 ing factor of this kind of cowardice in the infantile 
 awe of the parents and older members of the family, 
 which at that time restrained the child's revolt 
 against their rebukes and bodily chastisements. 
 
 With the close physiological connection and the 
 ideational association that obtain between the sexual 
 function and the passage of urine I found it intelligi- 
 ble that the patient's inhibition also made its appear- 
 ance, as it soon turned out, in regard to micturition. 
 He was unable to discharge urine in the presence of 
 a second person. So long as he was quite alone in a 
 public urinal he urinated regularly, and with a good 
 stream ; at the moment when anyone entered the flow 
 was "as if cut off," and he became unable to press out 
 even a drop. 
 
 From this symptom, as also from his bashfulness 
 in regard to men, I inferred that with the patient, as 
 with most neurotics (Freud), the homosexual compo- 
 nent was present in a higher degree than usual. I 
 believed that the infantile source of this was to be 
 
 In Ibsen's "Pretenders" the figure of the Bishop Nicholas 
 excellently illustrates cowardice and concealed cruelty as the 
 result of sexual impotence.
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 21 
 
 sought in his relation to a younger brother, with 
 whom he had slept in the same bed for years, and 
 with whom he had lived in an offensive and defensive 
 league against the elder brother who ill-treated them. 
 With the expression "usual amount of homosexu- 
 ality" I imply that my psycho-analyses, now quite 
 numerous, support the theory of psycho-bisexualityA 
 according to which there is retained from the original / 
 bisexual disposition of man not only anatomical, but \ 
 also psychosexual rudiments, which under certain 
 circumstances may obtain the supremacy. 
 
 On the ground of other similar analyses I sus- 
 pected that the corpulent woman who recurred in the 
 dreams stood for some near relative of the patient, 
 the mother or a sister; he indignantly rejected this 
 imputation, however, and triumphantly told me that 
 he had only one corpulent sister, and it was just this 
 one that he couldn't bear ; he had always been sullen 
 and gruff towards her. When, however, one has ex- 
 perienced, as I have, how often a sympathy that is 
 burdensome to consciousness is hidden behind an ex- 
 aggerated harshness and ill-temper, one's suspicion 
 is not lulled by information such as this. 9 
 
 On one of the following da}'s the patient had a 
 peculiar hypnagogic hallucination, which with slight 
 modifications he had already noticed a few times be- 
 fore: in the act of going to sleep he had the feeling 
 as if his feet (which, though naked, appeared to him 
 
 "I hate because I cannot love." (Ibsen.)
 
 22 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 to have shoes on) were rising in the air, while his 
 head sank deep down ; he awakened at once with an 
 intense feeling of dread. Having regard to the al- 
 ready mentioned foot- and shoe-fetishism I submit- 
 ted afresh to an exact analysis the patient's free 
 associations to this theme, with the result that the 
 following memory-images emerged, which he had long 
 forgotten, and which were most painful to him : The 
 corpulent sister, whom he "couldn't stand," and who 
 was ten years older than the patient, used to undo 
 and do up the shoes of her then three- or four-year- 
 old brother, and it also not infrequently happened 
 that she would let him ride on her naked leg (cov- 
 ered only by a short stocking), whereupon he used 
 to experience a voluptuous sensation in his member. 
 (Since this is obviously a "cover-memory" in Freud's 
 sense, more must have passed between them). When 
 he wanted to repeat this later on his sister, now four- 
 teen or fifteen years old, rebuffed him with the re- 
 proach that such conduct was improper and indecent. 
 I was now able to tell the patient of my assured 
 conviction that the psychological ground for his im- 
 potence was to be sought in the wish for the repetition 
 of those sexual acts, a wish incompatible with the 
 "cultivated sexual-morality" (V. Ehrenfels, Freud) 
 and hence repressed, but which lived on in the uncon- 
 scious. The patient, with whom the arguments only 
 half prevailed, adhered to his denial, but his resis- 
 tance did not last much longer. He came shortly
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 23 
 
 after with the news that he had thought over what 
 I had said to him, and recollected how in his youth 
 (from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year) he would 
 select this infantile experience with his sister as the 
 object of his masturbation phantasies ; indeed, it was 
 the dread of his conscience after self-gratification of 
 this kind that had moved him to give up masturba- 
 tion altogether. Since that time the childhood story 
 had never occurred to his mind till now. 
 
 I induced the patient from the beginning to con- 
 tinue during the treatment his attempts at cohabita- 
 tion. After the dream-analysis related above he 
 came one day with the surprising news that on the 
 day before (for the first time in his life) he had suc- 
 ceeded in this ; the erection, the duration of the fric- 
 tion, and the orgasm had given him complete satis- 
 faction, and, with the avidity characteristic of neu- 
 rotics, he repeated the act twice again on the same 
 evening, each time with a different woman. 
 
 I continued with the treatment and began to re- 
 duce analytically the other symptoms of his neurosis, 
 but the patient, after he had achieved his chief aim 
 and convinced himself of the durability of the result, 
 lacked the necessary interest for the analysis, and so 
 I discharged him after treating him for two months. 
 
 This therapeutic success needs explaining. From 
 Freud's pioneering work on the evolution of sexual- 
 ity in the individual (Drei AWiandlimgen) we learnt 
 that the child receives his first sexual impressions
 
 24 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 from the immediate environment, and that these im- 
 pressions determine the direction in the later choice 
 of the sexual-object. It may happen, however, that 
 as a result of constitutional causes or of external 
 favouring factors (e. g. spoiling) the incestuous 
 object-choice becomes fixed. Cultural morality, 
 gradually strengthened by example and education 
 defends itself energetically against the obtrusion of 
 the improper wishes, and repression of these comes 
 about. This defence to begin with succeeds com- 
 pletely ("Period of successful defence," Freud) as 
 also in our case , but the suppressed wishes may 
 again become active under the influence of the or- 
 ganic-sexual development in puberty, making neces- 
 sary another corresponding stage in repression. The 
 second repression signified for our patient the be- 
 ginning of the psychoneurosis, which manifested 
 itself in, amongst other ways, the psychosexual in- 
 hibition and the aversion to the sister. He was 
 incapable of performing the sexual act, since every 
 woman reminded him unconsciously of his sister ; and 
 he couldn't endure his sister because, without know- 
 ing it, he always saw in her not only the relative, 
 but also the woman. The antipathy was a good 
 means of protection against his becoming conscious 
 of a feeling-stream of the opposite kind. 
 
 Still the unconscious (in Freud's sense) is only 
 able to control the mental and bodily being of man 
 until the analysis reveals the content of the thought-
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 25 
 
 processes hidden in it. Once the light of conscious- 
 ness has illuminated these mental processes there is 
 an end of the tyrannical power of the unconscious 
 complex. The repressed thoughts cease to be heaps 
 and collections of non-abreacted affects ; they be- 
 come links in the ideational chain of normal asso- 
 ciation. It was, therefore, in our case thanks to the 
 analysis, i. e. to a kind of "circumvention of the 
 censor" (Freud), that the affective energy of the 
 complex was no longer converted into a physical 
 compulsion- (inhibition-) symptom, but was disinte- 
 grated and led off by thought-activity, losing its in- 
 adequate 10 significance forever. 
 
 That incestuous fixation of the "sexual hunger" 11 
 is to be recognized not as an exceptional, but as a 
 relatively frequent cause of psychosexual impotence, 
 is shewn by the quite analogous psycho-analyses by 
 Steiner and Stekel. I am also able to bring forward 
 a second similar case. A psychoneurotic, twenty- 
 eight years old (who had been treated by me and 
 at that time was almost cured), was tormented by 
 anxious obsessions and obsessive acts, and suffered 
 besides from psycho-sexual inhibition, just like the 
 patient whose history was related above. This symp- 
 tom, however, ceased of itself in the sixth month of 
 the analysis after we managed to make conscious 
 infantile incest-thoughts that had been fixed on the 
 
 10 (This word is used in psychopathology to mean "dispropor- 
 tionate." Translator.) 
 u This word is used to translate the German "Libido."
 
 86 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 person of the mother. When I mention that this 
 otherwise rather "over-moral" patient also indulged 
 in hostile phantasies against his father among his un- 
 conscious thought-processes, one will recognize in him 
 a typical personification of the Oedipus myth, the 
 general human significance of which has been re- 
 vealed by Freud's discoveries. 
 
 The libidinous thoughts repressed in childhood, 
 which condition psychical impotence, need not refer 
 to the nearest relatives; it is enough that the in- 
 fantile sexual-object has been a so-called "respected 
 person," demanding in one way or another high con- 
 sideration. As an example of this I may cite a 
 patient, aged forty-five, with whom both the torment- 
 ing "cardiac anxiety" (angina pectoris nervosa) and 
 the sexual weakness considerably improved after 
 he was able to give an account of repressed disre- 
 spectful phantasies, the object of which was his 
 dead foster-mother. In this case the incestuous fix- 
 ation (if this designation is permitted in regard to 
 people not related in blood) was furthered by the 
 circumstance that the foster-mother also had not re- 
 strained her child-love within the necessary limits; 
 she let the boy sleep in her bed till his tenth year, 
 and for a long time tolerated without contradicting 
 him his demonstrations of affection, which was al- 
 ready plainly tinged with erotism. Children are 
 often exposed to such dangers and temptations from 
 the side of their teachers and educators ; it is not
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 87 
 
 rare for them to fall a victim to masked sexual acts 
 on the part of grown-up relatives, and not only 
 as might have been supposed in the slums, but also 
 among classes of society where the greatest possible 
 care is lavished on children. 12 
 
 The tragic part that the foster-mother had played 
 in the life of this patient was shewn by the fact that, 
 when he wanted to marry, a few years ago, the old 
 lady, then over seventy years old, committed suicide 
 in her despair ; she threw herself out of the window of 
 the second floor 13 just in the moment that her 
 adopted son left the front door. The patient be' 
 lieved that the motive for this deed was her dissatis- 
 faction with his choice. But his unconscious must 
 have interpreted the suicide more correctly, for about 
 this time appeared the cardiac pains, which one re- 
 gards as converted (projected into the corporeal 
 sphere) "heart-ache." The sexual weakness had ex- 
 isted with this patient since puberty, and he will 
 perhaps attain full sexual capacity only towards 
 the decline of masculine life. 
 
 Steiner distinguishes, besides the cases of func- 
 tional impotence that are determined by unconscious 
 complexes of infantile origin, two other kinds of 
 psychosexual inhibition; with one of these congeni- 
 tal sexual inferiority, with the other certain injuri- 
 
 12 See Freud's Kleine Schriften, S. 114, and also my article 
 "Sexual-Padagogik," Budapesti Orvosi Ujsdg, 1908. 
 
 18 [In America this would be called the fourth floor, in Eng- 
 land the third. Translator.]
 
 28 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 ous influences acting after puberty, are to be re- 
 garded as the causative agents. The value of this 
 division is, in my opinion, more a practical than a 
 theoretical one. From the "congenital" cases we 
 have above all to exclude the cases of pseudo- 
 heredity, where neuropathic parents as a result of 
 their complaint treat the children wrongly, train 
 them badly, and may expose them to influences that 
 have as a result a subsequent sexual inhibition, 
 whereas without these influences even the person 
 afflicted through heredity would perhaps not have 
 become sexually impotent. 
 
 Freud compares the pathogenesis of the neuroses 
 with that of tuberculosis. The predisposition also 
 plays an important part with the latter, but the 
 real pathogenic agent is none the less only the Bacil- 
 lus Kochii, and if this could be kept at a distance 
 not a single soul would die of the predisposition 
 alone. Sexual influences of childhood play the same 
 part in the neuroses as bacteria do in infective dis- 
 eases. And though one must admit that where the 
 predisposition is very marked the ubiquitous, un- 
 avoidable impressions may suffice to determine a fu- 
 ture functional impotence, one has nevertheless to 
 be absolutely clear that these impressions, and not 
 the unsubstantial "predisposition," are the specific 
 cause (Freud) of the disorder. From this it also 
 follows that even with "congenital sexual inferiority"
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 29 
 
 psycho-analysis is not quite without hopeful possi- 
 bilities. 
 
 The psychosexual impotence that is acquired after 
 puberty also differs, in my opinion, only apparently 
 from that constellated by unconscious complexes. 
 When anyone, after being able for a time properly 
 to perform the act of copulation, loses for a long 
 period his capacity under the impression of special 
 circumstances (e. g. fear of infection, of pregnancy, 
 of being detected, too great sexual excitement, etc.), 
 one may be confident that repressed infantile com- 
 plexes are present in him also, and that the exag- 
 geratedly long or intense, i. e. pathological, effect 
 of the present harmful agent is to be ascribed to the 
 affect that has been transferred from such complexes 
 to the current reaction. From a practical point of 
 view Steiner is entirely right when he brings this 
 group into special prominence, for the cases to be 
 reckoned here are often curable by simple tranquilli- 
 sation, suggestive measures, or a quite superficial 
 analysis (which may be equated to the old Breuer- 
 Freud "catharsis" or "abreaction"). Still, this kind 
 of cure has not the prophylactic value of the pene- 
 trating psycho-analysis, although one cannot gain- 
 say its advantage in being a much lesser burden to 
 the physician and the patient. 
 
 A superficial analysis of this kind restored his 
 potestas coewndi to one of my patients, a young man
 
 30 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 who became impotent from hypochondria after ac- 
 quiring his first gonorrhoea, and also to a second one, 
 who was made impotent with his wife by the sight of 
 her menstrual blood. Simple encouragements and 
 suggestive tranquillisation had the same effect with 
 a thirty-six-year-old man who, although he had pre- 
 viously been fairly active sexually, became impotent 
 when he married and it was a question of marital 
 *'duty." In this case, however, I continued the an- 
 alysis after restoring the sexual function, and the 
 result of this was the discovery of the following 
 facts: The patient, the son of a cooper, had in his 
 fourth or fifth year masturbated the genital parts 
 otf a girl of the same age; in this he was encouraged 
 by an undoubtedly perverse assistant of his father's, 
 who then got the girl to manipulate the boy's prepuce 
 wtth a small wooden needle, such as is used for stop- 
 ping up casks with worm holes in them. In this way 
 the needle happened to bore into the prepuce, and 
 a medical man had to perform an operation to take 
 il away. With all this there was considerable fright, 
 dread, and shame. What depressed him still more, 
 however, was that his comrades somehow got wind 
 of the occurrence and teased him for years with the 
 nickname "needle-prick." He became taciturn and 
 sullen. About the time of puberty he was often 
 frightened that the scar in his prepuce, trivial as it 
 was, would diminish his capacity for the act, but 
 after a little wavering the first attempts succeeded
 
 Psychosexual Impotence 31 
 
 fairly well. Still, the fear of being unable to meet 
 the higher sexual claims of married life entailed an 
 inordinate burden for his sexuality, already weak- 
 ened through an infantile complex, and after the 
 marriage he was reduced to impotence. 
 
 The case is instructive in several respects. It 
 shews that when potency returns after dispersing 
 the current anxious ideas, this does not mean that 
 this fear has been the exclusive cause of the inhibi- 
 tion ; it is much likelier that, in this case as in all 
 similar ones, the preconscious dread has only a 
 "transferred field of activity," while the original 
 source of the disorder is hidden in the unconscious. 
 The successful treatment by suggestion would then 
 have only "broken the point" off the symptom as 
 Freud says i. e. would have so far diminished the 
 total burthen of the neuropsychical apparatus that 
 the patient could then manage it alone. 
 
 The case also illustrates how, besides infantile in- 
 cestuous fixation, other experiences of early child- 
 hood connected with the affect of pronounced shame 
 may later determine a psychosexual inhibition. 
 
 One kind of shame deserves special mention on 
 account of its practical importance, that, namely, 
 which the child feels on being caught masturbating. 
 The feeling of shame on such an occasion .is often 
 still more strongly fixed through the child receiving 
 bodily punishment and having the fear of severe ill- 
 nesses implanted in him ; Freud has called our atten-
 
 32 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 tion to the fact that the way in which the child is 
 weaned from onanism is a typical influence in the 
 later character- and neurosis-formation. It may be 
 asserted with confidence that the tactless behaviour 
 of parents, teachers, and physicians in this matter, 
 which is so important for the child, causes more mis- 
 chief than all the other noxious influences of civili- 
 sation that are so often blamed. The isolation of 
 children in their sexual exigencies, the resulting ex- 
 aggerated and false notions on everything that 
 physiologically or ideationally has to do with sex- 
 uality, the inordinate strictness in the punishment 
 of sexual habits of childhood, the systematic train- 
 ing of children to blind obedience and motiveless 
 respect for their parents: all these are components 
 of a method of education, unfortunately prevailing 
 to-day, that might also be called artificial breeding 
 of neuropaths and sexually impotent people. 
 
 I may sum up as follows my view on male psycho- 
 sexual impotence: 1. Male psychosexual impotence 
 is always a single manifestation of a psychoneurosis, 
 /and accords with Freud's conception of the genesis 
 / of psychoneurotic symptoms. Thus it is always 
 the symbolic expression of repressed memory-traces 
 of infantile sexual experiences, of unconscious wishes 
 striving for the repetition of these, and of the mental 
 conflicts provoked in this way. These memory- 
 traces and wish-impulses in sexual impotence are 
 always of such a kind, or refer to such personalities,
 
 Psycho sexual Impotence 33 
 
 as to be incompatible with the conscious thought of 
 adult civilised human beings. The sexual inhibition 
 is thus an interdiction on the part of the unconscious, 
 which really is directed against a certain variety of 
 sexual activity, but which, for the better assuring 
 of the repression, becomes extended to sexual gratifi- 
 cation altogether. 
 
 2. The sexual experiences of early childhood that 
 determine the later inhibition may be serious mental 
 traumata. When the neurotic predisposition is 
 marked however, unavoidable and apparently harm- 
 less childhood impressions may lead to the same 
 result. 
 
 3. Among the pathogenic causes of later psycho- 
 sexual impotence, incestuous fixation (Freud) and 
 sexual shame in childhood are of specially great 
 significance. 
 
 4. The inhibiting effect of the repressed complex 
 may manifest itself at once in the first attempts at 
 cohabitation, and become fixed. In slighter cases the 
 inhibition becomes of importance only later, in co- 
 habitation accompanied by apprehension or by spe- 
 cially strong sexual excitement. An analysis carried 
 to a sufficient depth, however, would probably be 
 able in all such cases to demonstrate beside (or, 
 more correctly, behind), the current noxious influ- 
 ence that is acting in a depressing way also repressed 
 infantile sexual memories and unconscious phantasies 
 related to these.
 
 34 Contributions to Psyclw-Analyv* 
 
 5. Full comprehension of a case of psychosexunl 
 impotence is only thinkable with the help of Freud's 
 psycho-analysis. By means of this method cure of 
 the symptom and prophylaxis against its return is 
 often to be obtained even in severe and inveterate 
 cases. In mild cases suggestion or a superficial an- 
 alysis may be successful. 
 
 6. The psychoneurosis of which the sexual in- 
 hibition is a part manifestation is as a rule compli- 
 cated by symptoms of an "actual-neurosis" in 
 Freud's sense (neurasthenia, anxiety-neurosis). 
 
 (The following sentence may be added here, ex- 
 tracted from a short article written some years later 
 by Dr. Ferenczi ("Paraesthesias of the Genital Re- 
 gion in Impotency," Internat. Zeitschr. f. Psycho- 
 analyse, May 1913): "Apart from unconscious 
 (onanistic) incest-phantasies, fears of castration 
 are the most frequent cause of psychical impotence; 
 most often both are the cause (dread of castration 
 on account of incest-wishes)." Transl.).
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 INTROJECTION AND TRANSFERENCE 1 
 
 /. Introjection in the Neuroses 
 
 THE productivity of the neurosis (during a 
 course of psycho-analytic treatment) is far 
 from being extinguished, but exercises itself in the 
 creation of a peculiar sort of thought-formation, 
 mostly unconscious, to which the name 'transfer- 
 ences' may be given. 
 
 "These transferences are re-impressions and re- 
 productions of the emotions and phantasies that 
 have to be awakened and brought into consciousness 
 during the progress of the analysis, and are char- 
 acterised by the replacement of a former person by 
 the physician." 
 
 In these sentences Freud announced, in the mas- 
 terly description of a hysterical case, 2 one of his 
 most significant discoveries. 
 
 Whoever since then, following Freud's indications, 
 has tried to investigate psycho-analytically the men- 
 
 1 Published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 1909. 
 *"Bruchstiick einer Hysteric-analyse," in Sammlung Kleiner 
 Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, Bd. II. 
 
 35
 
 36 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 tal life of neurotics, must have become convinced of 
 the truth of this observation. The greatest difficul- 
 ties of such an analysis, indeed, proceed from the 
 remarkable peculiarity of neurotics that "in order 
 to avoid insight into their own unconscious, they 
 transfer to the physician treating them all their 
 affects (hate, love) that have been reinforced from 
 the unconscious." 3 
 
 When, however, one becomes more familiar with 
 the workings of the neurotic mind, one recognises 
 that the psychoneurotic's inclination to transference 
 expresses itself not only in the special case of a 
 psycho-analytic treatment, and not only in regard 
 to the physician, but that transference is a psychi- 
 cal mechanism that is characteristic of the neurosis 
 altogether, one that is evidenced in all situations of 
 life, and which underlies most of the pathological 
 manifestations. 
 
 With increasing experience one becomes convinced 
 that the apparently motiveless extravagance of af- 
 fect, the excessive hate, love and sympathy of neu- 
 rotics, are also nothing else than transferences, by 
 means of which long forgotten psychical experiences 
 are (in the unconscious phantasy) brought into con- 
 nection with the current occasion, and the current re- 
 action exaggerated by the affect of unconscious idea- 
 tional complexes. The tendency of hysterical pa- 
 
 * Ferenczi, "Ueber Aktual-und Psychoneurosen im Sinne 
 Freuds," Wiener klin. Rundschau, 1908, Nr. 48 to 51.
 
 Introjection and Transference 37 
 
 tients to use exaggeration in the expression of their 
 emotions has long been known, and often ridiculed. 
 Freud has shewn us that it is rather we physicians 
 who deserve the ridicule, because failing to under- 
 stand the symbolism of hysterical symptoms the 
 language of hysteria, so to speak we have either 
 looked upon these symptoms as implying simulation, 
 or fancied we had settled them by the use of abstruse 
 physiological terms. It was Freud's psychological 
 conception of hysterical symptoms and character 
 traits that first really disclosed the neurotic mind. 
 Thus he found that the inclination of psychoneu- 
 rotics to imitation, and the "psychical infection" so 
 frequent among hysterics, are not simple automa- 
 tisms, but find their explanation in unconscious pre- 
 tensions and wishes, which the patient does not con- 
 fess even to himself, and which are incapable of 
 becoming conscious. The patient copies the symp- 
 toms or character traits of a person when "on the 
 basis of an identical aetiological claim" he identifies 
 himself in his unconscious with him. 4 The well- 
 known impressionability also of many neurotics, their 
 capacity to feel in the most intense way for the ex- 
 periences of others, to put themselves in the place 
 of a third person, finds its explanation in hysterical 
 identification ; and their impulsive philanthropic and 
 magnanimous deeds are only reactions to these un- 
 conscious instigations are therefore in the last 
 4 Freud. Die Traumdeutung, 2e Aufl., S. 107.
 
 88 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 analysis egoistic actions governed by the "unpleas- 
 antness (Unlust) principle." The fact that every 
 sort of humanitarian or reform movement, the propa- 
 ganda of abstinence (vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, 
 abolitionism), revolutionary organisations and sects, 
 conspiracies for or against the religious, political, 
 or moral order, teem with neuropaths is similarly to 
 be explained by the transference of interest from 
 censored egoistic (erotic or violent) tendencies of 
 the unconscious on to fields where they can work 
 themselves out without any self-reproach. The 
 daily occurrences of a simple civic life also, however, 
 offer neurotics the richest opportunity for the dis- 
 placement on to permissible fields of impulses that 
 are incapable of being conscious. An example of 
 this is the unconscious identification of grossly sexual 
 genital functions with those of the oral organs (eat- 
 ing, kissing), as was first established by Freud. In 
 a number of analyses I have been able to prove that 
 the partiality of hysterics for dainty feeding, their 
 inclination to eat indigestible material (chalk, unripe 
 fruit, etc.), their peculiar search for exotic dishes, 
 their preference or idiosyncrasy in regard to food 
 of a certain form or consistency, that all this was 
 concerned with the displacement of interest from 
 repressed erotic (genital or coprophilic) inclinations, 
 and was an indication of a lack of sexual satisfac- 
 tion. (The well-known manias of pregnant women 
 also, which, by the way, I have observed with non-
 
 Introjection and Transference 39 
 
 pregnant women as well at the menstrual time, I 
 have many times been able to trace to insufficient 
 satisfactions, relative to the increased "sexual hun- 
 ger"). Otto Gross and Stekel found a similar cause 
 with hysterical kleptomania. 
 
 I am aware that in the examples brought forward 
 I have confounded the expressions Displacement and 
 Transference. Transference, however, is only a spe- 
 cial case of the neurotic's inclination to displace- 
 ment; in order to escape from complexes that are 
 unpleasant, and hence have become unconscious, he 
 is forced to meet the persons and things of the outer 
 world with exaggerated interest (love, hate, passion- 
 ate manias, idiosyncrasy) on the basis of the most 
 superficial "aetiological pretensions" and analogies. 
 
 A course of psycho-analytic treatment offers the 
 most favourable conditions for the occurrence of 
 such a transference. The impulses that have been 
 repressed, and are gradually becoming conscious, 
 first meet "m statu nescendi" the person of the phy- 
 sician, and seek to link their unsatisfied valencies to 
 his personality. If we pursued this comparison 
 taken from chemistry we might conceive of psycho- 
 analysis, so far as the transference is concerned, as 
 a kind of catalysis- The person of the physician has 
 here the effect of a catalytic ferment that tempo- 
 rarily attracts to itself the affects split off by the 
 dissection. In a technically correct psycho-analysis, 
 however, the bond thus formed is only a loose one,
 
 40 Contribution* to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 the interest of the patient being led back as soon as 
 possible to its original, covered-over sources and 
 brought into permanent connection with them. 
 
 What slight and trivial motives suffice with neuro- 
 tics for the transference of affects is indicated in the 
 quoted work of Freud. We may add a few charac- 
 teristic examples. A hysterical patient with very 
 strong sexual repression betrayed first in a dream the 
 transference to the physician. (I, the physician, am 
 operating on her nose, and she is wearing a frisure 
 a la Cleo de Merode.) Whoever has already analy- 
 tically interpreted dreams will readily believe that in 
 this dream, as well also as in the unconscious waking 
 thought, I have taken the place of the rhinologist 
 who once made improper advances to the patient; 
 the frisure of the well-known demi-mondaine is too 
 plain a hint of this. Whenever the physician ap- 
 pears in the patient's dreams the analysis discovers 
 with certainty signs of transference. Stekel's book 
 on anxiety states 5 has many pretty examples of this. 
 The case just mentioned, however, is also typical 
 in another way. Patients very often use the oppor- 
 tunity to revive all the sexual excitations they have 
 previously noticed and repressed during medical ex- 
 aminations (in unconscious phantasies about un- 
 dressing and being percussed, palpated, and "ope- 
 rated on"), and to replace in the unconscious the 
 
 Stekel, Nervdse Angstzustande, 1908.
 
 Introjection and Transference 41 
 
 previous physicians in question by the person of the 
 present one. One need only be a physician to become 
 the object of this kind of transference; the mystical 
 part played in the sexual phantasy of the child by 
 the doctor, who knows all forbidden things, who may 
 look at and touch everything that is concealed, is an 
 obvious determining factor in unconscious fancying, 
 and therefore also in the transference occurring in a 
 subsequent neurosis. 8 
 
 With the extraordinary significance that attaches 
 (according to Freud's conclusion which is confirmed 
 daily) to the repressed "Oedipus-complex" (hate and 
 love towards the parents) in every case of neurosis, 
 one is not surprised that the "paternal" air, the 
 friendly and indulgent manner, with which the physi- 
 cian has to meet the patient in psycho-analysis gets 
 so frequently used as a bridge to the transference 
 of conscious feelings of sympathy and unconscious 
 erotic phantasies, the original objects of which were 
 the parents. The physician is always one of the 
 "revenants" (Freud) in whom the neurotic patient 
 hopes to find again the vanished figures of childhood. 
 Nevertheless, one less friendly remark, reminding him 
 of a duty or of punctuality, or a tone that is only a 
 nuance sharper than usual, on the part of the an- 
 alysing physician is sufficient to make him incur all 
 
 'Compare the remark about the "doctor game"" in Freud's 
 article on "Infantile Sexualtheorien," Kleine Schriften, 2e 
 FoUre, S. 171.
 
 42 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 the patient's hate and anger that is directed against 
 moralising persons who demand respect (parent, 
 husband). 
 
 The ascertaining of such transferences of positive 
 and negative effects is exceedingly important for the 
 analysis, for neurotics are mostly persons who believe 
 themselves incapable either of loving or of hating 
 ( often denying to themselves even the most primitive 
 knowledge about sexuality) ; they are therefore 
 either anaesthetic or else good to a fault, and nothing 
 is more suited to shatter their erroneous belief in 
 their own lack of feeling and angelic goodness than 
 having their contrary feeling-currents detected and 
 exposed in flagranti. The transferences are still 
 more important as points of departure for the con- 
 tinuation of the analysis in the direction of the more 
 deeply repressed thought-complexes. 
 
 Ridiculously slight resemblances also: the colour 
 of the hair, facial traits, a gesture of the physician, 
 the way in which he holds a cigarette or a pen, the 
 identity or the similarity in sound of the Christian 
 name with that of some person who has been signifi- 
 cant to the patient; even such distant analogies as 
 these are sufficient to establish the transference. 
 The fact that a transference on the ground of such 
 petty analogies strikes us as ridiculous reminds me 
 that Freud in a category of wit shewed the "presen- 
 tation by means of a detail" to be the agent that 
 sets free the pleasure, . e. reinforces it from the un-
 
 Introjection and Transference 48 
 
 conscious ; in all dreams also we find similar allusions 
 to things, persons, and events by the help of mini- 
 mal details. The poetical figure "pars pro toto" is 
 thus quite current in the language of the uncon- 
 scious. 
 
 The sex of the physician is in itself a much-used 
 bridge for the transference. Female patients very 
 often attach their unconscious heterosexual phan- 
 tasies to the fact that the physician is a man; this 
 gives them the possibility of reviving the repressed 
 complexes that are associated with the idea of mas- 
 culinity. Still the homosexual component that is 
 hidden in everyone sees to it that men also seek to 
 transfer to the physician their "sympathy" and 
 friendship or the contrary. It is enough, however, 
 that something in the physician seems to the patient 
 to be "feminine" for women to bring their homo- 
 sexual, and men their heterosexual interests, or their 
 aversion that is related to this, into connection with 
 the person of the physician. 
 
 In a number of cases I succeeded in demonstrating 
 that the relaxation of the ethical censor in the 
 physician's consulting room was partly determined 
 by the lessened feeling of responsibility on the pa- 
 tient's part. The consciousness that the physician 
 is responsible for everything that happens (in his 
 own room) favours the emergence of day-dreams, 
 first unconscious, later becoming conscious, which 
 very often have as their subject a violent sexual
 
 44 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 assault on the part of the physician and then mostly 
 end with the exemplary punishment of such a vil- 
 lain (his being sentenced, publicly degraded through 
 newspaper articles, shot in a duel, etc.). It is just 
 in this sort of moral disguise that the repressed 
 wishes of people can become conscious. As another 
 motive lessening the feeling of responsibility I recog- 
 nised in a patient the idea that "the doctor can do 
 everything," by which she understood the operative 
 removal of any possible consequence of a liaison. 
 
 In the analysis the patients have to communicate 
 all these lewd plans, just as everything else that oc- 
 curs to them. In the non-analytic treatment of 
 neurotics all this remains unknown to the physician, 
 and as a result the phantasies sometimes attain an 
 almost hallucinatory character and may end in a 
 public or legal calumny. 
 
 The circumstance that other persons also are be- 
 ing treated psychotherapeutically allows the patients 
 to indulge without any, or with very little, self- 
 reproach the affects of jealousy, envy, hate, and 
 violence that are hidden in their unconscious. Nat- 
 urally the patient has then in the analysis to detach 
 these "inadequate," 7 feeling-impulses also from the 
 current inciting cause, and associate them with much 
 more significant personalities and situations. The 
 same holds good for the more or less conscious 
 thought-processes and 1 feeling-impulses that have 
 
 1 (I. e. disproportionate, misplaced, or inappropriate. Transl.)
 
 Introjection and Transference 45 
 
 their starting-point in the financial contract between 
 the patient and physician. In this way many "mag- 
 nanimous," "generous" people have to see and admit 
 in the analysis that the feelings of avarice, of ruth- 
 less selfishness, and of ignoble covetousness are not 
 quite so foreign to them as they had previously liked 
 to believe. (Freud is accustomed to say, "People 
 treat money questions with the same mendacity as 
 they do sexual ones. In the analysis both have to 
 be discussed with the same frankness.") That the 
 money complex, transferred to the treatment, is often 
 only the cover for much more deeply hidden impulses 
 Freud has established in a masterly characterologi- 
 cal study ("Charakter und Analerotik"). 
 
 When we bear in mind these different varieties of 
 the transference to the physician, we become de- 
 cidedly strengthened in our assumption that this is 
 only one manifestation, although in a practical way 
 the most important one, of the general neurotic 
 passion for transference. This passion, or mania, we 
 may regard as the most fundamental peculiarity of 
 the neuroses, and also that which goes most to ex- 
 plain their conversion and substitution symptoms. 
 All neurotics suffer from flight from their complexes; 
 they take flight into illness, as Freud says, from 
 the pleasure that has become disagreeable; that is 
 to say, they withdraw the "sexual hunger" from cer- 
 tain ideational complexes that were formerly charged 
 with pleasantness. When the withdrawal of "sexual
 
 46 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 hunger" is less complete, the interest for what form- 
 erly was loved or hated disappears, being succeeded 
 by indifference; if the detachment of the "sexual 
 hunger" is more complete, then the censor does not 
 let pass even the slight degree of interest necessary 
 for the exercising of attention the complex becomes 
 "repressed," "forgotten," and incapable of being 
 conscious. It would seem, however, as though the 
 mind did not easily tolerate "sexual hunger" that 
 has been released from its complex, and is thus "free- 
 floating." In the anxiety neurosis, as Freud has 
 shewn, the deviation of the somatic sexual excitation 
 from the psychical field converts the pleasure into 
 anxiety. In the psychoneuroses we have to presup- 
 pose a similar alteration; here the deviation of the 
 psychosexual hunger from certain ideational com- 
 plexes causes a sort of lasting unrest, which the 
 patient tries to mitigate as much as possible. He 
 manages also to neutralise a greater or less part by 
 the way of conversion (hysteria) or of substitution 
 (obsessional neurosis).' It seems, however, as if this 
 bond were scarcely ever an absolute one, so that a 
 variable amount of free-floating and complex-escap- 
 ing excitation remains over, which seeks satisfaction 
 from external objects. The idea of this excitation 
 could be used to explain the neurotic passion for 
 transference, and be made responsible for the 
 "manias" of the neurotic. (In the petite hysterie
 
 Intr ejection and Transference 47 
 
 these manias seem to constitute the essence of the 
 disease.) 
 
 To understand better the fundamental character 
 of neurotics one has to compare their behaviour with 
 that of patients suffering from dementia praecox 
 and paranoia. The dement completely detaches his 
 interest from the outer world and becomes auto- 
 erotic (Jung, 8 Abraham 9 ). The paranoiac, as 
 Freud has pointed out, would like to do the same, 
 but cannot, and so projects on to the outer world 
 the interest that has become a burden to him. The 
 neurosis stands in this respect in a diametrical con- 
 trast to paranoia. Whereas the paranoiac expels 
 from his ego the impulses that have become unpleas- 
 ant, the neurotic helps himself by taking into the 
 ego as large as possible a part of the outer world, 
 making it the object of unconscious phantasies. 
 This is a kind of diluting process, by means of which 
 he tries to mitigate the poignancy of free-floating, 
 unsatisfied, and unsatisfiable, unconscious wish-im- 
 pulses. One might give to this process, in contrast 
 to projection, the name of Intro jection. 
 
 The neurotic is constantly seeking for objects with 
 
 * Jung, Zur Psychologic der Dementia Praecox, 1907. ("Lack 
 of pleasant rapport in dementia praecox.") 
 
 Abraham, "Die psychosexuellen Differenzen der Hysteric 
 und der Dementia praecox," Zentralbl. f. Nervenheilk. u. Psych., 
 1908. ("The contrast between dementia praecox and hysteria 
 lies in the auto-erotism of the former. Turning away of 'sex- 
 ual hunger' in the former, excessive investment of the object in 
 the latter.")
 
 48 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 whom he can identify himself, to whom he can trans- 
 fer feelings, whom he can thus draw into his circle 
 of interest, i. e. introject. We see the paranoiac on 
 a similar search for objects who might be suitable 
 for the projection of "sexual hunger" that is creat- 
 ing unpleasant feeling. So finally there appear the 
 opposite characters of the large-hearted, impression- 
 able, excitable neurotic, easily flaming up with love 
 of all the world or provoked to hate of all the world, 
 and that of the narrow-souled, suspicious paranoiac, 
 who thinks he is being observed, persecuted, or loved 
 by the whole world. The psychoneurotic suffers 
 from a widening, the paranoic from a shrinking of 
 his ego. 
 
 When we revise the ontogenesis of the ego-con- 
 sciousness on the basis of the new knowledge, we come 
 to the conclusion that the paranoiac projection 
 and the neurotic introjection are merely extreme 
 cases of psychical processes the primary forms of 
 which are to be demonstrated in every normal being. 
 
 We may suppose that to the new-born child every- 
 thing perceived by the senses appears unitary, so to 
 speak monistic. Only later does he learn to distin- 
 guish from his ego the malicious things, forming 
 an outer world, that do not obey his will. That 
 would be the first projection process, the primordial 
 projection, and the later paranoiac probably makes 
 use of the path thus traced out, in order to expel 
 still more of his ego into the outer world.
 
 Int rejection and Transference 49 
 
 A part of the outer world, however, greater or 
 less, is not so easily cast off from the ego, but 
 continually obtrudes itself again on the latter, chal- 
 lenging it, so to speak; "Fight with me or be my 
 friend" (Wagner, Gotterdammerung, Act I). If the 
 individual has unsettled affects at his disposal, and 
 these he soon has, he accepts this challenge by ex- 
 tending his "interest" from the ego on to the part of 
 the outer world. The first loving and hating is a 
 transference of auto-erotic pleasant and unpleasant 
 feelings on to the objects that evoke those feelings. 
 The first "object-love" and the first "object-hate" 
 are, so to speak, the primordial transferences, the 
 roots of every future introjection. 
 
 Freud's discoveries in the field of psychopathology 
 of everyday life convince us that the capacity for 
 projection and displacement is present also in normal 
 human beings, and often overshoots the mark. Fur- 
 ther, the way in which civilised man adjusts his ego 
 to the world, his philosophic and religious meta- 
 physics, is according to Freud only metapsychology, 
 for the most part a projection of feeling-impulses 
 into the outer world. Probably, however, besides 
 projection introjection is significant for man's view 
 of the world. The extensive part played in myth- 
 ology by the anthropomorphising of lifeless objects 
 seems to speak in favour of this idea. KleinpauPs 
 able work on the development of speech, 10 to the 
 
 10 Kleinpaul, Das Stromgebiet der Sprache, 1893.
 
 50 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 psychological significance of which Abraham u has 
 called attention, shews convincingly how man suc- 
 ceeds in representing the whole audible and inaudible 
 environment by means of the ego, no form of projec- 
 tion and introjection remaining untried thereby. 
 The way in which in the formation of speech a series 
 of human sounds and noises gets identified with an 
 object on the ground of the most superficial acoustic 
 analogy, and of the slightest "aetiological claim," 
 reminds one strongly of the neurotic transference- 
 bridges mentioned above. 
 
 The neurotic thus makes use of a path that is 
 much frequented by the normal as well when he seeks, 
 to mollify the free-floating affects by extension of 
 his circle of interest, i. e. by introjection, and when, 
 so as to be able to keep unconscious various affective 
 connections with certain objects that concern him 
 nearly, he lavishes his affects on all possible objects 
 that do not concern him. 
 
 In analysing a neurotic one often succeeds in 
 tracing out historically this extension of the circle 
 of interest. Thus I had a patient who was reminded 
 of sexual events of childhood by reading a novel and 
 thereupon produced a phobia of novels, which later 
 extended to books altogether, and finally to every- 
 thing in print. The flight from a tendency to mas- 
 turbate caused in one of my obsessional patients a 
 phobia of privies (where he used to indulge this 
 
 11 Abraham. Traum und Mythos, 1909.
 
 Introjection and Transference 51 
 
 tendency) ; later there developed from this a claus- 
 trophobia, fear of being alone in any closed space. 
 I have been able to shew that psychical impotence 
 in very many cases is conditioned by the transfer- 
 ence to all women of the respect for the mother or 
 sister. 12 With a painter the pleasure in gazing at 
 objects, and with this the choice of his profession, 
 proved to be a "replacement" for objects that as a 
 child he might not look at. 
 
 In the association investigations carried out by 
 Jung 13 we can find the experimental confirmation 
 of this inclination of neurotics to introjection. 
 What is characteristic for the neurosis Jung desig- 
 nates as the relatively high number of "complex- 
 reactions" : the stimulus-words are interpreted by 
 the neurotic "in terms of his complex." The healthy 
 person responds quickly with an indifferent reaction- 
 word that is associated by either the content or the 
 sound. With the neurotic the unsatisfied affects 
 seize on the stimulus-word and seek to exploit it in 
 their own sense, for which the most indirect associa- 
 tion is good enough. Thus it is not that the stimu~ 
 lus-words evoke the complicated reaction, but that 
 the stimulus-hungry affects of neurotics come to 
 meet them. Applying the newly coined word, one 
 may say that the neurotic "mtrojects" the stimulus- 
 words of the experiment. 
 
 "See Chapter I. (Impotence.) 
 
 13 Jung, Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien, 1906
 
 52 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 The objection will be raised that extension of the 
 circle of interest, identifying of oneself with many 
 people indeed with the whole human race , and 
 sensitiveness for the stimuli of the outer world, are 
 attributes with which normal persons also, and espe- 
 cially the most distinguished representatives of the 
 race, are endowed ; that one cannot, therefore, desig- 
 nate introjection as the psychical mechanism that 
 is typical and characteristic of the neuroses. 
 Against this objection must be brought the knowl- 
 edge that the fundamental differences, assumed be- 
 fore Freud's time, between normal and psychoneuro 
 tic do not exist. Freud shewed us that "the neuroses 
 have no special psychical content that is peculiar 
 to them and occurs only in them," and according to 
 Jung's statement, neurotics suffer from complexes 
 with which we all fight. The difference between the 
 two is only quantitative and of practical import. 
 The healthy person transfers his affects and identi- 
 fies himself on the basis of "aetiological claims" 
 that have a much better motive than in the case of 
 the neurotic, and thus does not dissipate his psychi- 
 cal energies so foolishly as the latter does. 
 
 Another difference, to the cardinal importance of 
 which Freud has called attention, is that the healthy 
 person is conscious of the greater part of his intro- 
 jection, whereas with the neurotic this remains for 
 the most part repressed, finds expression in wncon- 
 gcious phantasies, and becomes manifest to the expert
 
 Introjection and Transference 53 
 
 only indirectly, symbolically. It very often appears 
 in the form of "reaction-formations," as an exces- 
 sive accentuation in consciousness of a current of 
 feeling that is the opposite of the unconscious one. 
 
 The fact that the pre-Freudian literature con- 
 tained nothing of all these matters, of transferences 
 to the physician, of introjections fa ne les em- 
 pechait pas d'exister. With this remark I consider 
 answered also those critics who repudiate the posi- 
 tive results of psycho-analysis as not even worthy 
 of being re-examined, but who readily accept our 
 estimate, on which we insist, of the difficulties of this 
 method of investigation, and use it as a weapon 
 against the new movement. Thus I have come across 
 among others the curious objection that psycho- 
 analysis is dangerous because it brings about trans- 
 ferences to the physician, where significantly enough 
 there was never any talk of the negative transfer- 
 ences, 14 but always of the erotic ones. 
 
 If, however, transference is dangerous, then, to 
 be consistent, all neurologists, including the oppo- 
 nents of Freud, must give up having anything to 
 do with neurotics, for we get more and more con- 
 vinced that in the non-analytic and non-psycho- 
 therapeutic methods of treating the neuroses also 
 
 "The practical significance and the exceptional position of 
 the kind of introjections that have as their object the person 
 of the physician, and which are discovered in analysis, make it 
 desirable that the term "transferences" given to them by Freud 
 be retained. The designation "introjection" would be applic- 
 able for all other cases of the same psychical mechanism.
 
 54 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 transference plays the greatest, and probably the 
 sole important part, only that in these methods of 
 treatment as Freud rightly points out merely the 
 positive feelings towards the physician come to ex- 
 pression, for when unfriendly transferences make 
 their appearance the patient leaves the "antipathetic 
 doctor." The positive transferences, however, are 
 overlooked by the physician, who surmises nothing, 
 and the curative effect is attributed to the physical 
 measures or to an obscurely conceived idea of 
 "suggestion." 
 
 The transference shews itself most clearly in treat- 
 ment by hypnotism and suggestion, as I shall try to 
 demonstrate in detail in the following chapter of this 
 work. 
 
 Since I have known something about transferences, 
 the behaviour of the hysteric who after the end of 
 a suggestion treatment asked for my photograph, in 
 order so she said to be reminded of my words by 
 looking at it, appears to me in its true light. She 
 simply wanted to have a memento of me, as I had 
 given so many pleasant quarters of an hour to her 
 conflict-tortured soul by stroking her forehead, by 
 friendly, gentle talk, and by letting her fancies have 
 free rein in a darkened room. Another patient, with 
 a washing mania, even confessed to me once that to 
 please a sympathetic doctor she could often suppress 
 her obsessive act.
 
 Introjection and Transference 55 
 
 These are not exceptional cases, but are typical, 
 and they help to explain not only the hypnotism and 
 suggestion "cures" of psychoneurotics, but also all 
 the others by means of electrotherapy, mechano- 
 therapy, hydrotherapy and massage. 
 
 It is not intended to deny that more reasonable 
 conditions of living improve the nutrition and the 
 general sense of well-being, and in this way can to 
 isome extent help to subdue psychoneurotic symp- 
 toms, but the main curative agency with all these 
 methods of treatment is the unconscious transfer- 
 ence, in which the disguised satisfaction of libidinous 
 tendencies (in mechanotherapy the vibration, in 
 hydrotherapy and massage the rubbing of the skin) 
 certainly plays a part. 
 
 Freud summarises these considerations in the say- 
 ing that we may treat a neurotic any way we like, 
 he always treats himself psychotherapeutically, that 
 is to say, with transferences. What we describe as 
 introjections and other symptoms of the disease are 
 really in Freud's opinion, with which I fully agree 
 self-taught attempts on the patient's part to cure 
 himself. He lets the same mechanism function, how- 
 ever, when he meets a physician that wants to cure 
 him: he tries as a rule quite unconsciously to 
 "transfer," and when this is successful the improve- 
 ment of the condition is the result. 
 
 The plea may be raised that when the non-analytic
 
 56 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 methods of treatment follow although uncon- 
 sciously the path automatically laid down by the 
 sick mind they are in the right. The transference 
 therapy would thus be, so to speak, a natural way 
 of healing, psycho-analysis on the other hand some- 
 thing artificial, imposed on nature. This objection 
 might be irrefutable. The patient does in fact 
 "heal" his mental conflicts through repression, dis- 
 placement, and transference of disagreeable com- 
 plexes ; unfortunately what is repressed compensates 
 itself by creating "costly replacement-formations" 
 (Freud), so that we have to regard neuroses as 
 "healing attempts that have miscarried" (Freud), 
 where really "medicina pejor morbo." It would be 
 very wrong to want to imitate Nature slavishly even 
 here, and to follow her along a road where in the 
 case in question she has shewn her incapacity. 
 Psycho-analysis wishes to individualise, while Nature 
 disdains this; analysis aims at making capable for 
 life and action persons who have been ruined by the 
 summary repression-procedure of that Nature who 
 does not concern herself with the weakly individual 
 being. It is not enough here to displace the re- 
 pressed complexes a little further by the help of 
 transference to the physician, to discharge a little 
 of their affective tension, and so to achieve a tem- 
 porary improvement. If one wants seriously to help 
 the patient one must lead him by means of analysis 
 to overcome opposing the unpleasantness-principle
 
 Introjection and Transference 57 
 
 the resistances (Freud) that hinder him from gaz- 
 ing at his own naked mental physiognomy. 
 
 Present-day neurology, however, will not hear of 
 complexes, resistances, and introjections, and quite 
 unconsciously makes use of a psychotherapeuttic 
 measure that in many cases is really effective, namely 
 transference; it cures, so to speak, "unconsciously," 
 and even designates as dangerous the really effective 
 principle of all methods of healing the psycho- 
 neuroses. 
 
 The critics who look on these transferences as 
 dangerous should condemn the non-analytic modes of 
 treatment more severely than the psycho-analytic 
 method, since the former really intensify the trans- 
 ferences, while the latter strives to uncover and to 
 resolve them as soon as possible. 
 
 I deny, however, that transference is harmful, and 
 surmise rather that at least in the pathology of 
 the neuroses the ancient belief, which strikes its 
 roots deep in the mind of the people, will be con- 
 firmed, that diseases are to be cured by "sympathy.'* 
 Those who scornfully reproach us with explaining 
 and wanting to cure "everything from one point" 
 are still far too much influenced by that ascetic- 
 religious view of life, with its depreciation of every- 
 thing sexual, which for nearly two thousand years 
 has prevented the attainment of insight into the 
 great significance that "sexual hunger" has for the 
 mental life of the normal and pathological.
 
 68 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 II. The Part played by Transference in Hypnotism 
 and Suggestion. 
 
 The Paris neurological school (Charcot's school) 
 regarded stimuli acting peripherally and centrally 
 on the nervous system (optical fixation of objects, 
 stroking the skin of the head, etc.), as the main fac- 
 tors in hypnotic phenomena. The Nancy school 
 (Bernheim's school), on the contrary, sees in these 
 and similar stimuli only vehicles for the "administer- 
 ing" of ideas, and in hypnotism in particular the 
 vehicle for introducing the idea of going to sleep. 
 The successful administration of the sleep idea is 
 then supposed to be able to evoke a kind of "disso- 
 ciation condition of the brain" in which one is ac- 
 cessible with special ease to further suggestions, 
 . e. hypnosis. This was an enormous progress, the 
 first attempt at a purely psychological explanation, 
 freed from unjustifiable physiological phrases, of the 
 phenomena of hypnosis and suggestion, though even 
 this did not quite satisfy our causality criteria. It 
 was a priori unlikely that fixing the eye on a shining 
 object could be the main cause of such radical 
 changes in the mental life as those brought about by 
 hypnosis. It is not much more plausible, however, 
 to assume that an idea "administered" to a waking 
 person, the idea of sleeping, could cause such changes 
 without the indispensable assistance of much more 
 potent psychical forces. Everything speaks much
 
 Introjection and Transference 59 
 
 more in favour of the view that in hypnotism and 
 suggestion the chief work is performed not by the 
 hypnotist and suggestor, but by the person himself, 
 who till now has been looked upon merely as the 
 "object" of the administering procedure. The exist- 
 ence of auto-suggestion and auto-hypnosis on the 
 one hand, and the limits of producible phenomena 
 residing in the individuality of the "medium" on the 
 other hand, are striking proofs of what a subordinate 
 part in the causality chain of these phenomena is 
 really played by the intrusion of the experimental- 
 ist. In spite of this knowledge, however, the condi- 
 tions of the intrapsychical elaboration of the sug- 
 gestion influence remained wrapped in obscurity. 
 
 It was the psycho-analytic investigation of ner- 
 vous patients by Freud's method that first yielded 
 glimpses into the mental processes that go on in 
 suggestion and hypnosis. Psycho-analysis allowed 
 us to establish with certainty the fact that the 
 hypnotist is relieved of the effort of evoking that 
 "dissociation condition" (which effort, by the way, 
 he would scarcely be equal to), for he finds dissocia- 
 tion ready, i. e. the existence of different layers of 
 the mind by the side of one another (Freud's "lo- 
 calities," "ways of working") also in persons who 
 are awake. Besides the certain establishment of this 
 fact, however, psycho-analysis gives previously un- 
 surmised information also about the content of the 
 ideational complexes and the direction of the affects
 
 60 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 that go to make up the unconscious layer of the 
 mind which is operative during hypnosis and sugges- 
 tion. It has been found that in the "unconscious" 
 (in Freud's sense) all the impulses are pent up that 
 have been repressed in the course of the individual 
 cultural development, and that their unsatisfied, 
 stimulus-hungry affects are constantly ready to 
 "transfer" on to the persons and objects of the 
 outer world, to bring these unconsciously into con- 
 nection with the ego, to "introject." If we now im- 
 agine from this aspect the psychical state of a per- 
 son to whom something is to be suggested, we note 
 a displacement of the earlier point of view, a dis- 
 placement that is of cardinal importance. The 
 unconscious mental forces of the "medium" appear as 
 the real active agent, whereas the hypnotist, pre- 
 viously pictured as all-powerful, has to content him- 
 self with the part of an object used by the uncon- 
 scious of the apparently unresisting "medium" ac- 
 cording to the latter's individual and temporary 
 disposition. 
 
 Among the psychical complexes that, fixed in the 
 course of childhood, remain of extraordinarily high 
 significance for the whole fashioning of life later on, 
 the "parental complexes" rank foremost. Freud's 
 experience that these complexes furnish the basis for 
 the psychoneurotic symptoms of adults is confirmed 
 by all who have seriously occupied themselves with 
 these problems. My efforts to investigate analyti-
 
 Int rejection and Transference 61 
 
 cally the causes of psychosexual impotence led to the 
 conclusion that this condition also is in a very large 
 number of cases due to "incestuous fixation" of "sex- 
 ual hunger" (Freud), t. e. to the formation of a too 
 firm though quite unconscious bond between sex- 
 ual wishes and the images of the nearest relatives, 
 especially the parents ; this confirms similar observa- 
 tions of Steiner and Stekel. We owe to Jung 15 and 
 Abraham 16 a considerable enrichment of our knowl- 
 edge concerning the lasting after-effect of parental 
 influences. The former has shewn that psycho- 
 neuroses mostly arise from a conflict between the 
 (unconscious) parental constellation and the striv- 
 ing towards personal independence, and the latter 
 has unmasked as a symptom of the same psychical 
 constellation the inclination to stay unmarried, or 
 to marry near relatives ; Sadger 17 also has rendered 
 service in making these connections clear. 
 
 As psycho-analysts see things, however, it may be 
 considered as settled that there are only quantitative 
 differences between "normal" and "psychoneurotic" 
 mental processes, and that the results of mental in- 
 vestigation of psychoneurotics are also applicable 
 to the psychology of the normal. It is thus a priori 
 
 15 Jung, "Die Bedeutung des Vaters fur das Schicksal des 
 einzelnen," Jahrb., Bd. 1. 
 
 18 Abraham, "Die Stellting der Verwandtenehen in der Psy- 
 chologic der Neurosen," Jahrb., Bd. 1. 
 
 17 Sadger, "Psychiatrisch-Neurologisches in psychoanalytischer 
 Beleuchtung," Zentralbl. f. das Gesamtgebiet d. Medizin, 1908, 
 Nr. 7 and 8.
 
 62 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 likely that the suggestions which one person "gives'* 
 to another set into movement the same complexes as 
 those seen to be active in the neuroses. I have, how- 
 ever, to lay stress on the fact that in reality it was 
 not this a priori expectation, but actual experiences 
 in psycho-analysis that led me to preceive this. 
 
 Freud was the first to notice how in the analysis 
 one sometimes meets with great resistances that seem 
 to make the continuation of the work impossible, and 
 which in fact check it until one manages to make per- 
 fectly clear to the patient that this counter-striving 
 is a reaction to unconscious feelings of sympathy 
 which really refer to other persons, but which at the 
 moment have been brought into connection with the 
 personality of the analyst. 
 
 On other occasions one observes in the patient an 
 enthusiasm for the physician bordering on adoration, 
 and this like everything else has to be submitted 
 to analysis. It turns out here also that the physician 
 has served as a "cover-person" for the indulgence 
 of affects, mostly of a sexual nature, which really 
 refer to other personalities much more signifi- 
 cant to the patient. The analysis is very often, 
 however, disagreeably disturbed by motiveless hate, 
 fear and apprehension in regard to the physician, 
 which in the unconscious relate not to him, but to 
 persons of whom the patient is not at the time think- 
 ing. When now we go through with the patient the 
 list of personalities whom these positive and negative
 
 Introjection and Transference 68 
 
 affects concern, we often come across in the first 
 place some who have played a part in the patient's 
 immediate past (e. g. husband or sweetheart), then 
 come undischarged affects from the period of youth 
 (friends, teachers, hero fancies), and finally we ar- 
 rive, mostly after the overcoming of great resis- 
 tances, at repressed thoughts of sexuality, violence, 
 and apprehension that relate to the nearest relatives, 
 especially the parents. It thus becomes manifest 
 that the child with its desire for love, and the dread 
 that goes with this, lives on literally in every human 
 being, and that all later loving, hating, and fearing 
 are only transferences, or, as Freud terms them, 
 "new editions" of currents of feeling that were ac- 
 quired in the earliest childhood (before the end of 
 the fourth year) and later repressed. 
 
 With this knowledge it was not making a too 
 venturesome step further to assume that the curious 
 authority with which we as hypnotists dispose of all 
 the psychical and nervous forces of the "medium" is 
 nothing else but the expression of repressed, infantile 
 impulses of the hypnotised person. I found this 
 explanation much more satisfying than the assump- 
 tion of a capacity on the part of an idea to provoke 
 dissociation, which would make one feel apprehensive 
 at one's resemblance to a god. 
 
 An obvious objection to these considerations would 
 be that it has long been known how greatly sympathy 
 and respect favour the bringing about of a suggesti-
 
 64 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 ble state*, this fact could not escape the competent 
 observers and experimenters in this field. What has 
 not been known, however, and what could only be 
 known through the help of psycho-analysis, is first 
 that these unconscious affects play the chief part in 
 bringing about the action of suggestion and sec- 
 ondly that in the last analysis they are shewn to be 
 manifestations of libidinous impulses, which for the 
 most part are transferred from the ideational com- 
 plexes bearing on the relation between parent and 
 child to the relation between physician and patient. 
 
 That sympathy or antipathy between hypnotist 
 and medium greatly influences the success of the ex- 
 periment was also previously recognised. It was not 
 known, however, that the feelings of "sympathy" 
 and "antipathy" are highly complex psychical or- 
 ganisations capable of still further analysis, and of 
 dissection into their elements, by Freuds' method. 
 When this is done one finds in them the primary, un- 
 conscious, libidinous impulses as the substratum, 
 and over this an unconscious and preconscious 
 superstructure. 
 
 In the deepest layers of the mind the crude "un- 
 pleasantness-principle" still rules, as at the begin- 
 ning of psychical developments in other words, the 
 impulsion towards immediate motor satisfaction of 
 "sexual hunger;" this is, according to Freud, the 
 layer, or stage, of auto-erotism. This region in the 
 stratification of the adult mind can no longer as a
 
 Intro jection and Transference 65 
 
 rule be directly reproduced, and has to be inferred 
 from its symptoms. What can be reproduced al- 
 ready belongs for the most part to the layer (or 
 stage) of "object-love" (Freud), and the first ob- 
 jects of love are the parents. 
 
 Everything pomts to the conclusion that an un- 
 conscious sexual element is at the basis of every 
 sympathetic emotion, and that when two people meet, 
 whether of the same or the opposite sex, the uncon- 
 scious always makes an effort towards transference. 
 ("In the unconscious No does not exist." . . . "The 
 unconscious can do nothing except wish," Freud 
 writes.) When the unconscious succeeds in making 
 this transference acceptable to the conscious mind, 
 whether it is in a pure sexual (erotic) or in a subli- 
 mated form (respect, gratitude, friendship, aesthetic 
 admiration, etc.) a bond of "sympathy" is formed 
 between the two persons. When consciousness re- 
 fuses to accept the positive unconscious desire, then 
 we get, according to the degree of intensity in each 
 case, antipathy of various degrees up to loathing. 18 
 
 M That the feeling of antipathy, of disgust, is made up of 
 pleasantness and unpleasantness, of liking and disliking, I 
 found to be especially well illustrated in a case of paranoiac 
 delusion of jealousy occurring in a woman of the educated 
 classes; the case was also investigated by Professor Freud. 
 The original cause of her disorder was discovered to be in- 
 fantile homosexuality, which had been transferred from the 
 mother to nurses, later to young friends, and which had been 
 allowed to function extensively. The disappointments of mar- 
 ried life had as a result the flowing back of the "sexual hun- 
 ger" into "infantile channels," but in the meantime this kind 
 f sexual pleasure had become intolerable to her. She pro-
 
 66 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 As a classical witness for the reality of the "sexual 
 attitude" towards all people I might cite Freud's pa- 
 tient Dora (in the Bruchstuck einer Hysterie- 
 analyse). In the course of the analysis, incomplete 
 as this was, it turned out that her sexuality had not 
 remained indifferent to a single person in her environ- 
 ment. The husband and wife of the family K, the 
 governess, the brother, the mother, the father: all 
 excited her "sexual hunger." With all this she was 
 consciously like most neurotics rather prudish 
 and negativistic than otherwise, and had no idea that 
 sexual wishes were concealed behind her gushing 
 friendships, her sympathies and antipathies. 
 
 Dora, however, is not exceptional, but typical. As 
 her analysed mind stands before us she gives a true 
 picture of the inner man in general, for if we go 
 deep enough into the mental life of any human being 
 (whether "normal" or neurotic) we can find again, 
 
 jected it, therefore, on to her husband (whom she had pre- 
 viously loved), and accused him of infidelity. Curiously enough 
 she suspected him only in regard to quite young females, twelve 
 or thirteen years old, or else elderly ugly ones, mostly servants, 
 whom she found "antipathetic" or even "repulsive." Wherever 
 she could admit her fondness to herself in a sublimated form 
 (aesthetic liking, friendship), . g. with pretty women of her 
 own class, she could feel keen sympathy, and she also ex- 
 pressed no delusions in regard to them. The fact that we find 
 a mixture of sweet and bitter "disgusting" probably has 
 similar psychological causes, just as also the idiosyncrasy to- 
 wards food and drink of a certain colour and consistence is a 
 reaction against infantile, repressed wish-impulses, mostly of a 
 coprophilic and urophilic nature. The impulse to spit or vomit 
 at the sight of "disgusting" things is only the reaction to the 
 unconscious desire to take these things into the mouth.
 
 Introjection and Transference 67 
 
 apart from quantitative differences, the same phe- 
 nomena. 
 
 The capacity to be hypnotised and influenced by 
 suggestion depends on the possibility of transference 
 taking place, or, more openly expressed, on the posi- 
 tive, although unconscious, sexual attitude that the 
 person being hypnotised adopts in regard to the 
 hypnotist; the transference, however, like every "ob- 
 ject-love," has its deepest roots in the repressed 
 parental complexes. 19 
 
 Further circumstantial evidence for the correct- 
 ness of this conception is obtained when one takes 
 into consideration practical experience concerning 
 the conditions under which a person may be hypno- 
 tised or made to receive suggestions. 
 
 It is striking how greatly the percentage for suc- 
 cessful hypnosis differs with individual authors. 
 One achieves a positive success in only 50 per cent, 
 another in 80-90, or even 96 per cent of the cases. 
 According to the unanimous conviction of experi- 
 enced hypnotists, suitability for this profession pre- 
 supposes a number of external, and internal attri- 
 butes (really only external, for the "internal" ones 
 also must manifest themselves in movements of ex- 
 pression that can be noted from without and in the 
 nature and content of speech, all of which a the- 
 
 19 Being convinced of the correctness of Berheim's view, that 
 hypnosis is only a form of suggestion (suggested sleep), I at- 
 tach no importance to the sharp differentiation of the two 
 terms, and often use here the one for both.
 
 68 Contribution* to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 atrical talent can imitate without having any feeling 
 of conviction). Hypnosis is facilitated by an im- 
 posing appearance on the part of the hypnotist; 
 one often thinks of an "imposing" man, further, as 
 having a long, and if possible black beard (Sven- 
 gali) ; a notable stature, thick eyebrows, a pene- 
 trating glance, and a stern expression of countenance 
 though one that arouses confidence can compen- 
 sate for the lack of these manly attributes. It is 
 generally recognised that a self-confident manner, 
 the reputation of previous successes, the high esteem 
 attaching to a celebrated man of science, help in 
 the successful effect of suggestion, even when em- 
 ployed also by his assistants. Such effect is also 
 promoted by the hypnotist being of a higher social 
 rank. During my military service I witnessed how 
 an infantryman instantaneously fell asleep at his 
 lieutenant's command; it was a "coup de foundre". 
 My first attempts at hypnotism, undertaken in my 
 student days with the apprentices in my father's 
 publishing business, succeeded without exception ; 
 later on I had nothing like such a high percentage 
 of successes, but then I had lost the absolute self- 
 confidence that only ignorance can give. 
 
 The commands in hypnosis must be given with 
 such decision and sureness that contradiction should 
 appear to the patient as quite impossible. The 
 "being-startled hypnosis" may count as a border- 
 land instance of this kind of hypnosis, where in ad-
 
 Introjection and Transference 69 
 
 dition to a stern tone grimaces and clenched fists 
 may be of use. Being startled just as at the sight 
 of the Medusa head may be followed in a predis- 
 posed person by his being paralysed with fright, or 
 by catalepsy. 
 
 There is quite another method, however, for send- 
 ing someone to sleep, the requisites being: a dark- 
 ened room, absolute stillness, gentle, friendly ad- 
 dress in a monotonous, slightly melodic tone (on 
 which great stress is laid by those experienced in 
 the matter) ; light stroking of the hair, forehead, 
 and hands may serve as adjuvant measures. 
 
 In general, therefore, it may be said that there 
 are two ways and means at our disposal in hypno- 
 tising, or giving suggestion to, others, i. e., in com- 
 pelling them to (relatively) helpless obedience and 
 blind belief : dread and love. The professional hyp- 
 notists of the pre-scientific era of this therapeutic 
 method, the real inventors of the procedures, seem, 
 however, to have chosen instinctively with regard to 
 every detail, for their purpose of sending to sleep, 
 and rendering pliant, just those ways of frightening 
 and being tender, the efficacy of which has been 
 proved for thousands of years in the relations of 
 parent to child. 
 
 The hypnotist with the imposing exterior, who 
 works by frightening and startling, has certainly a 
 great similarity to the picture impressed on the child 
 of the stern, all-powerful father, to believe in, to
 
 70 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 obey, to imitate whom, is the highest ambition of 
 every child. 20 And the gentle stroking hand, the 
 pleasant, monotonous words that talk one to sleep: 
 are they not a re-impression of scenes that may have 
 been enacted many hundred times at the child's bed 
 by the tender mother, singing lullabies or telling 
 fairy-tales ? 
 
 I lay no great stress on this distinction between 
 paternal and maternal hypnosis, for it happens 
 often enough that the father and mother change 
 their parts. I only call attention to the way in 
 which the situation during hypnosis tends to favour 
 a conscious and unconscious imaginary return to 
 childhood, and to awaken reminiscences, hidden 
 away in everyone, that date from the time of child- 
 like obedience. 
 
 The measures also for sending to sleep that are 
 said to work by means of external stimulation, e. g., 
 holding up a shining object, laying a ticking watch 
 to the ear, are the same that first succeeded in fas- 
 tening the attention of the child in his cradle, and are 
 thus very effective means for awakening infantile 
 memories and feeling-impulses. 
 
 That customs and rituals preserved since child- 
 hood also play a large part in the usual sponta- 
 
 10 The giant motive that ever recurs in myths, sagas, and 
 fairy-tales, and the universal interest in these colossal figures, 
 has the same infantile roots, and is a symptom of the undying 
 father-complex. This respect for "giants" appears in Nietzsche 
 in a quite sublimated form as the demand for a "pathos of 
 distance."
 
 Introjection and Transference 71 
 
 neous going to sleep, and that there are auto-sug- 
 gestive elements concerned in going to sleep, has 
 recently been admitted by many, some of whom are 
 hostile to psycho-analysis. All these considerations 
 force one to the supposition that a preliminary con- 
 dition of every successful suggestion (hypnosis) is 
 that the hypnotist shall figure as "grown up" to the 
 hypnotised subject; i. e. the former must be able to 
 arouse in the latter the same feelings of love or fear, 
 the same conviction of infallibility, as those with 
 which his parents inspired him as a child. 
 
 To avoid any misunderstanding it must be pointed 
 out with emphasis that not only is suggestibility 
 (i. e. receptivity for ideas, with the inclination to 
 blind belief and obedience,) here conceived as being 
 genectically connected with analogous psychical pe- 
 culiarities of childhood, but, further, it is our opinion 
 that in hypnosis and suggestion "the child that is 
 dormant in the unconscious of the adult" (Freud) 
 is, so to speak, re-awakened. The existence of this 
 second personality betrays itself not only in hyp- 
 nosis; it is manifested at night in all our dreams, 
 which as we know since Freud's work have always 
 to do with childhood reminiscences, and by day we 
 discover the infantile tendencies and modes of func- 
 tioning of our mind in certain "erroneous perform- 
 ances" 21 and in all expressions of wit. 22 In our 
 
 n Freud. Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. 
 M Freud. Der Witz und seine Beziehungen zum Unbewus- 
 Sten.
 
 72 Contributions to Psycho-Analyait 
 
 innermost soul we are still children, and we remain 
 so throughout life. Grattez VaduLte et vosu, y trour 
 verez Venfant. 
 
 Whoever wants properly to appreciate this way 
 of looking at things has, of course, fundamentally 
 to change his accustomed views about "forgetting." 
 Analytical experience convinces us more and more 
 that a forgetting, a disappearing without leaving a 
 trace, occurs as little in the mental life as does an 
 annihilation of energy or matter in the physical 
 world. Psychical processes seem to possess a very 
 great capacity for persistence and, even after being 
 forgotten for decades, can be revived as unchanged, 
 related complexes, or can be reconstructed from their 
 elements. 
 
 A favourable opportunity puts me in a position to 
 support, by psycho-analytical experiences with pa- 
 tients that I had previously hypnotised, the view 
 that unconditional subordination to an external will 
 is to be explained as simply the unconscious trans- 
 ference to the physician of affects (love, respect) 
 originating in childhood, and erotically tinged. 
 
 1. Five years ago I successfully hypnotised a 
 patient who had fallen ill with an anxiety-hysteria 
 after the proved infidelity of her fiance. About six 
 months ago, after the death of a nephew she had 
 been fond of, she came to me with a recurrence of 
 her suffering, and was submitted to psycho-analysis. 
 The characteristic signs of transference soon shewed
 
 Introduction and Transference 78 
 
 themselves, and when I pointed them out to the 
 patient she supplemented my observations with the 
 confession that already on the previous occasion, 
 during the hypnotic treatment, she had indulged in 
 conscious erotic phantasies concerning the physician 
 and had followed my suggestions "out of love." 
 
 The analysis, therefore, discloses, as Freud says, 
 the transference that created the hypnosis. It thus 
 seems that I had formerly cured the patient in 
 hypnosis through offering her, in my friendliness, 
 sympathy and words of consolation, a replacement 
 for the unhappy love-affair that evoked her first 
 illness. The inclination to the faithless lover was 
 itself only a surrogate for the love of an elder sis- 
 ter, lost through the latter's marriage, with whom 
 she had lived in childhood in the closest intimacy, 
 indulging for years in mutual masturbation. Her 
 greatest grief, however, had been an early estrange- 
 ment from her mother, who before then used to 
 idolise and pamper her to an incredible extent, and 
 indeed all her later essays at loving seemed to have 
 been only surrogates of this first, infantile, but 
 thoroughly erotic inclination to the mother. After 
 the end of the hypnotic treatment her "sexual hun- 
 ger," in a way that was quite sublimated, but which 
 in the analysis proved to be erotic, seized on a 
 little eight-year-old nephew, whose sudden death 
 evoked the recurrence of the hysterical symptoms. 
 The hypnotic docility was here the result of the
 
 74 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 transference, and the original love-object, never i\i\\y 
 replaced, was with my patient undoubtedly the 
 mother. 
 
 n. An official, aged twenty-eight, came to me for 
 the first time about two years ago with a severe 
 anxiety-hysteria. I was already occupied with 
 psycho-analysis, but for external reasons decided on 
 hypnotism, and achieved with simple talking 
 ("mother-hypnosis") a splendid temporary improve- 
 ment in his emotional state. The patient soon re- 
 turned, however, with a recurrence of the anxiety, 
 and I repeated the hypnosis from time to time with 
 the same, but always only a passing, success. As I 
 finally decided on analysis I had the greatest diffi- 
 culties with the transference, certainly increased 
 through the hypnoses. These difficulties were only 
 resolved when it became evident that he had identified 
 me with his "dear mother," on the ground of super- 
 ficial analogies. As a child he had felt himself 
 drawn to the mother in an extraordinary degree, her 
 caresses were a necessity to him, and he also admit- 
 ted having experienced at that time great curiosity 
 concerning the sexual relations of the parents; he 
 was jealous of his father, fancied himself playing 
 the father's part, and so on. For a time the analysis 
 passed off quite smoothly, but when I once dismissed 
 a remark of his a little impatiently he got a severe 
 anxiety attack, and the course of the analysis began 
 to be disturbed. After we had finally talked over
 
 Introjection and Transference 75 
 
 the incident that had excited him, the analysis went 
 deeper into the memories of similar occurrences, and 
 now after despatching friendships tinged with 
 homosexuality and masochism, and painful scenes 
 with teachers and seniors the father-complex ap- 
 peared. He saw in front of him in the flesh the 
 "frightful, grimacing, puckered countenance of his 
 wrathful father," and he trembled at it like an aspen 
 leaf. At the same time, however, a flood of memories 
 also came that shewed how fond he was of his father, 
 and how proud of the latter's strength and size. 
 
 These are only episodes in the analysis of a com- 
 plicated case, but they shew clearly that with the 
 hypnosis it was only his mother-complex, of which 
 he was then still unaware, that enabled me to in- 
 fluence his condition. In this case, however, I 
 should probably have been able to achieve just 
 the same success with the other method of sugges- 
 tion : intimidating, impressing, i. e. appealing to the 
 father-complex. 
 
 m. The third case that I can bring forward is 
 that of a tailor, aged twenty-six, who came for help 
 on account of epileptic attacks, which, however, I 
 considered were hysterical after hearing the descrip- 
 tion of them. His forlorn, submissive, and resigned 
 appearance absolutely cried out for suggestion, and 
 in fact he obeyed all my commands like a tractable 
 child; he developed anaesthesias, paralyses, etc., 
 quite at my will. I did not omit to carry out an
 
 76 Contributions to Psycho- Analyst 
 
 analysis of his condition, although an incomplete one. 
 In this I found that for years he had been somnambu 
 listic; he used to get up at night, sit at a sewing 
 machine, and work at an hallucinated material until 
 he was waked. This "impulsive" occupation dated 
 from the time when he was an apprentice to a strict 
 master-tailor, who often hit him, and whose high 
 demands he had tried to satisfy at any cost. This 
 was of course only a cover-memory for his respected 
 and feared father. His present attacks also began 
 with an impulse to occupation. He believed he heard 
 an inner voice saying "Get up," and then he would 
 sit up, take off his night-shirt, and make sewing 
 movements, which ended in general convulsions ; he 
 could not recall afterwards the motor phenomena, 
 knowing of them only from his wife. His father 
 had called him every morning with the cry "Get up," 
 and the poor fellow seemed still to be always carry- 
 ing out commands that he had received as a child 
 from his father and as an apprentice from his chief. 
 Freud writes 23 "These subsequent effects of orders 
 and threats in childhood may be observed in cases 
 where the interval is as great or greater than here 
 (11/4 decades);" he terms this occurrence "subse- 
 quent obedience." 
 
 I surmise now that this kind of "subsequentness" 
 in the psychoneuroses in general has much in com- 
 mon with the post-hypnotic command- automatisms. 
 
 Freud. Jahrb. Bd., I., S. 23.
 
 Intro jection cmd Transference 77 
 
 In both cases actions are performed the motives of 
 which cannot be explained, or only inadequately, 
 since the patient is following out with them either 
 (in the neurosis) a command repressed long ago 
 or (in the hypnosis) a suggestion concerning which 
 amnesia has been induced. 
 
 That children should willingly, and indeed cheer- 
 fully, obey their parents is really not at all obvious. 
 One might have expected that the demands made 
 by parents on the behaviour and conduct of children 
 would be felt to be an external compulsion, and as 
 something unpleasant. This is really the case in the 
 very first years of life, so long as the child knows 
 only auto-erotic satisfactions, but with the begin- 
 ning of "object-love" it becomes different. The 
 loved objects are introjected, taken into the ego. 
 The child loves his parents, that is to say, he iden- 
 tifies himself with them in thought. Usually one 
 identifies oneself as a child with the parent of the 
 same sex, and fancies oneself into all his situations. 
 Under such circumstances obedience is not unpleas- 
 ant; the expressions of the all-powerfulness of the 
 father even flatter the boy, who in his fancy em- 
 bodies in himself all the power of the father, and 
 only obeys himself, so to speak, when he bows to 
 his father's will. This willing obedience obviously 
 only goes to a certain limit, varying with the in- 
 dividual; if this is overstepped by the parents in 
 their demands, if the bitter pill of compulsion is not
 
 78 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 sugared with love, a precocious severing of tne 
 'sexual hunger" from the parents results, and gen- 
 erally there is an important disturbance of psy- 
 chical development, as especially Jung has estab- 
 lished (in his work on the part played by the father). 
 
 In Mereschkovszky's charming book, "Peter der 
 Grosse und Alexei" (1905) the relationship is very 
 characteristically depicted between a cruel, tyran- 
 nical father, who regrets every impulse of sentiment, 
 and the son, helplessly submissive to him, who 
 through his father-complex, compounded of love and 
 hate, is incapable of energetic revolt. The poetic his- 
 torian makes the picture of the father appear very 
 often in the reveries of the Crown Prince. At one 
 time he sees himself as a little child, with his father 
 before his cot. "He stretches out his arms to his 
 father with a fond, sleepy smile, and cries out "Papa, 
 Papa, my darling.' Then he jumps up and flings 
 himself round his father's neck. Peter embraces 
 him so tightly as to hurt the child, presses him to 
 himself, kisses his face, his neck, his bare legs, and 
 his whole warm, sleepy body." The Czar, however, 
 had later used frightfully stern educational measures 
 when his son was growing up. His pedagogy cul- 
 minated in the following (historical) sentence: "Give 
 the boy no power when he is young; break his ribs 
 so long as he is growing; when you hit him with a 
 stick, he won't die, but will only get stronger." 
 
 And in spite of all this the Czarevitch's face
 
 Intro jection and Transference 79 
 
 glowed with bashful joy when he "gazed at the fa- 
 miliar, horrible and dear face, with the full, almost 
 bloated cheeks, with the curled, pointed moustache 
 . . . with the cordial smile on the dainty, almost 
 womanly tender lips ; he looked into the large, dark, 
 clear eyes, which were as frightful as they were 
 gentle, and of which he had once dreamed as does a 
 youth in love of a beautiful woman's eyes; he took 
 in the odour known to him from childhood, a mixture 
 of strong tobacco, spirits, sweat, and another, 
 strong, but not unpleasant smell of the barracks, 
 one that pervaded his father's working-rooms and 
 office; he felt the touch, also known to him from 
 childhood, of the not very smoothly shaven chin 
 with the little cleft in the middle that formed such 
 a curious exception, almost comical, in the gloomy 
 countenance." Such descriptions of the father, or 
 similar ones, are in psycho-analysis typical. The 
 author wants to make us understand through this 
 characterisation of the bond between father and son 
 how it came about that the Crown Prince in his safe 
 Italian hiding-place gave up all resistance on getting 
 a letter from his father calling him back, and help- 
 lessly yielded himself to that cruel being (who then 
 whipped him to death with his own hands). The 
 Czarevitch's suggestibility is here quite correctly 
 ascribed to his strongly marked father-complex. 
 Mereschovszky seems likewise to have divined "trans- 
 ferences" when he writes: "He (the Czarevitch)
 
 80 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 transferred on to the priestly father (the confessor 
 Jacob Ignatiew) all the love that he could not be- 
 stow on his actual father. It was a jealous, tender, 
 passionate friendship, as though between lovers." 
 
 The feeling of awe for the parents, and the tend- 
 ency to obey them, normally disappear as the child 
 grows up, but the need to be subject to someone re- 
 mains; only the part of the father is transferred 
 to teachers, superiors, impressive personalities ; the 
 submissive loyalty to rulers that is so wide-spread 
 is also a transference of this sort. In Alexei's case the 
 father-complex could not fade even when he grew 
 up, for his father really was the terrible and mighty 
 despot that in childhood we think our fathers to be. 
 
 That the union in the father's person of parental 
 power with the dignity attaching to a respected 
 position can fix immovably any incestuous inclination 
 I was able to observe with two female patients who 
 were pupils of their own father. Passionate trans- 
 ference in the one and neurotic negativism in the 
 other caused almost insuperable difficulties for the 
 psycho-analysis. The limitless obedience in the one 
 case and the defiant rejection of all medical efforts 
 in the other were both determined by the same 
 psychical complexes, by the fusion of the father and 
 teacher complexes. 
 
 These striking cases, as well as all the other ob- 
 servations brought forward above, confirm Freud's 
 view that the hypnotic credulity and pliancy take
 
 Int rejection and Transference 81 
 
 their root in the masochistic component of the sexual 
 mstinct. 24 Masochism, however, is pleasurably obey- 
 ing, and this one learns in childhood from one's 
 parents. 
 
 In the case of the timid and obedient tailor we 
 saw how the parental commands go on acting long 
 after the years of childhood, in the manner of a 
 post-hypnotic suggestion. I have also been able 
 to demonstrate the neurotic analogy to the so- 
 called "dated suggestions" (suggestion a echeance) 
 in a case of morbid anxiety (the twenty-eight year 
 old official mentioned above). He got ill on a 
 quite trivial ground, and it was striking that he 
 had familiarised himself rather too readily with the 
 thought of retiring on his pension at such an early 
 age. The analysis brought out that he had entered 
 on this career exactly ten years before the illness, 
 and very unwillingly, for he considered himself to 
 have artistic gifts. At that time he had only yielded 
 to the pressure brought to bear by his father, mak- 
 ing up his mind, however, to get himself pensioned 
 under the pretext of illness the moment he had served 
 the time (ten years) that entitled him to a pension; 
 (the inclination to malingering dated from childhood, 
 when he had obtained in this way much tenderness 
 from his mother and some consideration from his 
 father). In the meantime, however, he completely 
 
 " Freud. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, S. 18. 
 Anm. 2.
 
 82 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 forgot his resolve ; he got a rather better income, and, 
 although the conflict continued between his antipathy 
 toward his office work and his preference for his ar- 
 tistic activities which he had successfully pursued 
 in the meanwhile, the pusillanimity that had been 
 instilled into him prevented him from even thinking 
 of giving up a part of his income, a loss which his 
 retirement would have entailed. The plan resolved 
 on ten years ago seems to have lain dormant in his 
 unconscious throughout the whole time, to have 
 become mature after the given interval had elapsed, 
 and to have cooperated "auto-suggestively," so to 
 speak, as one of the evoking causes of his neurosis. 
 The fact, however, that the idea of dates and periods 
 of time was able to play such a significant part in 
 the life of this patient was at bottom a symptom of 
 unconscious phantasies connected with infantile pon- 
 derings on the menstruation and gravidity time 
 periods with his mother, and, amongst others, on the 
 idea of his own situation in the womb and at birth. 25 
 This case like all others confirms Jung's state- 
 ment that "the magic binding children to their par- 
 ents" is really "the sexuality on both sides." 
 
 "The unconscious birth-fancy was the final explanation of 
 the following lines that he wrote in his diary during an anxiety 
 attack, and which turned out to possess symbolic meaning: 
 "Hypochondria surrounds my soul like a fine mist, or rather 
 like a cobweb, just as a fungus covers a swamp. I have 
 the feeling as though I were sticking in a bog, as though I 
 had to stretch out my head so as to be able to breathe. I 
 want to tear the cobweb, to tear it. But no, I can't do it! 
 The web is fastened somewhere the props would have to be
 
 Introjection and Transference 83 
 
 Such far-reaching points of agreement between 
 the mechanism of the psychoneuroses revealed analyt- 
 ically and the phenomena that can be produced by 
 means of hypnosis and suggestion absolutely compel 
 us to revise the judgment that has been passed in 
 scientific circles on Charcot's conception of hypnosis 
 as "artificial hysteria." Many scientists believe they 
 have already reduced this idea to absurdity in that 
 they are able to hypnotise ninety per cent of healthy 
 people, considering such an extension of the "hys- 
 teria" concept as unthinkable. Psycho-analysis has 
 led, nevertheless, to the discovery that healthy people 
 fight with the same complexes as those from which 
 the neurotic fall ill (Jung), that thus some hysterical 
 predisposition exists in every human being, which 
 can also manifest itself under unfavourable cir- 
 cumstances that inflict an undue burden on the mind. 
 The fact that so many normal people may be hypno- 
 tised can by no means be taken as an irrefragible 
 proof of the impossibility of Charcot's conception. 
 If, however, one is once free from this prejudice, and 
 compares the pathological manifestations of the 
 psychoneuroses with the phenomena of hypnosis and 
 suggestion, one becomes convinced that the hypnotist 
 can really shew nothing more, and nothing else, than 
 
 pulled out on which it hangs. If that can't be done, one 
 would have slowly to work one's way through the net in order 
 to get air. Man surely is not here to be veiled in such a cob- 
 web, suffocated, and robbed of the light of the sun." All these 
 feelings and thoughts were symbolic representations of phan- 
 tasies concerning intra-uterine and birth events.
 
 84 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 that which the neurosis spontaneously produces : the 
 same psychical, the same paralysis and stimulation 
 phenomena. The impression of a far-reaching anal- 
 ogy between hypnosis and neurosis becomes strength- 
 ened to the point of a conviction of their inherent 
 sameness as soon as one reflects that in both states 
 unconscious ideational complexes determine the phe- 
 nomena, and that among these ideational complexes 
 in both cases the infantile and sexual, especially those 
 concerned with the parents, play the greatest part. 
 It will be the task of future investigations to see if 
 these points of agreement extend to the details as 
 well; our experience up to the present justifies the 
 expectation that this will be shewn to be the case. 
 
 The certainty of this expectation is essentially sup- 
 ported by the undeniable existence of the so-called 
 auto-hypnoses and auto-suggestion. These are states 
 in which unconscious ideas, without any intended 
 external influence, bring about all the neuro-pyschic 
 phenomena of deliberate suggestion and hypnosis. 
 It is perhaps not too daring to assume that a far- 
 reaching analogy must exist between the psychical 
 mechanism of these auto-suggestions and that of 
 psychoneurotic symptoms, which after all are the 
 realisations of unconscious ideas. This relationship, 
 however, must be assumed with just the same right 
 between neurosis and foreign suggestion, since ac- 
 cording to our conception there is no such thing as 
 a "hypnotising," a "giving of ideas" in the sense of
 
 Int rejection and Transference 85 
 
 psychical incorporating of something quite foreign 
 from without, but only procedures that are able to 
 set going unconscious, pre-existing, auto-suggestive 
 mechanisms. The activity of the person suggesting 
 may then be very well compared with the action of 
 the evoking cause of a psychoneurosis. We do not, 
 of course, mean to deny that, in addition to this 
 extensive resemblance, there may also exist differ- 
 ences between being neurotic and being hypnotised; 
 to make these differences clear is indeed an important 
 task for the future. I only wanted here to point out 
 that the high percentage of normal people that may 
 be hypnotised can, according to the experience 
 gamed by psycho-analysis, be cited as an argument 
 rather for the universality of the predisposition to 
 suffer from a psychoneurosis than against the essen- 
 tial sameness of hypnosis and neurosis. 
 
 Even after this discussion, which must at first 
 produce a displeasing impression from its very nov- 
 elty, the statement will probably sound paradoxical, 
 that the resistance against being hypnotised or af- 
 fected by suggestion is a reaction to the same psy- 
 chical complexes that in other cases make trans- 
 ference, hypnosis, or suggestion possible; and yet 
 Freud divined this already in his first work on 
 psycho-analytic technique, 26 and was able to 
 strengthen it by means of examples. 
 
 * Freud, "Zur Psychotherapie der Hysteric," IV Abschnitt in 
 Breuer und Freud, Studien iiber Hysteric, 1895.
 
 86 Contributions to Psycho-Analysit 
 
 According to Freud's conception, which later ex- 
 perience has confirmed in all respects, an inability to 
 be hypnotised signifies an unconscious refusal to be 
 hypnotised. The fact that many neurotics cannot 
 be hypnotised, or only with difficulty, is very often 
 due to their not really wanting to be cured. They 
 have, so to speak, come to terms with their suffer- 
 ing, since it yields them libidinous pleasure 27 , al- 
 though by a highly unpractical and costly route, 
 still without self-reproach, and frequently also 
 brings other considerable advantages (termed by 
 Freud "the secondary function of the neuroses"). 
 
 The cause of a second kind of resistance lies in. 
 the relations between the hypnotist and the person 
 to be hypnotised, in the "antipathy" to the physi- 
 cian. It has already been pointed out that this 
 obstacle also is mostly created by the unconscious 
 infantile complexes. 
 
 It may be assumed with considerable probability 
 that the other resistances which can be demonstrated 
 in the psycho-analytic treatment of patients simi- 
 larly exert influence in attempts at hypnosis and 
 suggestion. There are some sympathies that are un- 
 endurable. The reason for hypnosis miscarrying is 
 in many cases, as Freud has shewn, the fear "of 
 getting too used to the physician's personality, of 
 losing one's independence in regard to him, or 
 
 "Freud, Kleine Schriften, Bd. II, 1909, S. 142: "The hys- 
 terical symptom serves sexual gratification and represents a 
 part of the person's sexual life."
 
 Intro jection and Transference 87 
 
 even of becoming sexually dependent on him." That 
 with one patient an unrestrained inclination to trans- 
 ference comes to expression, in another a flight from 
 every idea of external influence, can ultimately, I 
 believe, be similarly traced to the parental complex, 
 and especially to the way in which the "sexual 
 hunger" became detached from the parents. 28 
 
 IV. Not long ago a patient aged thirty-three, the 
 wife of a land-proprietor, consulted me: her case 
 may serve to illustrate these resistances. Her hus- 
 band was several times awakened in the middle of 
 the night by her moaning, and saw her restlessly 
 turning about in every direction ; "she was making 
 sounds as if something that she was vainly trying 
 to swallow was sticking in her throat" ran the hus- 
 band's description. Finally, choking and straining 
 movements came on, at which the patient would wake 
 up, calmly going to sleep again soon after. The 
 patient was the absolute opposite of a "good me- 
 dium." She was one of those refractory persons 
 who are always lying in wait for inconsistencies in 
 the physician's remarks, who are very particular 
 about everything he does and says, and who alto- 
 gether behave in a very stubborn and almost nega- 
 tivistic manner. Sharpened by bad experiences with 
 
 ** Infantile (incestuous) fixation and capacity for transfer- 
 ence seem in fact to be reciprocal quantities. Every psycho- 
 analyst can entirely confirm Jung's observations on this point, , 
 but I believe that this sentence is also valid for the form of 
 affective transference that we call suggestion.
 
 88 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 such patients, I did not even make any attempt at 
 hypnosis or suggestion, but immediately undertook 
 an analysis. To describe the winding ways by which 
 I arrived at the solution of her symptom-complex 
 would lead me too far from the subject. In the pres- 
 ent connection I will confine myself to the explana- 
 tion of her stubborn behaviour, which shewed 
 to me especially at the beginning of the analysis, 
 and long before that on the most trivial occasions 
 to her husband, with whom she often exchanged 
 not a word for days. Her illness came on after a 
 social gathering, at which she had interpreted as 
 insulting the behaviour of an older lady when the 
 latter wanted to reproach her with improperly tak- 
 ing the first place at the table. The appearance of 
 inadequacy in her feeling-reaction, however, disap- 
 peared as the analysis progressed. When she was 
 a young girl she had really improperly taken the 
 first place at table for a short time at home, after 
 her mother's death. The father had been left with 
 a number of children, and after the burial a touch- 
 ing scene took place between him and his daughter; 
 he promised never to marry again, at which she gave 
 her solemn word not to marry for ten years, and to 
 take her mother's place with the poor orphans. It 
 happened otherwise, however. Scarcely a year had 
 passed before her father began to insinuate that she 
 ought to get married. She guessed what that meant, 
 and obstinately kept every suitor at a distance.
 
 Intro jection amd Transference 89 
 
 True enough, the father soon after took a young 
 wife, and a bitter fight began between the daughter, 
 who was displaced from every position, and her 
 step-mother ; in this fight the father openly took sides 
 against the daughter, and the only weapon against 
 them both that remained to her was stubbornness, 
 which she used to the best of her powers. Up to 
 this point the whole thing sounded like a touching 
 story of the wicked step-mother and the faithless 
 father; but soon came the turn of the "infantile" 
 and the "sexual." As sign of a beginning transfer- 
 ence I began to play a part in her dreams, and curi- 
 ously enough in the not very flattering figure of a 
 composite person put together of myself and a 
 horse. The association to "horse" led to disagree- 
 able topics ; she recollected being taken by her 
 nurse as a quite small child to a stud-farm in the 
 barracks, and seeing many horses there (also copu- 
 lation scenes between stallion and mare). She con- 
 fessed further that when she was a girl she had been 
 unusually interested in the size of the male genitals, 
 and that she had been disappointed at the relative 
 smallness of this organ in her husband, with whom 
 she remained frigid. Even as a girl she persuaded a 
 friend to agree that they would measure the dimen- 
 sions of their future husbands' genital organs and 
 tell each other. She kept her promise, but the friend 
 didn't. 
 
 The strange circumstance that in one dream the
 
 90 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 horse appeared in a night-shirt led to the reproduc- 
 tion of much older childhood memories, among which, 
 as is often the case, the overhearing of sexual acts 
 between the parents, and especially the observation 
 of the father's micturition, were the most important. 
 She remembered now how often she used to fancy 
 herself in her mother's place, how fond she used to 
 be of playing father and mother with her dolls and 
 friends, on one occasion going through an imaginary 
 pregnancy with the help of a pillow stuffed under 
 her petticoats. It turned out finally that the patient 
 had even in childhood suffered for years from minor 
 anxiety-hysteria: often she was not able to go to 
 sleep till late at night from the fear that her stern 
 father might come to her and shoot her dead with 
 the revolver that he kept in his night-commode. 
 The choking and straining movements in her attacks 
 were signs of repression "from below upwards" 
 (Freud); for a long period she was (like Freud's 
 patient, Dora) passionately fond of sucking various 
 objects, a large number of perverse phantasies co- 
 operating with a strongly developed erogenous 
 mouth-zone. 
 
 This anamnesis, although only very imperfectly 
 reproduced, is instructive in two respects. In the 
 first place, it shews that here stubbornness, the re- 
 jection of any idea of being influenced, which stood 
 in the way of any attempt at treatment by sugges- 
 tion, turned out in the analysis to be resistance
 
 Introjection and Transference 91 
 
 against the father. In the second place, the case 
 teaches one that this resistance was a derivative of 
 a strongly fixed parental complex, an Oedipus-com- 
 plex feminini generis, and that her parental com- 
 plexes were interspersed with infantile sexuality. 
 (The horse dreams of this patient also form a strik- 
 ing analogy with the phobia of horses in the five- 
 year-old "little Hans" [Jahrbuch I.] that Freud 
 was similarly able to trace to identification of the 
 father with a horse.) 
 
 What I desired to establish by the facts brought 
 forward is the view that the "medium" is really in 
 love with the hypnotist, and has brought his tend- 
 ency with her from the nursery. I will merely add 
 that the usual state of being in love may also evince 
 psychological phenomena that remind one of hyp- 
 nosis. A man blinded with the passion of love 
 almost helplessly does things suggested to him by 
 his sweetheart, even if they are crimes. In the cele- 
 brated Czynsky trial the most learned experts could 
 not decide whether the actions of the baroness con- 
 cerned were determined by her being in love or by 
 ideas "suggested" to her. 
 
 Most of the homosexuals who have told me their 
 story stated that they had been hypnotised, or at 
 least submitted to the influence of suggestion, by the 
 first man with whom they had had relations. In the 
 analysis of such a case it becomes evident, of course,
 
 92 Contributions to Psycho- Analysts 
 
 that these phantasies of being hypnotised are only 
 apologetic attempts at projection. 
 
 I will content myself with these hints, and will not 
 continue the analogy between the state of being in 
 love and hypnosis, lest the incorrect impression be 
 aroused that it is here only a question of deductively 
 expatiating on a banal resemblance. That is not at 
 all the case. The basis on which this hypothesis is 
 built consists of laborious individual-psychological 
 investigations, such as we have been able to carry out 
 since Freud's work, and if they end in a common- 
 place, that is in no sense an argument against their 
 correctness. 
 
 An undeniable weakness of these considerations, it 
 is true, is that they are based on a relatively small 
 number of observed cases. It lies in the nature of 
 psycho-analytic work, however, that the observation 
 of large numbers and the statistical method are not 
 applicable. 
 
 Nevertheless I believe I have brought together, 
 through thorough investigation of the cases even 
 though these are not many , through the funda- 
 mental agreement in all the cases, and lastly through 
 the extent to which these observations fit in with 
 the rest of psycho-analytic knowledge, sufficient ma- 
 terial to support a conception of hypnosis and sug- 
 gestion that differs from the previous ones. 
 
 According to this conception, the application of 
 suggestion and hypnosis consists in the deliberate
 
 Intro jection and Transference 93 
 
 establishment of conditions under which the tendency 
 to blind belief and uncritical obedience present in 
 everyone, but usually kept repressed by the censor 
 {remains of tlw mfantUe-erotic loving and fearing 
 of the parents), may unconsciously be transferred 
 to the person hypnotising or suggesting. 22 
 
 " (This chapter may be read in conjunction with that en- 
 titled "The Action of Suggestion in Psychotherapy" in the 
 Translator's "Papers on Psycho-Analysis.") :
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DREAMS * 
 
 A PHENOMENON not rare in the evolution of 
 science is that professional men of erudition, 
 with all the help at their disposal, with all the im- 
 plements of their knowledge and ability, combat 
 some principle of popular wisdom which is, on the 
 other hand, defended by the people with equal te- 
 nacity, and that finally science is forced to recognise 
 that in essentials the popular conception, and not 
 its own, is the correct one. It would be especially 
 worthy of investigation to discovery why it is that 
 science, on its gradually mounting path, progresses 
 in an irregular zigzag line, which at times comes close 
 to the popular view of the world, and at times quite 
 departs from it. 
 
 I mention this peculiar phenomenon for the reason 
 that the latest investigations of dreams, those re- 
 markable and bizarre manifestations of mental life, 
 
 'Delivered before the Konigliche Gesellschaft der Aerzte, 
 Budapest, Oct. 16, 1909; published in the Psychiatr.-Neurolog. 
 Wochenschr., Jahrg. XII. (A translation by Professor Chase 
 was also published in the Amer. Jour, of Psych., April, 1910, 
 and I am indebted to President Stanley Hall for permission to 
 reproduce the article in this series. Transl.) 
 
 94
 
 Tlie Psychological Analysis of Dreams 95 
 
 have laid bare facts that compel us to abandon our 
 former views regarding the nature of dreams, and, 
 with certain limitations, to return to the popular 
 conceptions. 
 
 The people have never given up a belief in the 
 significance of dreams. The oldest writings that have 
 been preserved to us, hewn out in stone in praise of 
 the old Babylonian kings, as also the mythology 
 and history of the Hindoos, Chinese, Aztecs, Greeks, 
 Etruscans, Jews, and Christians, take the point of 
 view held to-day by the people, that dreams can be 
 interpreted. The interpretation of dreams was for 
 thousands of years a special science, a particular 
 cult, whose priests and priestesses often decided the 
 fate of countries and called forth revolutions that 
 changed the history of the world. This now anti- 
 quated science rested on the unshakable belief that 
 dreams, though in a concealed way and by obscure 
 analogies, were quite capable of being interpreted by 
 the initiate and revealed the future, and that by 
 these nocturnal phenomena the powers above desired 
 to prepare mortals for approaching events of im- 
 portance. In the lower ranks of the populace the 
 dream book, that curious survival of ancient Baby- 
 lonian astrology, still enjoys to-day great popu- 
 larity. Although the details of the dream-books 
 differ in the different countries, they have to be con- 
 sidered as products of the common folk-spirit. 
 
 On the other hand, we find on the part of the great
 
 96 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 majority of recent psychologists an almost complete 
 contempt for the dream as a psychical function, and 
 consequently a denial that the dream-content has 
 any significance. Many of these investigators con- 
 sider dreams to be a senseless complex of hallucina- 
 tions, which blaze up in a lawless way in the brain 
 of the sleeper. According to the view of other 
 writers dreams are nothing but the psychical re- 
 action to the external (objective) or internal (sub- 
 jective) stimuli which the sensory end-organs of the 
 body receive during sleep an^ conduct to the centres. 
 
 There were only a few who held that the mind at 
 sleep was able to develop a complicated, significant 
 activity, or that the dream could be maintained to 
 have any sort of symbolic meaning. Even these 
 authors, however, failed to make comprehensible the 
 peculiarities of dreams without forcing their explana- 
 tions into the Procrustian bed of an artificial play- 
 ing with allegories. 
 
 Accordingly for centuries the army of supersti- 
 tious interpreters of dreams stood over against that 
 of the sceptics, until about ten years ago the Vien- 
 nese neurologist, Professor Freud, discovered facts 
 that make possible a unification of the two opposing 
 conceptions, and which on the one hand helped to 
 disclose the true nucleus in the age-old superstition, 
 and on the other hand fully satisfied the scientific 
 need for knowledge of the relations between cause 
 and effect.
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 97 
 
 I may state at this point that Freud's theory of 
 dreams and his method of interpretation approach 
 the popular conception only in so far as it attributes 
 sense and meaning to dreams. The newly discovered 
 facts in no way sustain the belief of those who would 
 ascribe dreams to interference on the part of higher 
 powers, and see prophecies in them. Freud's theory 
 regards dreams as mental products dependent on 
 endopsychic occurrences, and is not calculated to 
 strengthen the belief of those who consider the dream 
 to be a device of higher powers or a clairvoyance 
 of the sleeper. 
 
 It was psycho-analysis, a new method for investi- 
 gating and treating psychoneuroses, that made it 
 possible for Freud to recognise the true significance 
 of dreams. The method takes its point of departure 
 in the principle that the symptoms of these dis- 
 orders are only the sensory images of particular 
 thought-constellations, impregnated with feeling, 
 which were distasteful to consciousness and there- 
 fore repressed, but which still live on in the uncon- 
 scious; and in the fact that the surrogate-creations 
 for the repressed material vanish as soon as the un- 
 conscious thought can be brought to light, and made 
 conscious, by help of free association. In the course 
 of this analytic work the patients' dreams were re- 
 lated, and Freud made their content also an object 
 of psycho-analytic investigation. To his surprise 
 he not only found in dream analysis a great aid to
 
 98 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 the treatment of neuroses, but he gained at the same 
 time as a by-product a new explanation of dreams 
 as a psychical function, more enlightening than any 
 of the previous explanations. In many chemical 
 processes materials are incidentally obtained by the 
 reduction of certain chemicals that perhaps have 
 long been thrown away as useless, but which after a 
 time have been shewn to be valuable materials, often 
 surpassing in value the principal products of the 
 manufacture. This was rather the case with the 
 explanation of dreams incidentally discovered by 
 Freud; it opens up such outlooks for the knowledge 
 of both the sound and the disordered mind that by 
 comparison its particular point of departure, the 
 treatment of certain phenomena of nervous disease, 
 seems a scientific question of second rank. 
 
 In the short time at my disposal I cannot repro- 
 duce exhaustively Freud's theory of dreams. I must 
 rather confine myself to the more essential explana- 
 tions and the most valuable facts of the new theory, 
 and to the verification by means of examples. Fur- 
 ther, I do not imagine that this lecture will convince 
 my hearers. According to my experience conviction 
 in matters of psycho-analysis is only to be gained 
 through oneself. So I shall not controvert here the 
 less important and quite superficial critics of Freud, 
 but will rather explain in brief the most essential 
 parts of the theory itself. 
 
 First a few words concerning the method. If we
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 99 
 
 desire to analyse a dream, we proceed exactly as in 
 the psychological investigation of psychoneurotic 
 symptoms. Behind each obsession, no matter how 
 illogical it may appear, are hidden coherent but un- 
 conscious thoughts, and to make these evident is the 
 problem of psycho-analysis. Freud has shewn that 
 the images and experiences of which the dream con- 
 sists are for the most part merely disguises, sym- 
 bolic allusions to suppressed trains of thought. Be- 
 hind the conscious dream-content is hidden a latent 
 dream-material, which, for its part, was aroused by 
 coherent, logical dream-thoughts. The interpreta- 
 tion of the dream is nothing else than the transla- 
 tion of the dream from its hieroglyphic-symbolic 
 speech into conceptual speech, the leading back of 
 the manifest dream-content to the logical dream- 
 thoughts through the clues of association provided 
 by the hidden dream-material. The means by which 
 this is done is the so-called free association. We 
 have the dream related to us, divide the given ma- 
 terial into several parts or sections, and ask the 
 dreamer to tell us all that occurs to him when he 
 directs his attention, not to the whole dream, but to 
 a definite part of it, to a particular event or word- 
 image occurring in it. This association, however, 
 must be wholly free ; consequently the one thing for- 
 bidden is the dominance of critical choice among the 
 irruptive ideas. Any half-way intelligent man can 
 be brought to express all the thoughts associated
 
 100 Contributions to Psycho-Analysts 
 
 with the fragments of the dream, whether clever or 
 stupid, coherent or senseless, pleasant or unpleas- 
 ant, suppressing the shame perhaps bound up with 
 them. The other fragments of the dream are also 
 worked over in this way, and so we collect the latent 
 dream material, that is to say, all the thoughts and 
 memories of which the conscious dream-picture is to 
 be considered the condensation-product. It is an 
 error to think that the activity of association when 
 left free is devoid of any regulation by law. As soon 
 as we disregard in the analysis the conscious goal 
 idea of our thinking, the directive forces of the un- 
 conscious psychic activities, that is to say, the very 
 same mental forces that functioned in the creation 
 of the dream, prevail in the choice of associations. 
 We have long been familiar with the thought that 
 there is no chance in the physical world, no event 
 without sufficient cause; on the basis of psycho- 
 analytical experience we have to suppose just as 
 strict a determination of every mental activity, 
 however arbitrary it may appear. The fear is there- 
 fore unjustified that the activity of association when 
 freed from all restraint, as it is in such an analysis, 
 will give valueless results. The subject of the analy- 
 sis, who at first reproduces his apparently senseless 
 ideas with scornful scepticism, soon discovers, to his 
 surprise, that the train of associations, uninfluenced 
 by conscious aid, leads to the awakening of thoughts 
 and memories that had lorg been forgotten or re-
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 101 
 
 pressed on account of the pain they caused. Through 
 the emergence of these, however, the fragment taken 
 from the dream is made intelligible or capable of in- 
 terpretation. If we repeat this procedure with all 
 the parts of the dream, we see that the trains of 
 thought radiating from the different fragments con- 
 verge on to a very essential train of thought, which 
 had been stimulated on the day before the dream 
 night the dream thoughts themselves. Once these 
 are recognised, not only the single fragment, but also 
 the dream as a whole appears coherent and intelli- 
 gible. If, finally, we compare the point of departure 
 of the dream, the dream thoughts, with the content 
 of the naively related dream, we see that the dream 
 is nothing else than the concealed fulfilment of a 
 repressed wish. 
 
 This sentence contains the most essential results 
 of Freud's investigation of dreams. The idea that 
 dreams fulfil wishes that in the rude world of facts 
 have to remain unfulfilled seems to partake of the 
 language of abandoned popular science. "Dreams'* 
 are used metaphorically in most languages for 
 "wishes," and a Hungarian proverb says just this, 
 "swine dream of acorns, geese of maize" which can 
 only be regarded as an allusion to the similar di- 
 rection of human dreams. 
 
 Some of the dreams of adults and most of those 
 of children are purely wish-fulfilment dreams. The 
 child dreams of pleasurable experiences denied him
 
 102 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 by day, of the toys that he envied his little com- 
 rades, of victorious struggles with those of his own 
 age, of his good mother or his friendly father. Very 
 often in his dream he seems "big," endowed with all 
 the freedom and power of his parents for which he 
 wishes so ardently by day. Wish dreams like these 
 also occur to adults. The difficult examination ( about 
 which we are so anxious) seems in dreams splendidly 
 passed; dear relatives awaken from their graves 
 and assure us they are not dead ; we appear to our- 
 selves rich, powerful, endowed with great oratorical 
 gifts ; the most beautiful of women solicit our favour, 
 and so on. For the most part we attain in dreams 
 just that which we painfully miss on waking. 
 
 The same tendency to wish-fulfilment dominates 
 not only in nocturnal, but also in day dreams, those 
 fancies in which we can catch ourselves at unoccupied 
 moments or during monotonous activity. Freud has 
 observed that women's fancies deal for the most part 
 with things directly or indirectly concerned with sex 
 life (of being loved, proposals, beautiful clothes), 
 those of men predominantly with power and esteem, 
 but also with sexual satisfaction. Fancies concern- 
 ing the means of escape from a real or imagined 
 danger and the annihilation of real or imagined ene- 
 mies are also very common. These simple wish-ful- 
 filment dreams and fancies have an obvious mean- 
 ing, and need no particular labour for their inter- 
 pretation.
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 108 
 
 But what is new, surprising, and incredible to 
 many in Freud's explanation of dreams is the asser- 
 tion that all dreams, even those which seem indiffer- 
 ent or even unpleasant, can be reduced to this basai 
 form, and that it can be shewn by analysis that they 
 fulfil wishes in a disguised way. In order to under- 
 stand this we have first to make ourselves familiar 
 with the mechanism of psychic activity in dreams. 
 
 The associative analysis of a dream is only the 
 reversal of the synthetic work performed at night 
 by the mind when it transforms the unwelcome 
 thought and the unpleasant sensation that disturb 
 sleep into wish-fulfilling dream-images. Critical 
 consideration convinces one that this work never 
 ceases during sleep, even when after waking we can- 
 not recall having dreamed at all. The traditional 
 idea that dreams disturb rest during sleep must be 
 abandoned on the ground of these newly won results ; 
 on the contrary, since they do not allow the unpleas- 
 ant, painful or burdensome thought that would dis- 
 turb sleep to become conscious with its true content, 
 but only in a changed form as the fulfilment of a 
 wish, we are compelled to recognise dreams as the 
 preservers of sleep. 
 
 The psychic factor watching over rest during 
 sleep, often with the assistance of the dream disguise 
 already mentioned, is the censor. This is the gate- 
 keeper at the threshold of consciousness, which we 
 see zealously at work during waking life also, es-
 
 104 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 pecially in the psychoneuroses, and which for our 
 problem is to be considered as either repressing all 
 thought groupings that are in ethical or aesthetic 
 ways distasteful, or disguising them in the form of 
 apparently harmless symbols, symptomatic actions, 
 or symptomatic thoughts. 
 
 The function of the censorship is to secure repose 
 for consciousness, and to keep at a distance all psy- 
 chical productions that would cause pain or disturb 
 rest. And like the censor of political absolutism, 
 who sometimes works at night, the psychic censor- 
 ship is kept in activity during sleep, though its red 
 penciling is not so strongly in evidence as in waking 
 life. Probably the censor is led to relax its activity 
 by the idea that motor reactions are paralysed dur- 
 ing sleep, so that thoughts cannot be expressed in 
 deeds. Thus the fact may be explained that for the 
 most part the images and situations emerging as 
 wish-fulfilments in dreams are those which by day 
 we refuse to recognise as wishes. 
 
 We all shelter in our unconscious many wishes 
 repressed since childhood, which take the oppor- 
 tunity of exercising their psychic intensity as soon 
 as they perceive the relaxation of the censorship at 
 night. 
 
 It is not chance that among the wishes revealed 
 in dreams the greatest part is played by the strongly 
 repressed sexual excitations, and in particular those 
 of the most despised kind. It is a very great error to
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 105 
 
 believe that psycho-analysis deliberately places sex- 
 ual activity in the foreground. It cannot be denied 
 that whenever one attempts thoroughly to investi- 
 gate the basal facts of mental life one always strikes 
 against the sexual element. If, accordingly, we find 
 psycho-analysis objectionable for this reason, we are 
 really degrading the description of the unconscious 
 facts of human mentality by our attitude in regard- 
 ing them as obscene. The censorship of sexual mat- 
 ters is, as already said, much milder in dream life 
 than in waking hours, so that in dreams we experi- 
 ence and crave for sexual experiences without bounds, 
 even representing in our dreams experiences and acts 
 that remind one of the so-called perversions. As an 
 example of this I may avail myself of the dream of 
 a patient who was extraordinarily modest in waking 
 life. He saw himself enveloped in an antique pep- 
 lum, fastened in front with a safety-pin ; suddenly 
 the pin fell out, the white garment opened in front, 
 and his nakedness was admired by a great crowd of 
 men. Another patient, equally modest, told me this, 
 which is an exhibition dream with somewhat altered 
 circumstances : She was draped from top to toe in 
 a white garment, and bound to a pillar ; around her 
 stood foreign men, Turks or Arabs, who were hag- 
 gling over her. The scene strongly reminds one, 
 apart from her enveloping garment, of an Oriental 
 slave market ; and, indeed, analysis brought out that 
 this lady, now so modest, had read when a young
 
 106 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 girl the tales of the Arabian Nights, and had seen 
 herself in fancy in many of the situations of the 
 highly coloured love scenes of the Orient. At that 
 time she imagined that slaves were exposed for sale 
 not clothed, but naked. At present she repudiates 
 the idea of nudity so strongly, even in dreams, that 
 the suppressed wishes bearing on this theme can be 
 manifested only when changed to their opposite. 
 A third dreamer only allowed herself so much free- 
 dom in this respect as to move about amongst the 
 other figures of her dream incompletely clad, in her 
 stockings or with bare feet ; and here analysis shewed 
 that as a child she had over a long period greatly en- 
 joyed removing her clothes and going about without 
 them, so that she was nicknamed "the naked Pancri" 
 (her name was Anna, in Hungarian Fauna). Such 
 exhibition dreams are so frequent that Freud was 
 able to put them in the class of his "typical" dreams, 
 which recur with most people from time to time and 
 have the same origin. They are based on the fact 
 that there lives on in all of us an undying longing 
 for the return of the paradise of childhood; this is 
 the "Golden Age" that poets and Utopians project 
 from the past into the future. It is a very common 
 means of dream disguise to circumvent the censorship 
 by presenting the wish not as such, but only in the 
 form of an allusion in the dream. It would not be 
 possible to understand, for example, why one of my 
 patients dreamed so often of sexual scenes with A
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 107 
 
 man by the name of Frater, who was quite indifferent 
 to her, if we had not learned that in her youth her 
 brother (/ rater) was her ideal and that in childhood 
 the affection of the pair had often assumed a purely 
 erotic form, manifesting itself by relations that she 
 now repressed as incestuous. This repression of for- 
 bidden things often enters into dreams, especially 
 with persons who in consequence of incomplete satis- 
 faction of their sexual hunger are inclined to the 
 development of morbid anxiety (Freud's anxiety 
 neurotics). Nocturnal anxiety can become so great 
 that the dreamer awakes with feelings of distress 
 (pavor noctumus). Anxiety, which has a physio- 
 logical basis, gives in such cases an opportunity for 
 the deeply repressed childish-perverse excitations to 
 involve themselves in the dream, in the form of cruel, 
 horrible scenes, which seem frightful to us, but which 
 in a certain depth of the unconscious satisfy wishes 
 that in the "prehistoric" ages of our own mental de- 
 velopment were actually recognised as desires. 
 
 The great part played in such dreams by cruelties 
 inflicted or endured must find its explanation in the 
 sadistic idea that children have of the sex-relation- 
 ship, as Freud has so prettily shewn in his "infantile 
 sexual theories." 2 All the cruel acts of such dreams 
 appear in analysis as sexual events transformed into 
 deeds of violence. Sexually unsatisfied women, for 
 
 * Freud. Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre. 
 2e Folge, 1909.
 
 108 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 example, very commonly dream of thieves breaking 
 in, of attacks by robbers or wild beasts, not one of 
 the well-concealed incidents of the dream betraying 
 the fact that the outrages to which the dreamer is 
 subjected really symbolise sexual acts. An hysteric 
 of my observation once dreamed that she was 
 run down by a bull in front of which she held a 
 red garment. There was involved in this dream not 
 only the present wish to possess such a dress, but 
 also an unavowed sexual wish, the same one that also 
 caused the illness. The thought of the frightfully 
 enraged bull, which is a wide-spread symbol of mas- 
 culine strength, came to her especially through the 
 circumstance that a man with a so-called "bull neck" 
 had played a certain part in the development of her 
 sexual life. 
 
 Childhood memories make continual and always 
 significant contributions to the creation of dreams. 
 Freud has shewn not merely that even the earliest 
 age of childhood is not free from sexual excitations, 
 but rather that infantile sexuality, not yet restrained 
 by education, is expressly of a perverse character. 
 In infantile sexuality the oral and anal-urethral ero- 
 genous zones, the partial instincts of sexual curiosity 
 and of exhibitionism, as well as sadistic and maso- 
 chistic impulses, dominate the scene. When we con- 
 sider these facts we come to the conclusion that 
 Freud is in the right when he says that dreams ex- 
 press such impulses as wish-fulfilments, the fulfil-
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 109 
 
 ment of wishes from that part of our childhood that 
 seems long since outgrown. 
 
 There are, however, dreams of very unpleasant 
 content which strangely enough disturb our sleep 
 hardly at all, so that when we awaken we reproach 
 ourselves for experiencing such terrible events with 
 so little sympathy or feeling. This sort of dream 
 was observed, for instance, by one of Freud's pa- 
 tients who in a dream was present at the funeral of 
 a beloved nephew. An apparently unessential detail* 
 of the dream, a concert ticket, led to the explanation 
 of the occurrence. The lady in question meant to 
 attend a concert on the next night, where she ex- 
 pected to see again the man whom she had formerly 
 loved and had not yet forgotten, and whom she had 
 last met a long while before at the funeral of another 
 nephew. So the dream, in order to hasten the meet- 
 ing, sacrificed the other nephew. The censorship, ap- 
 parently knowing that a harmless wish, not one of 
 death, was to be fulfilled, let the funeral "pass" 
 without attaching to it any obvious emotional ex- 
 citation. This analysis may serve as an illustra- 
 tion of all those dreams that apparently contradict 
 Freud's wish theory, and which have to do with very 
 unwelcome matters or even with the non-fulfilment 
 of wishes. If we seek out the latent dream thoughts 
 concealed behind these dreams that are invested with 
 painful effects, it becomes clear to us that, as Fteud 
 himself expresses it, the non-fulfilment of a wish in
 
 110 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 a dream always means the fulfilment of some other 
 wish. 
 
 When we consider the dream-material gained by 
 free association from the conscious dream elements, 
 it becomes clear that they more usually flow from 
 two opposite sources; from childhood memories on 
 the one hand, and from unnoticed experiences of the 
 "dream day," often quite indifferent, to which the 
 person had not reacted. Indeed, according to 
 Freud's expression, every well-articulated dream 
 stands as it were on two legs, and is shewn by analysis 
 to be over-determined, that is, to be the fulfilment 
 of both a present and a long suppressed wish. 
 
 As an example I may relate the dream of a patient 
 suffering from a nervous difficulty in urination. "A 
 polished floor, wet, as though a pool lay there. Two 
 chairs leaning against the wall. As I look around, I 
 note that the front legs of both chairs are missing, 
 as when one wants to play a practical joke on some 
 one and gets him to sit down on a broken chair, so 
 that he falls. One of my friends was also there with 
 her affianced." 
 
 Free association on the theme of the polished floor 
 gave the fact that on the day before her brother in 
 a rage had thrown a pitcher to the floor, which, with 
 the water spilled over it, looked like the floor in the 
 dream. She also recalled a similar floor from her 
 childhood; on this occasion her brother, then very 
 young, had made her laugh so hard that micturition
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 111 
 
 ensued. This part of the dream, which also proved 
 to be significant for the symptom-formation of the 
 neurosis, accordingly fulfilled infantile erotic wishes, 
 which could now in consequence of strong censorship 
 be presented only as allusions. The two broken chairs 
 leaning against the wall were shewn by analysis to 
 be a scenic presentation of the proverb "to fall to 
 the ground between two stools." The patient had 
 had two suitors, but the family constellation just 
 mentioned (the unconscious love for the brother) 
 prevented the marriage on both occasions. And al- 
 though her conscious ego, according to her repeated 
 testimony, had long been reconciled to the idea of 
 spinsterhood, she still seems in the depth of her soul 
 to have regarded with some envy the recent be- 
 trothal of one of her friends. The affianced pair 
 had in fact been calling on her the day before the 
 dream. 
 
 According to Freud's theory we may picture to 
 ourselves the origin of this dream in the following 
 way: The dream-work succeeded in uniting two ex- 
 periences of the day before, the breaking of the 
 pitcher and the visit of the bethrothed pair, with that 
 train of thought, always emotionally toned, which, 
 though already suppressed in childhood, was always 
 in a condition to lend its effective energy to any cur- 
 rent mental image that could be brought into even 
 a superficial connection with it. Freud compares a 
 dream to the promotion of a business undertaking.
 
 112 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 in which the unconscious repressed complex fur- 
 nishes the capital, that is, the affective energy, while 
 the wishes play the part of promoters. 
 
 Another source of dreams is in the sensory and 
 sensorial nerve-stimulations to which the organism 
 is subjected during sleep. These may be: dermal 
 stimuli, the pressure of mattress and covering, cool- 
 ing of the skin ; acoustic or optical stimuli ; organic 
 sensation* hunger, thirst, an overloaded stomach, 
 an excited condition of the sexual parts, and so on. 
 Most psychologists and physiologists are inclined 
 to attribute too great significance to stimuli of this 
 sort; they think they have given a satisfactory ex- 
 planation of all dreams when they say that the dream 
 is nothing but the sum of the psychophysical reac- 
 tions set free by nerve stimuli of this character. On 
 the other hand, Freud rightly remarks that the 
 dream does not admit these bodily stimuli as such to 
 consciousness, but disguises and alters them in par- 
 ticular ways ; the motive and means of this disguise 
 are given, not through the external stimuli, but from 
 mental sources of energy. The nervous stimuli dur- 
 ing sleep offer, as it were, only the opportunity for 
 the unfolding of certain immanent tendencies of the 
 psychical life. Analysis shews that dreams caused 
 by nervous stimulation are also wish-fulfilments, 
 either open or concealed: the thirsty man drinks 
 large amounts of water in his dreams; the hungry 
 man satisfies himself; the sick man who is disturbed
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 113 
 
 by the ice-packing on his head throws it away, for 
 he thinks of himself in his dream as already well; 
 the painful throbbing of a boil on the perinaeum 
 leads to the dream idea of riding. So it is made 
 possible that the hunger, the thirst, the pressure on 
 the head, the painful inflammation, do not waken 
 the sleeper, but are transformed into wish-fulfilments 
 by the psychic forces. 
 
 The anxiety-dream known as "nightmare," 
 brought on by an overloaded stomach, respiratory 
 or circulatory disturbances, or by intoxication, per- 
 mits of explanation in the same way ; the unpleasant 
 bodily sensations offer an opportunity for deeply 
 repressed wishes to fulfil themselves, wishes which 
 the censorship of civilisation will not allow to pass 
 and which can break through into consciousness only 
 in connection with feelings of anxiety and disgust. 
 
 In the process of analysis, as has already been 
 said, we retrace, only in the reverse direction, the 
 same path that the sleeping soul has travelled in the 
 formation of the dream. When we compare the mani- 
 fest dream, often very short, with the rich material 
 that is brought to light during the process of analy- 
 sis, and when we consider that in spite of this quan- 
 titative difference all the elements of the latent 
 dream-content are contained in some way in the por- 
 tion that is manifest to us, we must agree that Freud 
 is right in considering this dream-condensation as 
 the most laborious part of the dream-formation, I
 
 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 will try to shew this by means of an example. A 
 patient suffering from psychosexual impotence 
 brought to me on one occasion a dream composed of 
 two fragments. In the first one the only occurrence 
 was that instead of a Hungarian newspaper "Pesti 
 Hirlap," which came regularly to him, he received 
 the Vienna "Neue Freie Presse," to which as a mat- 
 ter of fact one of his colleagues had subscribed. The 
 second part of the dream dealt with a brunette whom 
 he ardently desired to marry. It turned out that in 
 the dream he acquired not the foreign newspaper 
 but, in the hidden sense of the dream, a foreign 
 woman to whom in fact a colleague had "subscribed." 
 This woman had long excited his interest, for it 
 seemed to him that just this person would be able to 
 get his sexuality, which was struggling with strong 
 inhibitions, to function. The thought associations 
 that came from this idea made it plain that he had 
 been deceived in his hopes of another woman, with 
 whom he had entered into the same relation. This 
 woman, being a Hungarian, had been concealed in the 
 dream behind the name of the paper "Pesti Hirlap." 
 Of late he had occupied himself in seeking free sexual 
 associations, which led to no obligations, instead 
 of a more stable relationship. When we know the 
 great freedom with which the dream avails itself 
 of symbols, we are not surprised to learn that my 
 patient also applied the word "Press" in a sexual 
 sense. The second part of the dream shews, as
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 116 
 
 though to confirm our interpretations, that the pa- 
 tient had often been obliged to think, not without 
 anxiety, that relations which lasted too long, like 
 that between him and his friend, could easily lead 
 to a mesalliance. One who does not know what 
 Freud has shewn in his monograph, 3 namely that the 
 psychic motive and means of presentation of wit are 
 almost exactly the same as those that come out in 
 dreams, might consider us guilty of a cheap joke in 
 saying that the dream succeeds in condensing in the 
 words "Neue Freie Presse" all the patient's thoughts 
 and wishes relating to the pleasures of which his ill- 
 ness had robbed him and the means of benefit that 
 he had in mind, namely, the stimulus of the new, and 
 the greater freedom for which he was striving. ( Nov- 
 elty and newspaper are expressed in Hungarian by 
 the same word "ujsag.") 
 
 Highly characteristic products of the dream-con- 
 densation are the composite formations of persons, 
 objects, and words. These "monstrosities of the 
 dream world" have largely contributed to the cir- 
 cumstance that dreams up to our day have been re- 
 garded as mental productions without value or 
 sense. But psycho-analysis convinces us that when 
 the dream links together or fuses two features or 
 concepts, it furnishes a product of the same work of 
 condensation to which the less obvious parts of the 
 
 * Freud. Der Wit* und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. 
 1009.
 
 116 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 dream owe their disguise. One of the rules of the 
 art of dream interpretation says that in cases of such 
 composite formations the dream material of the 
 single constituents must first be sought, and then 
 only can it be determined on what basis of a com- 
 mon element or similarity the welding together has 
 taken place. An example of this, which is of value 
 theoretically, I owe to one of my patients. The com- 
 posite picture that occurred in one of her dreams 
 was made up of the person of a physician and of a 
 horse, which in addition was attired in night cloth- 
 ing. Associations led from the horse into the pa- 
 tient's childhood. As a girl she had suffered for a 
 long time from a pronounced phobia of horses ; she 
 avoided them especially on account of their evident 
 and open satisfaction of their bodily needs. It also 
 occurred to her that as a child she had often been 
 taken by her nurse to the military quarters, where 
 she had had the opportunity of observing all these 
 things with a curiosity that was at that time still 
 unrestrained. The night-clothing reminded her of 
 her father, whom she had had the opportunity of 
 seeing, while she still slept in her parents' room, not 
 only in such costume, but in the act of satisfying his 
 bodily needs. (This case often occurs; parents for 
 the most part place no restraint on themselves be- 
 fore three-and four-year-old children, whose under- 
 standing and faculty of observation they materially 
 underestimate). The third constituent of the com-
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 117 
 
 posite picture, the physician, awakened in me the 
 suspicion, which proved to be well grounded, that the 
 patient had unconsciously transferred her sexual 
 curiosity from her father to the physician who was 
 treating her. 
 
 The constituent parts of a composite image often 
 have an unequal share in its formation ; perhaps only 
 a characteristic movement of one person is grafted 
 on to the second person. I once saw myself in a 
 dream rub my forehead with my hand just as my 
 honoured master, Professor Freud, does when he is 
 meditating over a difficult question. It does not re- 
 quire much art of interpretation to guess that this 
 confounding of teacher and pupil, particularly in, 
 meditation, can only be ascribed to envy and ambi- 
 tion, when at night the intellectual censorship was 
 relaxed. In my waking life I have to laugh at the 
 boldness of this identification, which makes me think 
 of the saying, "How he clears his throat, and how he 
 expectorates, that you have learned well from him." 
 As an example of a composite word I may mention 
 that in a dream a German-speaking patient thought 
 of a certain Metzler or Wetzler. No one of this 
 name, however, is known to the patient, but on the 
 day before the dream he was much occupied with the 
 approaching marriage of a friend, by the name of 
 Messer, who liked to tease (hetzen) the patient. The 
 associations from Messer shewed that as a small 
 child he had been very afraid of his grandfather,
 
 118 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 who while whetting (wetzen) his pocket-knife (Tas- 
 chenmesser) had jokingly threatened to cut his penis 
 off, a threat that was not without influence on the 
 development of his sexuality. The names "Metzler- 
 Wetzler" are accordingly nothing but condensations 
 of the words, messer, lietzen and wetzen. 
 
 Dream condensation stands in close relation to the 
 work of displacement and transvaluation of the 
 dream. This consists essentially in the fact that the 
 psychical intensity of the dream-thoughts is shunted 
 over from the essentials to the accessories, so that 
 the thought-complex that is at the focus of interest 
 is represented in the conscious dream content either 
 not at all or by a weak allusion, while the maximum 
 of interest in the dream is turned to the more insig- 
 nificant constituents of the dream-thoughts. The 
 work of condensation and of displacement go hand 
 in hand. The dream renders harmless an important 
 thought, which would disturb the sleeper's rest, or be 
 censured on ethical grounds. It goes as it were be- 
 yond such a thought, by attaching memory-images 
 to its less essential parts until the condensed psy- 
 chical intensity of the former can distract the at- 
 tention from the thought of particular interest. As 
 an example of the displaced centre of the conscious 
 dream in comparison with the centre of the dream- 
 thoughts I may mention the already cited dream of 
 the aunt concerning the death of her beloved nephew. 
 The funeral, which actually was not essential, took
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 119 
 
 up the largest place in the dream, the personality 
 that was most significant for the dream-thoughts 
 was on the contrary present in the dream only 
 through a distant allusion. 
 
 I was once called upon to analyse the very short 
 dream of a woman ; in it she had wrung the neck of a 
 little, barking, white dog. She was very much aston- 
 ished that she, who "could not hurt a fly," could 
 dream such a cruel dream, and she did not remem- 
 ber having dreamt one like it before. She admitted 
 that, being very fond of cooking, she had many times 
 killed pigeons and fowls with her own hand. Then 
 it occurred to her that she had wrung the neck of 
 the little dog in the dream in exactly the same way 
 as she was accustomed to do with the pigeons in order 
 to cause them less pain. The thoughts and associa- 
 tions that followed had to do with pictures and 
 stories of executions, and especially with the thought 
 that the executioner, when he has fastened the cord 
 about the criminal's neck, arranges it so as to give 
 the neck a twist, and thus hasten death. Aslced 
 against whom she felt strong enmity at the present 
 time, she named a sister-in-law, and related at length 
 her bad qualities and malicious deeds, with which she 
 had disturbed the family harmony, before so beau- 
 tiful, after insinuating herself like a tame pigeon 
 into the favour of her subsequent husband. Not 
 long before a violent scene had taken place between 
 her and the patient, which ended by the latter shew-
 
 120 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 ing her the door with the word : "Get out ; I cannot 
 endure a biting dog in my house." Now it was clear 
 whom the little white dog represented, and whose 
 neck she was wringing in the dream. The sister-in- 
 law is also a small person, with a remarkably white 
 complexion. This little analysis enables us to ob- 
 serve the dream in its displacing and thus disguising 
 activity. Without doubt the dream used the com- 
 parison with the biting dog, instead of the real ob- 
 ject of the execution fancy (the sister-in-law), 
 smuggling in a little white dog just as the angel 
 in the Biblical story gave Abraham at the last mo- 
 ment a ram to slaughter, when he was preparing to 
 slaughter his son. In order to accomplish this the 
 dream had to heap up memory-images of the killing 
 of animals until by means of their condensed psychi- 
 cal energy the image of the hated person paled, 
 and the scene of the manifest dream was shifted to 
 the animal kingdom. Memory-images of human exe- 
 cutions served as a connecting link for this displace- 
 ment. 
 
 This example gives me the opportunity to repeat 
 that, with few exceptions, the conscious dream-con- 
 tent is not the true reproduction of our dream- 
 thoughts, but only a displaced, wrongly accented 
 caricature, the original of which can be reconstructed 
 only by the help of psycho-analysis. 
 
 It is a noteworthy phenomenon of dream work that 
 the material of abstract thought, the concept, is
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 121 
 
 capable of being presented in the dream only to a 
 slight extent or not at all, that rather the dream as 
 it were dramatises thoughts only in optical or acous- 
 tic sense-images, changes them to scenes enacted on 
 a stage, and in this way brings them to presentation. 
 Freud strikingly characterises the difficulty imposed 
 on the dream by this necessity of working only with 
 concrete material when he says that the dream itself 
 has to turn the thoughts of a political editorial into 
 illustrations. 
 
 Dreams are given to using ambiguous words and 
 interpretations of all sorts of expressions in concrete 
 or metaphorical senses in order to make abstract 
 conceptions and thoughts capable of presentation 
 and so of inclusion in the dream. 
 
 The memory of every man at all educated contains 
 a large number of proverbs, quotations, figures of 
 speech, parables, fragments of verse, and so forth. 
 The content of these offers very suitable material, 
 ever present, that can be applied to the scenic presen- 
 tation of a thought or to an allusion to it. I will 
 try to make this clear by a series of examples. One 
 of my patients related to me the following dream: 
 "I go into a large park, walking on a long path. 
 I cannot see the end of the path or of the garden 
 hedge, but I think I will go on until I arrive at the 
 end." The park and hedge of the dream resem- 
 
 4 (This dream was in the Hungarian language, and the sense 
 of it depends on a play on words that is not translated by the 
 author. Transl.)
 
 122 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 bled the garden of one of her aunts, with whom she 
 had passed many happy holidays in her youth. She 
 remembers in connection with this aunt that they 
 customarily shared the same room, but when her 
 uncle was at home the young guest was "put out" 
 into a neighbouring room. The girl at that time had 
 only a very fragmentary conception of sex matters, 
 and often tried by peeping through cracks in the 
 door and through the keyhole to find out what was 
 going on within. The wish to get to the end of the 
 hedge symbolised in this dream the wish to get to 
 the bottom of what was going on between the married 
 pair. This wish was further determined by an ex- 
 perience of the day before. 
 
 Another patient dreamed of the corridor of the 
 girls' boarding school in which she was educated. 
 She saw her own clothes-closet there, but could not 
 find the key, so that she was forced to break open the 
 door; but as she violently opened the door, it be- 
 came evident that there was nothing within. The 
 whole dream proved to be a symbolic masturbation- 
 phantasy, a memory from the time of puberty; the 
 female genitals were, as so often happens, presented 
 as a cupboard. But the supplement to the dream, 
 "there is nothing within" (es ist nichts darm) means 
 in Hungarian the same as "it is no matter" (es ist 
 nichts daran), and is a sort of exculpation or self- 
 consolation of this sufferer from a bad conscience. 
 
 Another girl, whose neurosis was brought on by
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 
 
 the death of her brother, who, according to her 
 view, married too early and was not happy in his 
 marriage, dreamed continually of the dead man. 
 Once she saw him lying in his grave, but the head 
 was turned to one side in a peculiar manner, or the 
 skull had grown into a bough ; another time she saw 
 him, referring to his modest origin, "one fallen from 
 which he had to jump. All this symbolism was a 
 complaint against the wife and the father-in-law of 
 the dead man, who turned the boy's head when he 
 was almost a child, and in the end made him "jump 
 down" (a Hungarian idiom) and who nevertheless 
 did not consider him their equal, for they once called 
 him, referring to his modest origin, "one fallen from 
 a bough" (another Hungarian idiom.) 
 
 Very often falling from a great height pictures in 
 a concrete way the threat of ethical or material fall ; 
 with girls, sitting may mean spinsterhood (Sitzen- 
 bleiben) ; with men, a large basket may mean the fear 
 of an unsuccessful wooing (emen Korb erhalten). It 
 occurs still more commonly that the human body is 
 symbolised by a house, the windows and doors of 
 which represent the natural openings of the body. 
 My patient who suffered from sexual impotence 
 made use of a vulgar Hungarian expression for 
 coitus, namely the word for "to shoot," and very 
 often dreamed of shooting, missing fire, the rusting 
 of his fire-arms, and so on. 
 
 It would be an enticing problem to collect the
 
 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 fragments of dreams that can be explained symboli- 
 cally and to write a modern dream-book, in which 
 the explanation could be found for the separate 
 parts of dreams. This is not possible, however, for 
 although much typical material recurs in dreams and 
 in most cases can be correctly interpretated without 
 analysis, symbols may have different meanings with 
 different individuals, and even with the same indi- 
 vidual at different times. Accordingly, if we wish 
 to know in any particular case all the determinants 
 of a single dream fragment there is nothing for it 
 but laborious analysis, for which the investigating 
 power and the wit of the interpreter alone will not 
 suffice, the industrious co-operation of the dreamer 
 being indispensable. 
 
 Still greater difficulties than are created by the 
 presentation of abstract thoughts are met with when 
 the dream endeavours to present in a concrete way 
 the thought-relations of the individual dream- 
 thoughts. Freud rendered a valuable service by 
 succeeding in making it possible to discover the whole 
 of the concealed, formal peculiarities of the connec- 
 tions of the dream, with which it endeavours to pre- 
 sent logical relations. Logical relations between two 
 dream elements with respect to the dream-thoughts 
 that are concealed behind them are presented in the 
 simplest cases by temporal or spatial proximity, or 
 by a fusion of the features of the dream. 
 
 Dreams lack a means for presenting causal con-
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 125 
 
 nection, of the "either-or" relation of conditions, 
 and so on, so that all these relations are brought to 
 presentation in a very insufficient way by means of 
 a temporal sequence of the dream elements. From 
 this circumstance arise many embarrassments for the 
 dream interpreter, from which he can often be extri- 
 cated only by the communications of the dreamer. 
 Much, however, can be divined. For example, if one 
 dream picture changes to another, we can divine 
 behind this cause and effect; but this connection the 
 dream often presents by two completely separated 
 dreams, one signifying the cause, the other the effect. 
 Even the presentation of a simple negative the dream 
 can manage only with great difficulty, so that as 
 we know from Freud we can never tell in advance 
 whether the dream-thought is to be taken in a posi- 
 tive or a negative way. Considering the complexi- 
 ties of our mental organisation it may be seen only 
 too easily that affirmation and negation of the same 
 thoughts and feeling-complexes are to be met with 
 in the dream-thoughts side by side, or, rather, in 
 succession. It may be taken as an indication of 
 displeasure or scorn when anything in a dream is pre- 
 sented in a reversed form, or when the truth is pre- 
 sented very openly and in a striking way. The 
 feeling of inhibition, which is so common, signifies a 
 conflict of the will, the struggle of opposing motives. 
 In spite of the lack of all logical relations in the 
 translation of the dream-thoughts into the manifest
 
 126 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 dream, the latter often seems to be possessed of sense 
 and to be correlated. When this is the case it may 
 result from one of two causes. We may on the one 
 hand have to do with a dream-phantasy, that is, 
 with the reproduction of fancies that have developed 
 in waking life, articles read in books or magazines, 
 fragments of novels, or bits of conversation spoken 
 or heard by the person himself. A deeper and more 
 general explanation for the apparently logical ar- 
 ticulation of many dreams, however, is the fact 
 that the rationalising tendency of mental activity, 
 which seeks to arrange senseless material into logical 
 trains of thought, does not rest at night. This last 
 activity of the dream Freud calls the secondary elab- 
 oration. It is due to this that the originally frag- 
 mentary parts of the dream are rounded into a 
 whole by supplementarily inserted connecting words 
 and other little connections. 
 
 x^ince the dream has fundamentally condensed, 
 displaced, disguised, and scenically presented a 
 dream-thought, robbed it of its logical connections, 
 and elaborated it in a secondary manner, the work 
 of interpretation is often very difficult. We are con- 
 fronted by the conscious dream-content as by a 
 hieroglyph or by a rebus that is very difficult of 
 solution ; the result is that the explanation of many 
 dreams needs, besides the rules of Freud's interpre- 
 tation, special capacity and inclination to occupy 
 oneself with the questions of mental life.
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 
 
 Not less a riddle than the dream itself is its rapid 
 fading away after awakening. When we awake, the 
 dream-images so toilsomely built up at night collapse 
 like a house of cards. During sleep the mind is like 
 an air-tight room, into which neither light nor sound 
 can penetrate from without, but within whose own 
 walls the slightest sound, even the buzzing of a fly, 
 can be heard. But awakening is like opening the 
 door to the air of the bright morning; through the 
 doors of our senses press in the bustle and the im- 
 pulses of every-day life, and the daily cares, lately 
 soothed to sleep by wish-fancies, once more assert 
 their domination. The censor, too, wakens from its 
 slumber, and its first act is to declare the dream to 
 be foolishness, to explain it as senseless, to put it 
 as it were under guardianship. It is not always 
 satisfied with this measure, it reacts much more 
 strongly against the revolutionary dreams (and 
 there is not a single dream that cannot be shewn 
 by analysis to offend against some ethical or legal 
 canon). The stronger method consists in the con- 
 fiscation, the full suppression, of the dream-image. 
 Mental confiscation is commonly called "forgetting.'* 
 One wonderingly relates how distinctly one dreamed, 
 and yet when one woke all was confused and in a few 
 minutes it had all been forgotten. At other times 
 one can only say that the dream was beautiful, good, 
 bad, confused, stimulating, or stupid. Even in mak- 
 ing this judgment often a remnant of the dream-con-
 
 128 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 tent will shew itself, the analysis of which may lead 
 to a later recovery of larger fragments of the dream. 
 Behind the additional fragments of the dream thus 
 brought to light one often finds the kernel of the 
 dream-thoughts. 
 
 It is an important consequence of Freud's theory 
 of dreams, that one is always dreaming, so long as 
 one sleeps. 5 That one remembers nothing of it is 
 no decisive objection against this consideration. My 
 patients, for example, who at the beginning of the 
 analysis declared that they usually had no dreams, 
 gradually accustomed themselves to remember all 
 their dreams by continual weakening of the internal 
 psychic resistance against the censorship. But if 
 in the course of the analysis one strikes a very re- 
 sistant, painfully toned complex, dreams apparently 
 cease naturally they are only forgotten, repressed, 
 because of their unpleasant content. 
 
 The obvious objection that these dream observa- 
 tions and analyses have for the most part been 
 carried out on neurotic and thus abnormal persons, 
 and that conclusions should not be drawn as to the 
 dreams of healthy people, does not need to be refuted 
 by the reply that mental health and psychoneuroses 
 differ in only a quantitative way; the answer can 
 
 (This remark is perhaps carelessly phrased. The author 
 probably means that unconscious psychic activity always goes 
 on during sleep, tending to lead to the formation of dreams, 
 not that we are always actually dreaming in the sense of con- 
 sciously experiencing fully formed dreams. TransL)
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 129 
 
 also be made that the analyses of people mentally 
 normal fully agree with the interpretations of dreams 
 of neurotics. The communication of the analysis 
 of one's own dreams, however, meets with almost in- 
 surmountable difficulties. Freud has not shrunk 
 from this sacrifice the exposure of intimate per- 
 sonal matters in his Traumdeutung, even though 
 regard for others make unavoidable gaps here and 
 there in his analysis. Similar considerations make 
 it necessary for me to explain the interpretation of 
 dreams not from my own dreams, but from those of 
 my patients. For the rest, the practice of self- 
 analysis is indispensable for anyone who desires to 
 penetrate into the unconscious processes of dream 
 life. 
 
 The neurotic persons whose dreams I have brought 
 forward here and there as examples also pave the 
 way for me to say a few words about the patho- 
 logical significance of dreams and their interpreta- 
 tion. We have seen how greatly the analysis of a 
 neurotic may be accelerated by a successful dream 
 analysis. The dream censorship, which is only half 
 awake, often allows thought-complexes to penetrate 
 to the dream consciousness that in waking life could 
 not be brought to consciousness by free association. 
 From the dream elements also lead out immediate 
 and shorter ways to the repressed pathogenic ma- 
 terial, becoming conscious of such complexes may be 
 regarded as a step towards the cure.
 
 130 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 Then, too, the diagnostic significance of dreams 
 should not escape us, and in a time that is not too 
 distant there ought to arise besides the physiological, 
 also a pathological dream psychology, which should 
 treat systematically of dreams among hysterics, ob- 
 sessional patients, paranoiacs, dementia praecox pa- 
 tients, sufferers from neurasthenia, from the anxiety- 
 neurosis, alcoholism, epilepsy, paralysis, etc. Many 
 pathognostic peculiarities of dreams in these dis- 
 eased conditions are already recognisable to-day. 
 
 All these more practical and special questions have 
 been raised to importance by the unexpected theo- 
 retical consequences of this investigation of dreams. 
 Freud has succeeded in surprising a process on the 
 boundary line between the physiological and patho- 
 logical departments of mental life, in taking it in 
 the midst of its work, in flagranti, so to speak. In 
 this way he has brought us nearer to an understand- 
 ing of the mechanism of the manifestations of neu- 
 roses and insanity in waking life. And though it 
 was the study of psycho-neuroses that led Freud to 
 his investigation of dreams, the dream theory pays 
 back with interest all that it owes to pathology. 
 
 The case could not, indeed, be other than it is. 
 Waking life, dreams, neuroses, and psychoses are 
 only variations of the same psychic material with 
 different modes of functioning, and progressive in- 
 sight into one of these processes must necessarily 
 deepen and widen our knowledge of the others.
 
 The Psychological Analysis of Dreams 131 
 
 Those who expect from the new dream theory any 
 sort of prophetic insight into the future will turn 
 back disillusioned. But those who value highly the 
 solution of psychological problems that have until 
 now been set aside as insoluble, the widening of the 
 psychological point of view apart from any imme- 
 diate practical consequences, and who are not kept 
 back from advance by hide-bound prejudices, will 
 perhaps supplement the presentation given here by a 
 thorough and serious study of Freud's Traumdev- 
 twng.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ON OBSCENE WORDS l 
 
 Contribution to the Psychology of the Latent Period 
 
 IN all analyses one is sooner or later fa^ed with 
 the question whether one should mention in front 
 of the patient the popular (obscene) designations 
 of the sexual and excremental organs, functions, 
 and material, and get him to utter in an unvarnished, 
 unaltered way the obscene words, phrases, curses, 
 etc., that occur to his mind, or whether one can 
 rest content with allusions to them or with the use 
 of scientific language to denote such matters. 
 
 In one of his earlier works Freud called attention 
 to the possibility of finding ways and means to dis- 
 cuss with patients even the most proscribed sexual 
 activities (perversions) without wounding their mod- 
 esty, and for this purpose he recommended the use 
 of technical medical expressions. 
 
 At the beginning of a course of psycho-analytic 
 treatment one avoids unnecessarily provoking re- 
 sistance on the part of the patient, and in this way 
 
 1 Published in the Zentralbl. f. Psychoanalyse, Jahrg. 1, 
 1911. 
 
 132
 
 On Obscene Words 
 
 setting up perhaps insurmountable obstacles to the 
 continuation of the analysis. One contents oneself, 
 therefore, at first with allusive references or with 
 serious scientific terms, and can very soon talk with 
 one's patient about the most delicate matters of 
 sexuality, as of the instincts in general, without ex- 
 citing any reaction of shame whatever. In a number 
 of cases, however, this does not suffice. The analysis 
 comes to a standstill, no thoughts occur to the pa- 
 tient, his behaviour shews signs of inhibition, indica- 
 tions of increased resistance manifest themselves, and 
 this resistance ceases only when the physician man- 
 ages to discover the ground for it in the fact that 
 proscribed words and phrases have occurred to him, 
 which he does not venture to utter aloud without the 
 analyst's express "permission." 
 
 An hysterical patient of twenty-three, for exam- 
 ple, who so far as consciousness was concerned was 
 intent on the greatest honesty, and who listened 
 without much prudishness to my explanations about 
 her sexuality (formulated in scientific language), in- 
 sisted that she had never heard or noticed anything 
 about sexual matters ; she still professed belief in the 
 "kissing-theory" of propagation (which, by the way, 
 is always a secondary one). In order to display 
 her assiduity, she bought a large work on embryol- 
 ogy and related to me, with naive interest and with- 
 out any inhibition, her recently acquired informa- 
 tion concerning spermatozoa and ova, male and fe-
 
 184 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 male sexual organs and their union. On one occa- 
 sion she casually told me that ever since childhood 
 she had had the habit of shutting her eyes when at 
 stool. She could give no reason for this eccentricity. 
 Finally I helped her memory by asking if, by clos- 
 ing her eyes, she had not sought to shun the ob- 
 scene writings and drawing so frequent in closets. 
 I then had to direct attention to the obscene writ- 
 ings known to her, and this evoked in the patient, 
 who up till then had been so superior and imper- 
 turbable, an intense reaction of shame, which gave 
 me access to the deepest layers of her previously 
 latent store of memories. The repression, therefore, 
 evidently appertained to the wording itself of the 
 sexual thought-complexes, and could be reversed only 
 by uttering those "magic words." 
 
 A young homosexual, who without much ado made 
 use of even the vulgar designations for the sexual 
 parts and their functions, refused for two hours 
 long to utter aloud the commoner expression for the 
 word "flatus" which had occurred to him. He sought 
 to avoid it by all possible circumlocutions, foreign 
 words, euphemisms, etc. After the resistance against 
 the word was overcome, however, he was able to pene- 
 trate much deeper into the previously barren analy- 
 sis of his anal-erotism. 
 
 The hearing of an obscene word in the treatment 
 often produces in the patient the same agitation that 
 on some earlier occasion had been produced by ac-
 
 On Obscene Words 135 
 
 cidentally overhearing a conversation between the 
 parents, in which some coarse (usually sexual) ex- 
 pression had slipped o^t. This agitation and shock, 
 which for a moment seriously threatens the child's 
 respect for his parents, and which in a neurotic may 
 remain "fixed" for life (although unconsciously), 
 happens as a rule in the years of puberty and is 
 really a "new edition" of the impressions made by 
 overhearing in infancy actual sexual performances. 
 The early confidence in parents and superior au- 
 thorities, however, which the latter have sought to 
 instil, but which has been nullified by awe, belongs 
 to the most significant complexes of the suppressed 
 psychical material, and if one does not shrink from 
 and, indeed, insists on getting the patient to 
 express the very wording of these thoughts (and, 
 if necessary, to utter it oneself), it often results in 
 unexpected disclosures and a gratifying progress in 
 the mental dissection, which had perhaps been for 
 some time at a standstill. 
 
 Apart from this practical importance, which, by 
 the way, is not to be underestimated, the behaviour 
 of the patient in this connection is also a matter of 
 more general interest. It gives us a psychological 
 problem. 
 
 How is it that it is so much harder to designate 
 the same thing with one term than with another? 
 That this is the case can be observed not only with 
 the patient, but also with oneself. Indeed, it was the
 
 136 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 not inconsiderable inhibition which I noticed, to be- 
 gin with, on mentioning such words, and against 
 which I have even now occasionally to contend, that 
 led me to devote more attention to this question and 
 to investigate it by examining myself as well as my 
 patients. By both of these ways I came to the con- 
 clusion that the popular (obscene) designations for 
 sexuality and excretion, the only ones known to the 
 child, are in the most intimate manner associated 
 with the deeply repressed nuclear complex of the 
 neurotic as well as of the healthy. (Following 
 Freud, I call the Oedipus-complex the "nuclear com- 
 plex.) 
 
 The child's thoughts about the sexual aspects of 
 the parents, about the processes of birth and the 
 animal functions, in a word, the "infantile sexual 
 theories," are, as soon as they appear, clothed in 
 the popular terminology that is the only one accessi- 
 ble to the child. The moral censorship and the in- 
 cest-barrier, which later on covers over these theo- 
 ries, becomes exerted, therefore, on just this formu- 
 lation of the hypotheses. 
 
 This would suffice to make comprehensible, at least 
 in part, the resistance that is manifested against the 
 mentioning of, and listening to, such words. As, 
 however, this explanation did not quite satisfy me, 
 I looked for further causes of the special quality of 
 these word-ideas and reached a point of view that I 
 cannot, it is true, regard as certainly correct, but
 
 On Obscene Words 137 
 
 which I wish to communicate here in order to prompt 
 &ther workers to bring forward a better explanation. 
 
 An obscene word has a peculiar power of compel- 
 ling the hearer to imagine the object it denotes, the 
 sexual organ or function, in substantial actuality. 
 That this is the case was clearly recognised and ex- 
 pressed by Freud in his discussion of the motives and 
 conditions of obscene jokes. He writes: 2 "Through 
 the mentioning of the obscene word the ribald jest 
 forces the assailed person to imagine the part of the 
 body or the function in question." I would supple- 
 ment this statement by calling special attention to 
 the fact that delicate allusions to sexual processes, 
 and scientific or foreign designations for them, do 
 not have this effect, or at least not to the same 
 extent as the words taken from the original, popu- 
 lar, erotic vocabulary of one's mother-tongue. 
 
 One may therefore infer that these words as such 
 possess the capacity of compelling the hearer to 
 revive memory pictures in a regressive and halluci- 
 natory manner. This inference, founded on self-ob- 
 servation, is confirmed by the statements of a con- 
 siderable number of normal as well as of neurotic 
 individuals. The causes of the phenomenon must be 
 sought for in the hearer himself, and we have to as- 
 sume that he harbours in his store of memories a 
 number of word-sound and writing images of erotic 
 
 Freud. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten. 
 S. 80.
 
 188 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 content that differ from other word-pictures in their 
 increased tendency to regression. On hearing or 
 seeing an obscene word this capacity of the mem- 
 ory-traces in question would then come into opera- 
 tion. 
 
 If, now, we subscribe to Freud's conception of the 
 ontogenetic development of the psychical mechan- 
 ism out of a motor-hallucinatory reaction centre to 
 an organ of thought (and his conception is the only 
 one that does justice to the results of psycho-analy- 
 sis and to our idea of the unconscious), we come 
 to the conclusion that obscene words have attributes 
 which all words must have possessed in some early 
 stage of psychical development. 
 
 Ever since Freud's work 3 we regard as the funda- 
 mental cause of every act of mental representation 
 the wish to put an end to an unpleasantness due to 
 privation, by means of repeating an experience of 
 gratification once enjoyed. If this need is not satis- 
 fied in reality, what happens in the first primitive 
 stage of mental development is that on the appear- 
 ance of the wish the perception of the previously ex- 
 perienced gratification becomes regressively engaged 
 (besetzt) and maintained in a hallucinatory way. 
 The idea is thus treated as equivalent to the reality 
 (perceptual identity, as Freud terms it). Only 
 gradually, sharpened by bitter experience of life, 
 
 Freud. Die Traumdeutung. [The view in question is ex- 
 pounded in an article in Child Study, April and May, 1916. 
 Transl.]
 
 On Obscene Words 139 
 
 does the child learn to distinguish the wish-idea from 
 real gratification, and to make use of his motor pow- 
 ers only when he has convinced himself that he sees 
 in front of him real objects, and not illusions of his 
 phantasy. Abstract thought, thinking in words, de- 
 notes the culminating point of this development. In 
 this, as Freud has set forth in detail, finer accom- 
 plishments are rendered possible through the mem- 
 ory images being represented merely by certain 
 qualitative remains of these images, the speech-signs. 
 
 It may be added that the capacity of represent- 
 ing wishes by means of speech signs, so poor in qual- 
 ity, is not acquired all at once. Apart from the 
 fact that it takes some time to learn to speak, 
 it seems that speech-signs replacing images, i. e., 
 words, retain for a considerable time a certain tend- 
 ency to regression, which we can picture to our- 
 selves in a gradually diminishing degree, until the 
 capacity is attained for "abstract" imagination and 
 thought that is almost completely free from hal- 
 lucinatory perceptual elements. 
 
 In this line of development there may be psychical 
 stages of which the characteristic is that the already 
 perfected capacity for the more economic form of 
 thought by means of speech-signs is accompanied 
 with a still existing, strong tendency to revive re- 
 gressively the image of the object. The assumption 
 that such stages occur is supported by the behaviour 
 of children at the time of their mental development.
 
 140 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 Freud, on investigating the psychogenesis of the 
 pleasure afforded by wit, recognised the significance 
 of the child's play with words. "Children," he says, 
 "treat words as objects." 
 
 The distinction, not yet rigorously carried out, 
 between what is only imagined and what is real, 
 (. e. the tendency of the mind to relapse into the 
 primary, regressive mode of functioning), may also 
 make the special charcter of obscene words compre- 
 hensible, and justify the surmise that at a certain 
 stage of development this concreteness, and with it 
 probably a strong tendency to regression, applies 
 still to all words. On this, indeed, rests Freud's ex- 
 planation of dream images ; in sleep we fall back on 
 the original mode of mental functioning, and once 
 more regressively revive the perceptual system of 
 consciousness. In dreams we no longer think in 
 words, but hallucinate. 
 
 If we now assume that this development from 
 speech-signs, still endowed with many concrete ele- 
 ments, in the direction of the abstract has been sub- 
 ject to a disturbance, an interruption, in the case 
 of certain words, which results in a lagging of the 
 word-image on a lower level, then we have some 
 prospect of approaching an understanding of the 
 tendency to regression which is so marked when ob- 
 scene words are heard. 
 
 Not only the hearing of obscene words, however, 
 but also the utterance of them is endued with quali-
 
 On Obscene Words 141 
 
 ties that are not found in the case of other words, 
 at least not in the same degree. Freud points out, 
 with truth, that whoever makes an obscene joke per- 
 petrates, in so doing, an attack (a sexual action) 
 on the object of the aggression, and evokes the same 
 phenomena of reaction as those which would have 
 resulted from the action itself. When uttering an 
 obscene word one has the feeling that it is almost 
 equivalent to a sexual aggression : "uncovering of the 
 individual who interests one personally." 4 The ut- 
 terance of an obscene joke, therefore, shews in a 
 higher degree what is scarcely indicated with most 
 words, namely, the original source of all speech in 
 pretermitted action. While other words, however, 
 contain the motor element of the word-image only 
 in the form of a reduced innervation impulse, the 
 so-called "mimicry of imagery," 5 on uttering an 
 obscene joke we still have the definite feeling of in- 
 itiating an act. 
 
 This marked investment of the vocal image of 
 obscene words with motor elements, as also the sen- 
 sorial and hallucinatory character of the heard ob- 
 scene joke, may be the result of a disturbance in de- 
 velopment. These vocal images may have remained 
 on a level of speech development where words are still 
 more markedly invested with motor elements. One 
 has here to ask oneself whether this speculation, 
 
 Freud. Der Witz. S. 80. 
 Ibid. S. 167.
 
 142 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 which represents only one of the many possibilities, 
 is in any way supported by experience, and if so, 
 what could be the cause of this developmental error, 
 one which concerns a small group of words, and is 
 of general occurrence among civilised people. 
 
 Psycho-analysis of normal and neurotic persons, 
 and observation of children, if fearless investigation 
 is made of the fate that the terms for sexual and ex- 
 cremental organs and functions undergo in the 
 course of mental development, bring much confirma- 
 tion of the hypothesis brought forward here. In 
 the firrt place, confirmation is found throughout of 
 the almost self-evident assumption that the specially 
 strong aversion to repeating certain obscene words 
 is to be ascribed to strong feelings of unpleasantness 
 which have become attached to just those words 
 through inversion of affect in the course of child de- 
 velopment. 
 
 A young man, for example, who was on the whole 
 normal, although he was noted for a rather exag- 
 gerated strictness in morals and was unusually intol- 
 erant of obscene words, recollected during a dream 
 analysis that his mother caught him, when he was six 
 and a half years old, writing down on a piece of pa- 
 per a dictionary, so to speak, of all the obscene 
 expressions he knew. The humiliation of being thus 
 detected, especially by his mother, as well as the se- 
 vere punishment that followed, resulted in a lack 
 of interest in erotic matters for many years after
 
 On Obscene Wordt 143 
 
 and in an inimical disposition even later towards the 
 contents of the erotic vocabulary. 
 
 The young homosexual who had displayed such 
 strong opposition to uttering the obscene word for 
 "flatus" developed in infancy an extraordinary love 
 of odour and coprophilia, and his over-lenient fa- 
 ther did not prevent him from indulging these incli- 
 nations even on his own body (the father's). The 
 association, inseparable from this time forward, of 
 the idea of defilement with that of the parents re- 
 sulted in an unusually strong repression of the pleas- 
 ure in dirt and smell; hence also the great unpleas- 
 antness in mentioning such matters. That it was 
 the obscene term for intestinal gas which was so 
 much more intolerable to him than any circumlocu- 
 tion had its reason in childhood experiences similar 
 to those of the "dictionary-writer" mentioned above. 
 The intimate connection between obscenity and the 
 parental complex was thus the strongest repressing 
 force in both cases. 6 
 
 In the case of the hysterical patient who used to 
 shut her eyes when in the closet this habit could be 
 traced back to the time of a confession at which she 
 was severely reprimanded by the priest for artlessly 
 mentioning the obscene term for the vagina. 
 
 Such rebukes, however, or similar ones, happen to 
 almost every child, with the possible exception of 
 
 The infantile interest for the sounds accompanying the 
 emission of intestinal gas was not without influence on his 
 choice of profession. He became a musician.
 
 144 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 those belonging to the lowest classes. In the fourth 
 or fifth year of life, and considerably earlier with 
 precocious children (i. e., at a time when children 
 are restricting their "polymorphous-perverse" im- 
 pulses), a period is interpolated between the relin- 
 quishing of the infantile modes of gratification and 
 the beginning of the true latency period, one char- 
 acterised by the impulse to utter, write up, and listen 
 to obscene words. 
 
 This fact would without doubt be confirmed by a 
 questionnaire addressed to mothers and teachers, 
 still more certainly by one to servants, the real con- 
 fidants of children, and that this is true of children 
 not only in Europe, but also in such a prudish coun- 
 try as America, I recognised, when strolling with 
 Professor Freud in New York Central Park, from 
 the chalk drawings and inscriptions on a beautiful 
 marble flight of steps. 
 
 We may conceive this impulse to utter, draw, 
 write, hear, and read obscenities as being a prelimi- 
 nary stage in the inhibition of the infantile desires 
 for exposure and sexual visual curiosity. It is the 
 suppression of these sexual phantasies and actions, 
 manifested in the weakened form of speech, that real- 
 ly connotes the beginning of the latency period 
 proper, that period in which "the mental counter- 
 forces against infantile sexuality, namely, disgust, 
 shame, and morality, are formed," 7 and the child's 
 1 Freud. Kl. Schr., 2e Aufl., S. 39.
 
 On Obscene Words 145 
 
 interest is turned in the direction of social activities 
 (desire for knowledge). 
 
 One is hardly likely to be wrong in surmising that 
 this suppression of obscene word-images occurs at a 
 time when speech, and especially the sexual vocabu- 
 lary, which is so strongly invested with affect, is still 
 characterised by a high degree of regressive tend- 
 ency and by a vivid "mimicry of imagery." It is, 
 therefore, no longer so improbable that the sup- 
 pressed verbal material must, in consequence of the 
 latency period (i. e. the deflection of attention), 
 remain at this more primitive developmental stage, 
 while the rest of the vocabulary gradually becomes, 
 for the greater part, divested of its hallucinatory 
 and motor character by progressive exercising and 
 training, and is rendered through this economy suit- 
 able for higher thought activities. 
 
 I know, however, from psycho-analysis of neuro- 
 ses that suppressed or repressed psychical material 
 becomes in fact through the blocking of association 
 a "foreign body" in the mental life, which is capable 
 of no organic growth and of no development, and 
 that the contents of these "complexes" do not par- 
 ticipate in the development and constitution of the 
 rest of the individual. I might bring forward here 
 a few surprising examples. 
 
 Apprehension about the smallness and consequent 
 incapacity of the copulatory organ or, as we psy- 
 cho-analysts are accustomed to say, "the complex
 
 146 Contribution* to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 of the small penis" is especially common among 
 neurotics, and far from rare among the healthy. In 
 every case in which I have analysed this symptom 
 the explanation was as follows: All those who suf- 
 fered later in this way had in their earliest childhood 
 occupied themselves to an unusual degree with the 
 phantasy of coitus cum matre (or with a corre- 
 sponding older person) ; in doing so they had nat- 
 urally been distressed at the idea of the inadequacy 
 of their penis for this purpose. 8 The latency period 
 interrupted and suppressed this group of thoughts; 
 when, however, the sexual impulse unfolded itself 
 afresh in puberty, and interest was again directed 
 towards the copulatory organ, the old distress once 
 more emerged, even when the actual size of the or- 
 gan was normal or exceeded the average. While, 
 therefore, the penis developed in the normal way, 
 the idea of the penis remained at an infantile level. 
 The deflection of attention from the genital region 
 led the individual to take no note of the changes in 
 it. 
 
 I have similarly been able to observe among fe- 
 male patients a "complex of the vagina being too 
 small" (fear that it would be torn during sexual 
 intercourse), and have been able to explain it 
 through the idea of the relative size of the paternal 
 
 The condition for this apprehensive phantasy is the igno- 
 rance of the extensibility of the vagina; children only know 
 that coitus takes place in an opening through which they once 
 passed in toto at birth.
 
 On Obscene Words 147 
 
 organ, an idea acquired in childhood and suppressed 
 in the latency period. Such women are then sex- 
 ually anaesthetic in consequence of the imaginary 
 smallness of the penis in their husbands. 
 
 As a third example of the effect of the latency pe- 
 riod in inhibiting development in an isolated manner 
 I may mention the "complex of the large breast": 
 The dissatisfaction that many men feel with the di- 
 mensions of most female breasts. With one patient, 
 whose sex hunger could be aroused only by quite 
 enormously developed female breasts, it was estab- 
 lished in the analysis that in his early childhood he 
 had taken an extraordinary interest in the suckling 
 of infants and had indulged in the secret wish that 
 he might share with them. In the latency period 
 these fancies disappeared from his consciousness, 
 but when he began once more to take an interest in 
 the opposite sex his wishes were constellated by the 
 complex of the large breast. The idea of the breast 
 had not developed in him during the intermediary 
 period, and the impression of size which the organ 
 must have made on the child, who was then so little, 
 had become fixed. Hence he desired only women 
 whose breasts corresponded with the old proportion 
 of his own smallness to the size of the woman. The 
 female breasts themselves had become relatively 
 smaller in the intermediary period, but the fixed idea 
 of them retained the old dimension. 
 
 These examples, which could easily be multiplied,
 
 148 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 support the assumption that the latency period ac- 
 tually brings about an isolated inhibition in the de- 
 velopment of individual repressed complexes, and 
 this makes it seem likely that the same process hap- 
 pens in the development of verbal images that have 
 become latent. Apart from this inference from an- 
 alogy, however, I wish to mention the fact, which 
 has often been demonstrated from the side of ex- 
 perimental psychology, that young children are of 
 a pronouncedly "visual" and "motor" reaction type. 
 I surmise that the loss of this visual and motor char- 
 acter comes about not gradually, but in a series of 
 stages, and that the advent of the latency period 
 denotes one, and perhaps the most important one, 
 of these stages. 9 
 
 I can bring forward two further series of observations in 
 favour of the correctness of my supposition concerning the 
 influence of the latency period. In a number of cases I have 
 had the opportunity of investigating the cause of lack of 
 capacity for visual representation and the resulting incom- 
 petency for certain subjects of school study that demand a 
 capacity for spacial presentation (geometry, natural history). 
 It appeared that this incapacity, which was out of correspond- 
 ence with the other powers of comprehension, was not con- 
 ditioned by a congenital partial weakness, but came about only 
 after the repression of phantasies, mostly of an incestuous 
 nature, that had been over-exuberant. To secure (Adler) the 
 repression of certain phantasy-pictures all kind of conscious 
 fancying, even the imaginative representation of quite indif- 
 ferent objects, was instinctively avoided. (Dread of the im- 
 agination.) 
 
 Another neurotic symptom, which may be observed much 
 more frequently, is exaggerated calm and grave precision in 
 the carrying out of every action, of every movement, shewn also 
 in the whole attitude and in the dread of all hurry and haste. 
 It is usually accompanied with pronounced antipathy against 
 those people who "let themselves go" easily, who are immod-
 
 On Obscene Words 149 
 
 Little can be said at present concerning the fate of 
 the repressed obscene verbal images during the lat- 
 ency period. From what I have gathered in self- 
 analysis and in the analyses of other normal people, 
 I think I am justified in inferring that the latency 
 of these images, especially with men, is normally not 
 an absolute one. The reversal of affect that occurs 
 sees to it, it is true, that attention is deflected so far 
 as possible from these verbal images that are in- 
 vested with unpleasantness, but a total forgetting, a 
 becoming unconscious of them, scarcely happens in 
 the normal. Everyday life, intercourse with the 
 lower classes and with servants, obscene inscriptions 
 on benches and in public urinals, see to it that this 
 latency gets broken through often enough and that 
 the memory of what has been put aside gets revived, 
 although the point of view is changed. Nevertheless 
 not much notice is paid to these memories for some 
 years, and when they once more make their appear- 
 ance at the time of puberty they are already in- 
 
 erate, hasty, lively, unthinking and frivolous. One might here 
 speak of phobia of movement. This symptom is a reaction- 
 formation against a strong, but suppressed, motor tendency 
 to aggression. 
 
 Both the dread of imagining and that of movement seem to 
 me to be exaggerations of the suppression of phantasy and 
 the inhibition of motility that comes to everybody in the la- 
 tency period, and which helps to purge the motor and hallucina- 
 tory elements even from the images that are capable of being 
 conscious. The images, however, that are incapable of being 
 conscious, the repressed or suppressed ones, and especially 
 the obscene verbal images, retain, as does all repressed ma- 
 terial, the characters of a more primitive type of imagination.
 
 150 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 vested with the character of shamefulness, perhaps 
 also with that of foreignness (on account of their 
 plasticity and natural vividness), which they retain 
 throughout life. 
 
 Quite other is the historical development of these 
 verbal images among the perverse and neurotic. 
 
 Whoever has become perverse, through his sexual 
 constitution and experiences, will, as we might ex- 
 pect according to Freud's theory of sex, take pos- 
 session of this source of pleasure also, and become 
 cynical in his speech, or perhaps content himself 
 merely with reading coarse obscenities. There ex- 
 ists, indeed, a perversity of its own that consists in 
 the uttering aloud of obscene words; I know from 
 the analysis of several women that they have been 
 insulted in the street by well-dressed men, who whis- 
 pered obscene words to them in passing by, without 
 any other sexual advances being made ( such as offer- 
 ing to accompany, etc.). These are evidently mild 
 exhibitionists and voyeurs, who instead of actual 
 exposure content themselves with an act that has 
 been weakened into the form of speech, and who 
 in doing so select those words that (through their 
 being forbidden, as through their motor and plastic 
 attributes) are especially calculated to evoke the re- 
 action of shame. This perversity might be called 
 "coprophemia." 10 
 
 10 "Coprolalia," on the contrary, is the involuntary, obsessive 
 expelling of obscene words, as may happen, for instance, in 
 severe cases of tic convulsif.
 
 On Obscene Words 151 
 
 The true neurotic turns his attention away from 
 obscene words, either completely or almost complete- 
 ly. Wherever possible he passes them by without 
 thinking of them, and when he cannot avoid them he 
 responds with an exaggerated reaction of shame and 
 disgust. The case mentioned above is rare, where 
 the words get totally forgotten. Only women shew 
 such a capacity for repression. 
 
 A very severe mental shock, however, can bring 
 about the re-appearance of these half-buried words 
 in the normal as well as in the neurotic. Then, just 
 as the Olympian gods and goddesses were degraded 
 to demons and witches after the great step in repres- 
 sion betokened by Christianity, so the words that 
 once denoted the most highly treasured objects of 
 infantile pleasure recur in the form of oaths and 
 curses, and, characteristically, associated very often 
 with the idea of the parents or the sacred beings and 
 gods that correspond to them (blasphemies). These 
 interjections that issue in vehement anger, which are 
 often softened down to jokes also, do not at all be- 
 long, as Kleinpaul rightly insists, to conceptual 
 speech ; they do not serve the needs of conscious com- 
 munication, but represent reactions to a stimulus 
 which are nearly related to gestures. It is none the 
 less remarkable, however, that a violent affect is 
 only with considerable difficulty saved from discharg- 
 ing itself along a motor path and is turned into an 
 oath; the affect involuntarily makes use of the ob-
 
 152 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 scene words that are best suited to the purpose from 
 the strength of their affect and their motor force. 
 Quite tragical are the cases in which obscene 
 words abruptly burst forth into the virtuous con- 
 sciousness of a neurotic. Naturally this can hap- 
 pen only in the form of obsessive ideas, for they are 
 so completely foreign to the conscious emotional life 
 of the psycho-neurotic that he feels them to be mere- 
 ly absurd, senseless, pathological ideas, "foreign 
 bodies," and can in no way recognise them as a war- 
 rantable content of his vocabulary. If one were not 
 prepared by what has already been mentioned here, 
 one would be faced with an insoluble riddle in the 
 fact that obsessive ideas of obscene words, and es- 
 pecially of words denoting the most despised ex- 
 cretions and excretory organs in a coarse way, fre- 
 quently appear in men after the death of their fa- 
 ther, in men, in4eed, who adoringly loved and hon- 
 oured their father. Analysis then shews that on the 
 death, in addition to the frightful pain at the loss, 
 the unconscious triumph at being freed at last from 
 all constraint comes to expression, and the con- 
 tempt for the "tyrant" who has now become harm- 
 less displays itself in words that were most strictly 
 forbidden to the child. 11 I have observed a similar 
 case with a girl whose eldest sister became danger- 
 ously ill. 
 
 11 As associative links between the conceptions of death 
 and excrement one often finds the ideas concerning the de- 
 composition of the corpse.
 
 On Obscene Words 153 
 
 An important support for my supposition that 
 obscene words remain "infantile" as the result of in- 
 hibited development, and on this account have an 
 abnormal motor and regressive character, would be 
 the ethnographic confirmation. Unfortunately I 
 have not sufficient experience on this point. What I 
 know of the life of the lower classes, and especially 
 of the gypsies, seems to indicate that among unculti- 
 vated people obscene words are perhaps more mark- 
 edly invested with pleasure, and do not differ so es- 
 sentially from the rest of the vocabulary, as com- 
 pared with the state of affairs among the culti- 
 vated. 
 
 Whether further observation will support or prove 
 incorrect the assumption of a specific infantile char- 
 acter of obscene verbal images, and of "primitive" 
 attributes resulting from a disturbance in develop- 
 ment, I think I can at least maintain after what 
 has been said that these highly affective images have 
 a significance in our mental life which has not up 
 to the present received corresponding attention.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 ON THE PAET PLAYED BY HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE 
 PATHOGENESIS OF PARANOIA X 
 
 IN the summer of 1908 I had the opportunity of 
 opening up the problem of paranoia in the 
 course of conversation with Professor Freud, and we 
 arrived at certain tentative ideas, which for the main 
 part were developed by Professor Freud, while I con- 
 tributed to the final shaping of the train of thought 
 with detached suggestions and criticisms. We laid 
 down to begin with that the mechanism of projec- 
 tion, as explicated by Freud in the only case of 
 paranoia at that time analysed, is characteristic of 
 paranois in general. We assumed further that the 
 paranoiac mechanism stands midway between the 
 opposite mechanisms of neurosis and of dementia 
 praecox. The neurotic gets rid of the affects that 
 have become disagreeable to him by means of the 
 different forms of displacement (conversion, trans- 
 ference, substitution ) ; the patient suffering from de- 
 mentia praecox, on the other hand, detaches his in- 
 
 ' Published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, Band III, 
 1912. 
 
 154
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 155 
 
 tcrest from objects ~ and retracts it to his ego (au- 
 to-erotism, grandiose delusions). 
 
 The paranoiac also would make an attempt to 
 withdraw his participation (in external interests), 
 but it meets with only a limited success. Some of 
 the desires get happily retracted into the ego 
 grandiose delusions occur in every case of para- 
 noia but a greater part of the interest, varying in 
 amount, cannot disengage itself from its original ob- 
 ject, or else returns to it. This interest, however, has 
 become so incompatible with the ego that it gets ob- 
 jectified (with a reversal of affect, t. e. with a "neg- 
 ative sign in front") and thus cast out from the 
 ego. The tendency that has become intolerable, and 
 has been withdrawn from its object, in this way 
 returns from its love-object in the form of a per- 
 ception of its own negative. The feeling of love is 
 turned into the sensation of its opposite. 
 
 The expectation that further observation would 
 verify the correctness of these assumptions has been 
 fulfilled. The cases of paranoid dementia published 
 by Maeder in the last volume of the Jahrbuch con- 
 firm Freud's assumptions to a very considerable ex- 
 tent. Freud himself by further studies has been able 
 to confirm not only this leading formula of paranoia, 
 but also certain finer details that we presuppose in 
 
 Cp. Abraham, "Die psychosexuellen Differenzen der Hys- 
 teric und der Dementia praecox," Zentralbl. f. Nervenheilk. u. 
 Psych., Juli, 1908.
 
 156 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 the psychical mechanism of the different kinds of 
 paranoia. 
 
 The aim of the present publication, however, is 
 not the opening up of the whole question of paranoia 
 (to which Professor Freud himself is devoting a 
 larger work 3 ), but only the communication of an 
 experiential fact which the analysis of several para- 
 noiacs has yielded, and which goes beyond the an- 
 ticipated ideas mentioned above. 
 
 It has become evident, namely, that t he paranoiac 
 mechanism is not set in action as a defence against 
 all possible attachments of the "sexual hunger," 
 but, according to the observations made up to the 
 present, * directed only against the homosexual 
 choice of object. 
 
 Homosexuality played a strikingly great part in 
 the case of the paranoiac analysed long ago by 
 Freud, a part not adequately appreciated by him at 
 that time. 4 In Maeder's investigations into cases 
 
 Jahrb., Bd. III. Reprinted in Sammlung kl. Schr., 3e 
 Folge. 
 
 4 "When she was alone with the servant" she "had a sen- 
 sation in the lower part of the body, which made her think 
 that the maid then had an indecent thought." She had "hallu- 
 cinations of female nudities, especially of an exposed female 
 lap with hair, occasionally also of male genitals." "When- 
 ever she was in a woman's company she constantly got the 
 torturing sensations of seeing her indecently exposed, and 
 believed that in the same moment the woman had the same 
 sensation about her." "The first pictures of female laps came 
 a few seconds after she had in fact seen a number of un- 
 dressed women at the baths." "Everything became plain to 
 her as soon as her sister-in-law uttered something," etc. 
 (Freud, Sammlung kl. Schr., S. 124.)
 
 Homosexriality in Pathogen-esis of Paranoia 157 
 
 of paranoid dementia also "undoubted homosexual 
 tendencies" 5 were discovered behind one patient's 
 delusions of persecution. 
 
 The observation of several cases, presently to be 
 related, seems to justify the surmise that in the 
 pathogenesis of paranoia, homosexuality plays not 
 a chance part, but the most important one, and that 
 paranoia is perhaps nothing else at all than dis- 
 guised homosexuality. 
 
 The first case occurred in the husband of my own 
 housekeeper, a well-built man of about thirty-eight, 
 whom I had occasion to observe exhaustively for sev- 
 eral months. 
 
 He and his wife (who could hardly be called 
 pretty), who had got married just before entering 
 my service, occupied a part of my flat consisting of 
 one room and the kitchen. 6 The husband worked 
 all day (he was an employee in the post-office), 
 came home punctually in the evening, and in the 
 first part of his time with me gave no grounds for 
 complaint. On the contrary, he impressed me by 
 his extraordinary diligence and his great politeness 
 to myself. He always found something in my rooms 
 to clean and embellish. I would come across him 
 
 "Jahrb., Bd. II, S. 237. 
 
 It is customary here in Budapest to get a reliable married 
 couple to look after one's residence.
 
 158 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 late at night putting fresh polish on the doors or 
 floors, burnishing the top window-panes that could 
 hardly be reached, or arranging some ingenious nov- 
 elty in the bathroom. He was most desirous of giv- 
 ing me satisfaction, obeyed all my instructions with 
 military smartness and punctuality, but was ex- 
 tremely sensitive to any criticism on my part, for 
 which, it is true, he rarely gave any occasion. 
 
 One day the housekeeper sobbingly told me that 
 she lived very unhappily with her husband. He was 
 drinking a great deal latterly, came home late, and 
 constantly scolded and abused her without cause. 
 At first I did not want to interfere in this domestic 
 affair, but when I accidentally heard that he was 
 beating his wife (which fact the woman had con- 
 cealed from me for fear of losing her place), I spoke 
 to him seriously and insisted he should abstain from 
 alcohol and treat his wife well, all of which he tear- 
 fully promised me. When I offered to shake hands 
 with him I could not prevent his impetuously kiss- 
 ing my hand. I ascribed this at the time, however, 
 to his emotion and to my "paternal" attitude (al- 
 though I was younger than he). 
 
 After this scene peace prevailed in the house for a 
 time. A few weeks later, however, the same scenes 
 were repeated, and when I now looked at the man 
 more carefully I saw evident signs of chronic alco- 
 holism. On this I interrogated the woman and learnt 
 from her that she was constantly being accused by
 
 Homosexuality m Pathogenesis of Paranoia 159 
 
 her husband of marital infidelity, without the slight- 
 est ground. The suspicion naturally occurred to me 
 at once that the husband was suffering from alco- 
 holic delusions of jealousy, the more so since I knew 
 the housekeeper to be a very respectable and modest 
 person. I managed once more to get the husband 
 to give up drinking, and to restore peace in the 
 house for a while. 
 
 The state of affairs, however, soon changed for the 
 worse. It became clear that we had to deal with a 
 case of alcoholic paranoia. The man neglected his 
 wife, and stayed in the public-house drinking till 
 midnight. On coming home he beat his wife, abused 
 her incessantly, and accused her of flirting with 
 every male patient who came to see me. I learnt 
 subsequently that he was even at this time jealous 
 also of me, but his wife, from a comprehensible anx- 
 iety, concealed this from me. I was naturally un- 
 able to keep the couple any longer, but I allowed the 
 woman, at her request, to retain her position until 
 the quarter was up. 
 
 It was now that I learnt all the details of these 
 domestic scenes. The husband, whom I called to 
 account, absolutely denied having beaten his wife, 
 although this had been confirmed by people who had 
 witnessed it. He maintained that his wife was a 
 lascivious woman, a sort of vampire that "sucked out 
 a man's force;" that he har 1 relations with her five 
 or six times every night, that this was never enough
 
 160 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 for her, however, so that she committed adultery 
 with every possible man. During this explanation 
 the emotional scene described above was repeated; 
 he took possession again of my hand, and kissed it 
 amid tears. He said he had never known anyone 
 dearer or kinder than I. 
 
 As his case began to interest me from a psychia- 
 tric point of view also, I learnt from the woman 
 that the man had had sexual relations with her only 
 two or three times since they were married. Now 
 and then he would make preparations in this direc- 
 tion mostly a tergo and then push her away, de- 
 claring in abusive language ^that she was a whore, 
 and that she could do it with anyone she liked, but 
 not with him. 
 
 I began to play an increasingly important part 
 in his delusions. He wanted to force his wife, un- 
 der the threat of stabbing her, to confess she had 
 had sexual relations with me. Every morning when 
 I went out he burst into my bedroom, sniffed the 
 bed-clothes, and then beat his wife, asserting he had 
 recognised her odour in the bedding. He tore from 
 her a head-kerchief I had brought back for her from 
 a holiday, and stroked it several times a day; he 
 was not to be parted from a tobacco-pipe that I 
 had made him a present of. If I was in the water- 
 closet he listened all the time in the ante-room, then 
 related to his wife with obscene words what he had 
 heard, and asked her "if it pleased her." He then
 
 Homosexuality m Pathogenesis of Paranoia 161 
 
 hurried into the closet immediately after me, to see 
 whether I had "properly rinsed everything away." 
 
 All this time he remained the most zealous servant 
 you could think of, and was exaggeratedly amiable 
 towards me. He turned to account my absence from 
 Budapest and without instructions repainted the 
 water-closet, even adorning the walls with coloured 
 sketches. 
 
 The fact that they had been discharged was kept 
 private from him for a time. When he heard of it he 
 became sad, abused and hit his wife, and threatened 
 that he would put her in the street and stab me, 
 "her darling." Even now he remained well-behaved 
 and devoted so far as I personally was concerned. 
 When I learned, however, that he was sleeping at 
 night with a well-ground kitchen knife at his side and 
 on one occasion seriously looked like forcing his way 
 into my bedroom, I felt I could not wait the two or 
 three days till their notice was up. The woman 
 notified the authorities, who took him to the insane 
 asylum after having him medically certified. 
 
 There is no doubt that this was a case of alcoholic 
 delusions of jealousy. The conspicuous feature of 
 homosexual transference to myself, however, allows 
 of the interpretation that this jealousy of men sig- 
 nified only the projection of his own erotic pleasure 
 in the male sex. Also, the disinclination for sexual 
 relations with his wife was probably not simply im- 
 potency, but was determined by his unconscious
 
 162 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 homosexuality. The alcohol, which might well be 
 called a censure-poison, had evidently for the most 
 part (though not quite) robbed his homosexuality, 
 which had been spiritualised into friendliness, as- 
 siduity and complaisance, of its sublimations, and so 
 caused the crude homosexual erotism that thus came 
 to the surface intolerable as such to the conscious- 
 ness of a man of ethical high standing to be sim- 
 ply imputed to his wife. In my opinion the alcohol 
 played here only the part of an agent destroying 
 sublimation, through the effect of which the man's 
 true sexual constitution, namely the preference for 
 a member of the same sex, became evident. 
 
 It was only subsequently that I received a com- 
 plete confirmation of this. I learnt that he had been 
 married before, years ago. He lived only a short 
 time in peace with his first wife also, began to drink 
 soon after the wedding, and abused his wife, tor- 
 menting her with jealousy scenes, until she left him 
 and got a divorce. 
 
 In the interval between these two marriages he 
 was said to have been a temperate, reliable, and 
 steady man, and to have taken again to drink only 
 after the second marriage. Alcoholism was thus 
 not the deeper cause of the paranoia; it was rather 
 that in the insoluble conflict between his conscious 
 heterosexual and unconscious homosexual desires he 
 took to alcohol, which then by destroying the subli- 
 mations brought the homosexual erotism to the sur-
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 163 
 
 face, his consciousness getting rid of this by way 
 of projection, of delusions of jealousy. 
 
 The destruction of the sublimation was not com- 
 plete. He was still able to let a part of his homo- 
 sexual tendency function in a spiritualised form, as 
 a faithful, compliant servant of his master, as *a 
 smart subordinate in his office, and as a competent 
 worker in both positions. Where the circumstances 
 made high claims on his capacity for sublimation, 
 however, for instance, in his occupation with the 
 bedroom and closet he was compelled to saddle his 
 wife with his desires, and by jealousy scenes to as- 
 sure himself that he was in love with her. The 
 boasting about his colossal potency in regard to 
 his wife was similarly a distortion of the facts that 
 served to calm his mind. 7 
 
 II 
 
 I shall cite as a second case that of a lady, still 
 young, who after living for years in moderate har- 
 
 * The one-sided agitation of temperance reformers tries to 
 veil the fact that in the large majority of cases alcoholism is 
 not the cause of neuroses, but a result of them, and a. ca- 
 lamitous one. Both individual and social alcoholism can be 
 cured only by the help of psycho-analysis, which discloses the 
 causes of the "flight into narcosis" and neutralises them. The 
 eradication of alcoholism only seemingly signifies an improve- 
 ment in hygiene. When alcohol is withdrawn, there remain at 
 the disposal of the psyche numerous other paths to the 
 "flight into disease." And when then psychoneurotics suffer 
 from anxiety-hysteria or dementia praecox instead of from 
 alcoholism, one regrets the enormous expenditure of energy 
 that has been applied against alcoholism, but in the wrong 
 place.
 
 164 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 mony with her husband, and bearing him daughters, 
 began to suffer from delusions of jealousy not long 
 after giving birth to a son ; alcohol played no part 
 in her case. 8 
 
 She began to find everything in her husband sus- 
 picious. A cook and one chambermaid after another 
 were dismissed, and finally she got her way and had 
 only male servants in the house. Even that didn't 
 help. The man, who was everywhere regarded as a 
 model husband, and who assured me on his word of 
 honour that he had never been unfaithful to her, 
 could not go a step or write a line without being 
 watched, suspected, and even abused by his wife. 
 Curiously enough she was suspicious of her husband 
 only with either very young females, about twelve 
 or thirteen years old, or quite old, ugly ones, while 
 she was not jealous of society women, friends, or 
 good-class governesses, even when they were attrac- 
 tive or pretty. 
 
 Her conduct at home became more and more odd, 
 and her threats more dangerous, so that she had to 
 be taken to a sanatorium. (Before doing this I got 
 the patient to consult Professor Freud, who agreed 
 with my diagnosis and approved of psycho-analysis 
 being tried). 
 
 The patient was so remarkably distrustful and 
 perspicacious that it was not easy to establish a rap- 
 
 * I have briefly narrated the case in another connection : 
 see Chapter II.
 
 Homosexuality m Pathogenesis of Parcmoia 165 
 
 port with her. I had to take the ground that I was 
 not quite convinced of her husband's innocence, and 
 in this way induced the otherwise inaccessible pa- 
 tient to part with the delusional ideas that she had 
 till then kept to herself. 
 
 Among these were pronounced delusions of gran- 
 deur and of connection. Between the lines of the 
 local newspaper were innumerable insinuations of 
 her supposed moral depravity, and of her ridiculous 
 position as a betrayed wife; the articles were writ- 
 ten by journalists at the orders of her enemies. Per- 
 sonalities of the highest standing (e. g, of the epis- 
 copal court) knew of these goings on, and the fact 
 that the royal manoeuvres took place every year just 
 in the neighbourhood of her home was not uncon- 
 nected with certain secret intentions of her enemies. 
 The enemies turned out in the course of further con- 
 versation to be the dismissed servants. 
 
 I then gradually learnt from her that it was 
 against her will, and only at her parents' wish, es- 
 pecially her father's, that she had looked favourably 
 on her husband's courtship. He seemed to her at 
 the time too common, too coarse. After the mar- 
 riage, however, she said she got used to him. A cu- 
 rious scene took place in the house after the birth 
 of the first daughter. The husband was supposed 
 to have been dissatisfied that she had not borne a 
 son, and she felt quite conscience-pricked about it 
 also; on this she began to doubt whether she had
 
 166 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 done right to marry this man. At this time she 
 began to be jealous of an extra servant-girl, aged 
 thirteen and said to be very pretty. She was still 
 in bed after the confinement when she summoned the 
 little girl and made her kneel down and swear by her 
 father's life that the master had done nothing to 
 her. This oath calmed her at the time, and she 
 thought she might have made a mistake. 
 
 After a son was at last born, she felt she had ful- 
 filled her duty to her husband and was now free. 
 She began to behave discordantly. She became jeal- 
 ous of her husband again, and on the other hand 
 would behave towards men in a remarkable manner. 
 "Only with the eyes, however," she said, and if any- 
 one took the hints she gave, she always vigorously 
 rebuffed him. 
 
 This "harmless playfulness," on which her ene- 
 mies similarly put a false construction, soon dis- 
 appeared from view, however, behind the jealousy 
 scenes, which went from bad to worse. 
 
 In order to make her husband impotent as re- 
 gards other women, she got him to perform coitus 
 several times every night. Even so, when she left 
 the bedroom for a moment (to attend to bodily 
 needs) she locked the room behind her. She hurried 
 back at once, but if she found any disarrangement 
 of the bed-clothes she became suspicious that the 
 discharged cook, who might have got a key made, 
 had been with him in the interval.
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 167 
 
 The patient, as we see, realised the sexual insa- 
 tiability that the alcoholic paranoiac mentioned 
 above had only invented and could not carry out. 
 (A woman can, to be sure, increase sexual rela- 
 tions at will, even without real pleasure, much more 
 easily than a man.) The sharp watching of the 
 state of the bed-clothes was also repeated here. 
 
 The patient's behaviour in the sanatorium was 
 full of contradictions. She coquetted with all the 
 men, but would not let any of them approach her. 
 On the other hand she made close friendships and en- 
 mities with all the female inhabitants of the house, 
 and her conversations with me turned for the most 
 part on these. She willingly took the luke-warm 
 baths prescribed for her, but used the opportunity 
 given by the bathing to collect detailed observations 
 on the shapes and figures of the other female pa- 
 tients. She described to me with every sign of dis- 
 gust and abhorrence the wrinkled abdomen of an 
 elderly patient who was very ill. As she narrated 
 her observations on prettier patients, however, the 
 lascivious expression of her face was unmistakable. 
 One day when she was alone with these younger ones 
 she got up a "calf exhibition;" she stated that she 
 won the first prize in the competition (narcissism). 
 
 I tried, with great circumspection, to learn some- 
 thing about the homosexual component of her sexual 
 development by asking her whether, like so many 
 young girls, she had been passionately fond of her
 
 168 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 girl friends. She divined my intention immediately, 
 however, snubbed me severely, and maintained that 
 I wanted to talk her into all sorts of abominations. 
 I managed to calm her, whereupon she confessed to 
 me under a pledge of secrecy that when she was a 
 child she performed mutual masturbation for years 
 with a little girl, whom she had seduced. (The pa- 
 tient had only sisters, no brothers.) More than this, 
 indications of over-strong sexual fixations to the 
 mother and nurses could be inferred from the pa- 
 tient's communications, which were becoming more 
 and more scanty. 
 
 The comparative peacefulness of the patient was 
 for the first time seriously disturbed by her hus- 
 band's visit, and the delusions of jealousy flared up 
 anew. She accused her husband of having used her 
 absence to do all sorts of disgraceful things, and her 
 suspicion was particularly directed against the aged 
 house-porteress, who, as she had heard, had helped 
 in the house-cleaning. In sexual relations she be- 
 came more insatiable than ever. If her husband re- 
 fused this, she threatened to kill him, and on one 
 occasion actually threw a knife at him. 
 
 The slight traces of transference to the physi- 
 cian, which were present at the beginning, also gave 
 way in these stormy times to a more and more ve- 
 hement resistance, so that the prospects of the analy- 
 sis sank to nothing. We found ourselves compelled, 
 therefore, to provide for her in a more distant in-
 
 Homo sexuality in Patho gene sis of Paranoia 169 
 
 stitution where she could be more strictly watched. 
 This case also of delusional jealousy only becomes 
 clear when we assume that it was a question of the 
 projection on to the husband of her pleasure in her 
 own sex. A girl who had grown up in almost ex- 
 clusively feminine surroundings, who as a child was 
 too strongly attached to the female nurses and ser- 
 vants and in addition to this had for years enjoyed 
 sexual relations with a girl comrade of her own 
 age, is suddenly forced into a marriage de conve- 
 nance with a "coarse man." She reconciles herself 
 to it, however, ana only once shews indignation 
 against an especially crude piece of unkindness on 
 her husband's part, by letting her desires turn to- 
 wards her childhood ideal (a little servant girl). 
 The attempt fails, she cannot endure the homosex- 
 uality any longer, and has to project it onto her 
 husband. That was the first, temporary attack of 
 jealousy. Penally, when she had done her "duty" 
 and borne her husband the son he demanded, she felt 
 herself free. The homosexuality that had been kept 
 in bounds until then takes stormy possession in a 
 crude erotic way of all the objects that offer no pos- 
 sibility for sublimation (quite young girls, old 
 women and servants), though all this erotism, with 
 the exception of the cases where she can hide it un- 
 der the mask of harmless play, is imputed to the hus- 
 band. In order to support herself in this lie, the 
 patient is compelled to shew increased coquetry to-
 
 170 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 wards the male sex, to whom she had become pretty 
 indifferent, and indeed to demean herself like a 
 nymphomaniac. 
 
 Ill 
 
 One day I was asked by a lawyer to examine and 
 declare sane one of his clients, the recorder of the 
 town X, who was being unjustly persecuted by his 
 compatriots. Soon after the man in question an- 
 nounced himself. It made me suspicious to begin 
 with that he handed me a mass of newspaper cut- 
 tings, documents and pamphlets, numbered and 
 sorted in the most exemplary order, all of which 
 he had written himself. A glance at the papers con- 
 vinced me that he was a paranoiac with delusions 
 of persecution. I made an appointment to examine 
 him on the next day, but the perusing of his papers 
 alone shewed me the homosexual root of his par- 
 anoia. 
 
 His disputes had begun with his writing to a cap- 
 tain that his vis-a-vis, an officer of the . . . regi- 
 ment, "shaved himself at the window, partly in his 
 shirt, with a bare chest." "In the second place he 
 lets his gloves dry at the window on a line, as I have 
 seen done in small Italian villages." The patient 
 asked the captain "to effect a redress of this nui- 
 sance." He replied to the captain's disclaimer by 
 attacking him. Then followed a notification to the
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 171 
 
 colonel, in which he begins to speak of the "drawers" 
 of the man opposite ; he complains again also of the 
 gloves. In printing of an enormous size he empha- 
 sises the fact that the matter would be indifferent to 
 him if it were not that he wanted to let his sister 
 occupy the rooms giving on to the street. "I be- 
 lieved I was fulfilling a chivalrous duty to the lady." 
 At the same time an extreme sensitiveness and every 
 sign of megalomania is noticeable in the papers. In 
 the later ones the drawers get mentioned oftener and 
 oftener. The expression "protection of ladies," un- 
 derlined, frequently appears. 
 
 In a subsequent application he adds that he had 
 forgotten to mention that the lieutenant was accus- 
 tomed to dress himself in the evening at the bright- 
 ly-lit window without pulling down the blinds. 
 "That would make no difference to me" (this in 
 small letters) : "In the name of a lady, however, I 
 must beg for protection against such a sight." 
 
 Then came memorials to the commander-in-chief, 
 to the ministry of war, to the cabinet, etc., and in all 
 of them the words in small print, "shirt, drawers, 
 naked chest," etc., and only these had been sub- 
 sequently underlined in red. (The patient was the 
 owner of a newspaper, and could get everything 
 printed according to his heart's desire.) 
 
 From a document of the commander-in-chief it 
 appeared that the patient's father and brother had 
 been insane and had ended in suicide. The father
 
 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 was, as the patient expressed it, a "country lawyer 
 and orator" (the patient was also a lawyer), the 
 brother was a lieutenant. It was further to be gath- 
 ered that the patient was a follower of Kneipp ; 9 
 indeed he appeared once at the Supreme Court of 
 Justice with bare feet in sandals, for which he was 
 reprimanded ( exhibitionism) . 
 
 Then he transferred the affair on to the code of 
 honour basis, 10 but always slipped out in the critical 
 moment, appealing to some paragraph or other in 
 the duelling code, of which he was complete master. 
 Here the half-deliberate exaggeration crept in that 
 he spoke as if his letter had been an insult to the 
 officer by a deed. In other places he said (in huge 
 print) that he had cited facts to the officer in the 
 most considerate way possible. He ascribes to the 
 military authorities the opinion of himself that he 
 was "an old woman, who has nothing else to do but 
 discover objects of her curiosity." He quoted in- 
 numerable examples of how officers abroad were 
 punished for insulting a girl in the street. He de- 
 manded protection for defenceless women in general 
 against brutal assaults, etc. In one of his applica- 
 tions he complained that the above-mentioned cap- 
 
 * (Kneipp was the founder of a pseudo-religious sect, one 
 of whose tenets was that the members should wear the same 
 foot-gear as that worn in the time of Christ. Transl.) 
 
 10 (This refers to the custom still prevailing in Hungary, and 
 elsewhere, of regarding certain matters as affairs of honour in- 
 volving the necessity of a duel if suitable satisfaction be not 
 provided. Transl.)
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 178 
 
 tain had "angrily and ostentatiously turned his face 
 away from him." 
 
 The number of law-suits in which he was involved 
 increased like an avalanche. What annoyed him 
 most was that the military authorities ignored his 
 memorials. Civilians he dragged before the civil 
 courts ; soon he transferred the matter to the politi- 
 cal sphere, egged on in his newspaper the military 
 and municipal authorities against each other, and 
 exploited the "Pan-Germans" against the Hungarian 
 civil authorities. In a short time about a hundred 
 "comrades" came forward, who applauded him both 
 publicly and by letter. 
 
 Then followed a curious episode. One day he 
 complained to the new colonel that another officer 
 had called "For shame, you miserable Saxon !" after 
 his sister in the street. The sister was supposed to 
 confirm this in a letter, which was certainly written 
 by the patient himself. 
 
 He then turned to newspaper articles, in which he 
 set difficult riddles with "dangerous'* places indi- 
 cated with dots. He mentioned, for instance, a 
 French proverb that in German ran "das L. . . T. 
 
 . ". I had considerable trouble to discover that 
 this signified "Lacherliche totet." n 
 
 A NEW COMPLAINT AGAINST THE CAPTAIN (Nr I) 
 
 mentioned "grimaces, gestures, movements, challeng- 
 ing glances.'* He wouldn't have bothered about it, 
 
 11 "Ridicule kills."
 
 174 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 but it concerned a lady. The officer was like a boy. 
 He and his sister would make the matter plain to him 
 regardless of everything. This was followed by new 
 attacks on honour with retreat of the patient, who 
 with legal niceties appealed to the duelling code. 
 
 Then follow threatening letters in which he, in his 
 sister's name, talks a lot about "self-help;" long 
 explanations ; a hundred quotations about duelling, 
 etc. : for instance, "Not bullets or swords is it that 
 kill, but the seconds." The words "man," "men," 
 "manly," recur again and again. He writes hymns 
 of praise to himself, and gets fellow-citizens to sign 
 them. In one place he ironically states that perhaps 
 one would like him, in the service of love, "to kiss 
 the hands and feet of those gentlemen." 
 
 Now comes the fight with the municipal authori- 
 ties, to whom the military had applied. Forty-two 
 municipal councilmen demanded that he be punished. 
 He picked out one of these, named Dahinten, and 
 bitterly persecuted him in public. Encouraged by 
 the cries of approval and the backing up of a Vienna 
 yellow journal, he canvassed for the position of vice- 
 Lord Lieutenant of a county and blamed everyone 
 at the injustice of his not getting this. 
 
 Then he wanted to restore the good relations be- 
 tween the civil and military authorities, always un- 
 derlining these words. 
 
 Finally the matter reached a superior civil au- 
 thority, who got the patient's mental state examined
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 175 
 
 into. He came to me in the hope I would declare 
 him to be sane. 
 
 Previous experiences with paranoiacs made it easy 
 for me to infer from these facts alone the extraordi- 
 narily important part played by homosexuality in 
 this case. The appearance of the delusion of perse- 
 cution, perhaps long hidden, was evoked by the sight 
 of a half-naked officer, whose shirt, drawers, and 
 gloves also seem to have made a great impression 
 on the patient. (Let me recall the part played by 
 the bed-clothes in the two cases mentioned above.) 
 No female person was ever accused or complained of, 
 he constantly fought and wrangled only with men, 
 for the most part officers or high dignitaries, supe- 
 riors. I interpret this as projection of his own 
 homosexual delight in those persons, the affect being 
 preceded by a negative sign. His desires, which 
 have been cast out from the ego, return to his con- 
 sciousness as the perception of the persecutory 
 tendency on the part of the objects that uncon- 
 sciously please him. He seeks until he has convinced 
 himself that he is hated. He can now indulge his 
 own homosexuality in the form of hate, and at the 
 same time hide from himself. The preference for 
 being persecuted by officers and officials was prob- 
 ably conditioned by the fact of his father having been 
 an official and his brother an officer; I surmise that 
 these were the original, infantile objects of his homo- 
 sexual phantasies,
 
 176 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 The false, magnified potency of the alcoholic delu- 
 sional patient and the hypocritical nymphomania of 
 the jealous paranoiac correspond with the exagger- 
 ated chivalry here and with the delicate feeling that 
 he demands from men towards women. I have found 
 this with most manifest homosexual men. This high 
 esteem is one reason why homosexuals, like many 
 psychically impotent men, are unable to take a 
 woman as an object of love. Homosexuals esteem 
 women, but love men. Thus also our paranoiac, only 
 that his love has been transformed through reversal 
 of affect into persecutory delusion and hate. 
 
 The fact that he put his sister in the foreground 
 as the insulted person was probably also in part con- 
 ditioned by passive-homosexual phantasies in which 
 he identifies himself with this sister. His complaint 
 that he was regarded as an old woman, who was seek- 
 ing for the objects of her curiosity in nude officers 
 and their underlinen, speaks in favour of this view. 
 When, therefore, he continually complains of insults 
 on the part of the men who persecute him, he means 
 unconsciously sexual assaults of which he would like 
 to be the object himself. 
 
 It is neat to see in this case how the laboriously 
 built up social sublimations of homosexuality col- 
 lapse, probably under the pressure from the over- 
 growth of infantile phantasies, perhaps also as a 
 result of other exciting causes which are unknown to 
 me, and how the childish-perverse basis of these spir-
 
 Homosexuality m Pathogenesis of Paranoia 177 
 
 itualisations (e. g. peeping mania, exhibitionism) 
 breaks through in the delusions. 
 
 As a control to my conception of this case I noted 
 the patient's reactions to a hundred stimulus-words 
 of Jung's scheme, and analysed the associations. 
 The instructive part of this analysis is that it yielded 
 meagre results. The paranoiac so thoroughly 
 gets rid of the affects disturbing him that he believes 
 they do not concern him, and that is why he relates 
 in his actions and speech everything that the hys- 
 teric from fear of his conscience represses deeply. 
 It is further striking, and evidently characteristic of 
 true paranoia, that of Jung's "complex-signs" dis- 
 turbed reproduction is hardly met with. The pa- 
 tient recalls excellently even the reactions to the 
 "critical" stimulus-words that touch the complexes. 
 Projection guards the paranoiac so well from affects 
 that he has no need of the hysterical amnesia. Near- 
 ness of a complex seems to betray itself here rather 
 through talkativeness and personal relation. The 
 reactions are in any case throughout egocentric. 
 Sound and rime reactions are very frequent, as are 
 witty ones. So much for the form. I shall narrate 
 here for the sake of example, some individual reac- 
 tions, together with the analysis relating to them. 
 
 S. W. 12 Cooking. R. cook. A. Cooking makes 
 women quarrelsome. A woman gets inflamed, heated, 
 at the fire. My mother was also heated. I wouldn't 
 
 11 S. W.=Stimulus-word. R.=Reaction. A.=Analysis,
 
 178 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 let her cook to-day. A man can stand much more. 
 Goethe says, to be sure : "Seven men would not stand 
 what one woman can." My mother had six children. 
 A man "would be more suitable for bearing children. 
 (In this reaction we find the forbearance towards 
 women and the over-estimation of men, with a phan- 
 tasy: for a man to bear children.) 
 
 S. W. River. R. I should like to bathe in a 
 river. A. I am passionately fond of bathing; I 
 bathed in the river with my cousin every day until 
 October. He shot himself, on account of over-strain. 
 I avoid over-strain, and that's why I don't have 
 much to do with women. (Attempt to explain on 
 hygienic grounds his sexual avoidance of women. 
 The cousin was an officer.) 
 
 S. W. Salt. R. Reminds me of the salt of mar- 
 riage. A. I am an enemy of married life. In it 
 there is daily "friction." (He perhaps means also 
 the compulsion to coitus in marriage.) 
 
 S. W. Writing. R. I like the writing of the 
 Berlin artist who has died, the founder of the Kun- 
 stgewerbe . . . Eckmann was his name. A. Strik- 
 ing, enormously large handwriting like his pleases 
 me. Like that of my father's. Mine resembles my 
 father's, but it is not so pretty. My letters, how- 
 ever, are also large ones. (Esteem for his father 
 and his physical superiority expresses itself, as so 
 often, in the tendency to copy his handwriting.
 
 Homosexuality m Pathogenesis of Paranoia 179 
 
 Pleasure in the size of the letters may also be taken 
 symbolically.) 
 
 S. W. Cork. R. "Brings out the popping effect 
 of champagne." A. Nature hasn't given women 
 any of this. Hence their fading. My father, how- 
 ever, was handsome even as an old man. 
 
 S. W. Hitting. R. That is what my opponents 
 deserve, to put it mildly. A. What I should best 
 like would be to turn a hose on them till they were 
 soaking. That would be fine. Fire-brigades inter- 
 ested me even in childhood. (Fire-hose is one of the 
 universal symbols for the male organ.) 
 
 S. W. Pure. R. To the pure all things are pure. 
 A. I was always a cleanly child, and was praised 
 for this by my uncle. My elder brother was dirty. 
 ( Exaggerated or precocious intolerance for dirt and 
 disorder on a child's part is a symptom of homosex- 
 ual fixation Sadger). 
 
 IV 
 
 The fourth case I wish briefly to relate was not 
 one of pure paranoia, but one of dementia praecox 
 with marked paranoiac aspects. 
 
 It concerned a country teacher, still young, who 
 so his rather elderly-looking wife told me had 
 been tormented for about a year with thoughts of 
 suicide, believed himself to be persecuted and accused 
 by everyone, and brooded alone for hours at a time.
 
 180 Contribution* to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 I found the patient, who was in bed, awake, but 
 with his head hidden away under the clothes. I had 
 hardly exchanged a few words with him when he 
 asked me if as a doctor I had to keep my patient's 
 secrets. After I affirmed this he told me, amidst 
 signs of intense dread, that he had three times per- 
 formed cunnilingus with his wife. He knew that 
 humanity had condemned him to death for this crime, 
 that his hands and feet would be chopped off, his 
 nose would decompose, and his eyes be plucked out. 
 He shewed me a defective place in the ceiling, which, 
 however, had been walled up, through which they 
 must have watched his crime. His greatest enemy, 
 the school-director, was informed of everything by 
 means of complicated mirrors and electro-magnetic 
 apparatus. Through his perverse deed he had be- 
 come a woman, for a man performed coitus with his 
 penis, not with his mouth. They would cut off his 
 penis and testicles, or else his whole "Kiirbiskopf" 
 (literally block-head, but kiirbis is also a vulgar 
 Hungarian expression for testicles). 
 
 I happened to touch my nose, and he said "Yes, 
 my nose is decomposing, you want to say." I said 
 on entering the room "Are you Herr Kugler?" 
 Coming back to this he explained : "The whole story 
 is told in my name; I am Die Kugel-er (= Kugl- 
 er), . e. a die-er t a mau-woman. 13 The d'or of the 
 
 " (Die and er are German for she and he respectively. 
 TransL)
 
 Homosexuality in Pathogenesis of Paranoia 181 
 
 Christian name Sandor signified to him gold (French 
 or gold), . ., he was made sexless. 14 On one occa- 
 sion he wanted to jump out of the window, but the 
 word "Hunyad" occurred to him ("huny" is Hun- 
 garian for to shut, "ad" for to give) *. e. he is clos- 
 ing his eyes (he dies), so that his wife may give her- 
 self to another (sexually). So that no one should 
 think this of him he stayed alive. They might even 
 think when he was alive that he wanted to shut an 
 eye if his wife "gave" herself to another. 
 
 He was filled with a terrible sense of guilt cm ac- 
 count of his perverse act. Such perversity had al- 
 ways been foreign to him, and now also he abhors it. 
 His enemy must have caused it, perhaps through sug- 
 gestion. 
 
 On closely questioning him I learnt that he had 
 sacrificed himself for his director ("A handsome, im- 
 posing man") ; the latter was also very pleased with 
 him and often said, "I could do nothing without you ; 
 you are my right hand." (This reminds one of the 
 "better half.") For the past five years the direc- 
 tor had tormented him, disturbing him with docu- 
 ments when he was most deeply engrossed at his 
 work in explaining a poem to the class, etc. 
 
 At the question "Can you speak German" (tud 
 nemetiil in Hungarian) he dissected and translated 
 the word nemetiil (=German) into the syllables: 
 
 14 (Gold in German happens to be of the neuter gender. 
 Transl.)
 
 182 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 nem = nimm (German for take) 
 et = und (German for and) 
 ill = sitz (German for seat) (ill is Hungarian 
 for to sit), 
 
 . e. I meant by my question that he should take his 
 penis in his hand, and, as a punishment for this, sit 
 (be imprisoned in a hole). By this he expressly 
 meant his own penis, which according to his enemies' 
 accusation he wanted to insert into another hole, 
 i. e. other strange women. 
 
 He swore that he adored his wife. His father had 
 been a poor man-servant (this was true) and very 
 stern with him. In student days he constantly sat at 
 home and read poetry aloud to his mother. His 
 mother had always been very kind to him. 
 
 We have here to do with a man who had happily 
 sublimated his homosexuality for a long time, but 
 who since the disappointment with the previously 
 adored director hated all men, and in order to find 
 reason for this hate had to explicate every expres- 
 sion, every gesture, every word, in terms of the wish 
 to be persecuted. He soon got to hate me also: 
 every one of my words and gestures he explained in a 
 hostile way, and dissected, translated, and distorted 
 every word until it was turned into a hostile insinua- 
 tion. 
 
 The patient's mother told me her son had always 
 been a good child. Instead of playing with other 
 children, he read aloud books, especially poetry, to
 
 Homosexuality m Pathogenesis of Paranoia 183 
 
 his mother, and explained to her their contents. The 
 father was a simple workman, and was sometimes 
 rather harsh with the boy, whom he often annoyed 
 by disturbing the reading. 15 
 
 There is no doubt that the patient thought very 
 little of his father, to whom he was intellectually 
 superior, and longed for a more imposing one. This 
 he found later in the person of the school-director, 
 his superior, whom he served for years with tireless 
 zeal, but who did not satisfy the patient's expecta- 
 tions (doubtless too high). He wanted now to give 
 his love back to his wife, but in the meantime, how- 
 .ever, she had become for him a "neutral quantity." 
 The heterosexual exaggeration and the cunnilingus 
 might have veiled his eyes to the lack of desire for his 
 wife, but the longing for the male sex did not cease ; 
 it was only cast out from the ego-consciousness and 
 returned to this as a projection with a negative pre- 
 fix; he became a persecuted being. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 In addition to those here narrated I have made an 
 "analytic anamnesis" with three other paranoiacs. 16 
 In each of these projected homosexual desires played 
 the most important part, but as I learnt nothing 
 
 "Hence the traumatic effect of the later disturbing of his 
 lecture by the director. 
 
 M One with delusions of jealousy and two querulants. One 
 of the latter, an engineer, introduced himself to me with the 
 complaint, "certain men in some unknown way sucked the 
 masculine power from his genitals."
 
 184 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 essentially new from these cases I did not make any 
 exact notes of them. 
 
 The histories here published, however, justify the 
 surmise that with paranoia it is essentially a question 
 of the re-occupation of homosexual pleasurable ob- 
 jects with unsublimated "sexual hunger," against 
 which the ego defends itself by help of the projection 
 mechanism. 
 
 The establishment of this process would naturally 
 bring us face to face with a larger problem, that of 
 the "choice of neurosis" (Freud) ; with the question, 
 namely, what conditions have to be fulfilled for the 
 normal preponderance of heterosexuality, a homo- 
 sexual neurosis, or paranoia to proceed from the in- 
 fantile bisexuality, or ambisexuality. 17 
 
 " I suggest that the term ambisexuality be used in psychology 
 instead of the expression "bisexual predisposition." This would 
 connote that we understand by this predisposition, not the 
 presence of male and female material in the organism (Fliess), 
 nor of male and female sex hunger in the mind, but the child's 
 psychical capacity for bestowing his erotism, originally object- 
 less, on either the male or the female sex, or on both.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ON ONANISM l 
 
 APART of the neurotic disturbances caused by 
 onanism is certainly of a purely psychical 
 nature and can be traced to the apprehension that, 
 in the earliest years of childhood (at the time of 
 infantile masturbation), had been brought into an 
 indissoluble associative connection with the idea of 
 self -gratification (fear of castration with boys, fear 
 of having the hands cut off with girls). A great 
 many cases of hysteria and obsessional neurosis 
 prove in the analysis to be the psychical result of 
 this infantile apprehension, which on the awaking 
 of object-love becomes accompanied with appre- 
 hension of incestuous onanistic phantasies. The 
 adult dread of masturbation is thus composed of 
 infantile (castration-) dread together with juvenile 
 (incest-) dread, and the symptoms resulting from 
 the conversion and substitution of this dread may 
 be removed by means of analysis. 
 
 I have no doubt, however, that onanism is also able 
 
 1 Contribution to the Symposium on Onanism held by the 
 Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. Published in the Diskus- 
 sionen der Vereinigung, Heft II. 1912. 
 
 185
 
 186 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 directly to evoke certain nervous and psychical dis- 
 turbances, although it cannot be pointed out too 
 often that this significance of onanisra is as a rule 
 much less than that of psychoneurotic symptoms 
 caused by rough frightening and repression. 
 
 In a series of cases in which the analysis had made 
 conscious the dread of castration- and incest- 
 thoughts, and had thereby removed psychoneurotic 
 symptoms, in which, however, abstinence from onan- 
 ism was not total even during and after the treat- 
 ment, the patients shewed on the day following mas- 
 turbation a typical disturbance in their psychical 
 and somatic condition which I will term One-Day- 
 Neurasthenia. The chief complaints of the patients 
 were: marked fatigability and leaden weight in the 
 legs, especially on getting up in the morning; in- 
 somnia or disturbed sleep ; over-sensitiveness to light 
 and sound stimuli (sometimes definite sensations of 
 pain in the eye and ear) ; gastric disturbances ; 
 paraesthesias in the lumbar region, and sensitive- 
 ness to pressure along the nerves. In the psychical 
 sphere: great emotional irritability; ill-humour and 
 fault-finding; incapacity or diminished capacity for 
 concentration (aprosexia). These disturbances 
 lasted the whole forenoon, gradually receded in the 
 early hours of the afternoon, and only towards eve- 
 ning was there complete restoration of the bodily 
 state, with calm in the sphere of the emotions and re- 
 covery of full intellectual capacity.
 
 On Onanism 187 
 
 I wish expressly to remark that these symptoms 
 did not coincide with any relapse in, or worsening of, 
 the psychoneurotic symptoms, and that I did not 
 manage in a single case to reach these symptoms psy- 
 cho-analytically or to influence them in this way. 
 Honesty, therefore, demands that psychological 
 speculations should be disregarded here, and that the 
 symptoms described be recognised as physiological 
 results of onanism. 
 
 This observation supports, so I think, Freud's 
 views regarding the genesis of neurasthenia. The 
 masturbatory actual-neurosis may be conceived as a 
 becoming chronic, a summation, of the symptoms of 
 the onanistic one-day neurasthenias. 
 
 Many observations tell in favour of the conclu- 
 sion that masturbatory activity is really able to 
 bring about physiological effects that do not per- 
 tain to the normal act of coitus, and theoretical con- 
 siderations are not in disaccord with it. 
 
 There are men who have frequent sexual inter- 
 course with their wives, in spite of a diminution in 
 "sexual hunger," but who replace in their imagina- 
 tion the person of their wife by another, and, there- 
 fore, so to speak, perform onanism per vaginam. 
 When such men occasionally have sexual relations 
 with someone else who gives them complete satisfac- 
 tion, they remark a very great difference between 
 their state after the coitus that was helped by phan- 
 tasy and after the coitus that gave satisfaction in
 
 188 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 itself. If the other person fulfilled the conditions of 
 their sexual hunger, they felt invigorated after the 
 act, enjoyed a short sleep, and on both the same and 
 the next day were unusually competent and efficient. 
 After the onanistic coitus, however, there surely 
 followed a one-day neurasthenia, with all the symp- 
 toms described above. Especially typical in such 
 cases was the occurrence, immediately after the in- 
 tercourse, of pain in the eyes when light fell on 
 them, weight in the legs, and apart from the psy- 
 chical irritability a pronounced hyperaesthesia of 
 the skin, especially sensitiveness to tickling. On the 
 ground of the accompanying feelings of heat and 
 pulsation I interpret the insomnia as the result of 
 vasomotor excitability. 
 
 Theoretical considerations also yield no sound ob- 
 jection to the supposition that normal coitus and 
 masturbation are processes that are to be estimated 
 differently not only psychologically, but also physio- 
 logically. Whether the onanism is performed by 
 rubbing with the hand or through friction of the 
 member against the vagina of a non-satisfying sex- 
 ual object two processes are essentially altered in 
 comparison with normal intercourse. With onanism 
 the normal fore-pleasure is absent, whereas the share 
 taken by the phantasy is enormously increased. 
 Now I do not believe that fore-pleasure is a purely 
 psychological process. When a satisfying sexual 
 object is gazed at, touched, kissed, embraced, the op-
 
 On nanism 189 
 
 tic, tactile, oral, and muscular erogenous zones are 
 actively excited, and they automatically pass s>ver a 
 part of this excitation to the genital zone ; the proc- 
 ess takes place to begin with in the sense organs, or 
 sensorial centres, and the phantasy is only second- 
 arily drawn into sympathetic enjoyment. With 
 onanism, however, all the sense organs are silent, and 
 the conscious phantasy, together with the genital 
 stimulation, have to procure the whole sum of exci- 
 tation. The forcible retaining of a picture, often 
 imagined with hallucinatory sharpness, during a 
 sexual act that normally is almost unconscious is no 
 slight task ; it is certainly great enough to explain a 
 resulting fatigability of the attention. 
 
 The excitability of the sense organs after onanism 
 (and in neurasthenia) is not so easily explained. Too 
 little is known for this purpose of the nervous proc- 
 esses in normal coitus. Through the stimulation of 
 the erogenous zones in coitus a state of preparedness 
 of the genital organ is aroused in the first place; in 
 the friction that succeeds, the genito-spinal reflex 
 then plays the chief part ; it ends in a summation of 
 genital stimuli, and finally synchronously with 
 ejaculation in an explosive radiation of the excita- 
 tion over the whole body. I surmise that the sensual 
 pleasure, which, like all common feelings, cannot be 
 localised, arises through the genital stimulation 
 (when it has accumulated enough or reached a cer- 
 tain tension) explosively radiating beyond the spinal
 
 190 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 centre into the whole sphere of feeling, thus into the 
 cutaneous and sensorial centres as well. If this is 
 the case, it is probably not a matter of indifference 
 whether the wave of lust finds a sphere of feeling 
 that is prepared by fore-pleasure, or one that is un- 
 excited and, so to speak, cold. It is therefore very 
 far from obvious that the nervous processes in coitus 
 and masturbation should be physiologically identical, 
 and indeed the considerations just mentioned even 
 give a hint of the direction in which one would have 
 to look for the causes of the vasomotor, sensory, sen- 
 sorial, and psychical over-stimulation that remains 
 after onanism. It is possible that the wave of lust 
 normally dies away altogether, but that with mas- 
 turbation a part of the excitation cannot reach a 
 proper level; this amount of excitation remaining 
 over would explain the one-day neurasthenia per- 
 haps neurasthenia altogether. 2 
 
 The discoveries of Fliess concerning the relations 
 between nose and genitalia should also not be forgot- 
 ten. The vasomotor over-excitation in masturbation 
 can cause chronic disturbances in the erectile tissue 
 of the nasal mucous membrane, which may then lead 
 to the most diverse forms of neuralgia and func- 
 tional disturbances. In some of my cases of mas- 
 
 * "One-Day Neurasthenia" sometimes happens even after quite 
 normal coitus, e. g. when as an exception the intercourse takes 
 place in the forenoon, when the sexual hunger is usually less. 
 The sexual hunger increases in the late hours of the afternoon, 
 a fact that certainly is not without bearing on the evening im- 
 provement in the neurasthenic's condition.
 
 On Onanism 191 
 
 turbatory Neurasthenia the patient's condition per- 
 ceptibly improved after cauterisation of the genital 
 points in the nose. Extensive investigations will 
 have to be undertaken on this matter. 
 
 Whereas in the preceding remarks I wanted to 
 warn against regarding the results of masturbation 
 exclusively from the psychological point of view, I 
 fear that in the question of ejaculatio praecox it is 
 the opposite mistake that is made. To judge from 
 my experience, precocious emission of semen often 
 happens with people to whom coitus is for one reason 
 or another disagreeable, who thus have an interest 
 in finishing the business as quickly as possible. Now 
 we know that onanists warped by their phantasy 
 are only too soon dissatisfied with their sexual 
 object, and it is to be supposed that unconsciously 
 they would like to shorten the act. By these re- 
 marks I do not mean to say that local causes 
 (changes around the ductus ejaculatorii) are in no 
 case to be held responsible for the ejaculatio praecox. 
 
 I only wish to add a remark about the genesis 
 of the tooth-pulling symbolism of onanism in dreams 
 and neuroses. We all know that tooth-pulling in 
 dreams symbolises onanism. Freud and Rank have 
 shewn this with irrefragable examples and have also 
 drawn attention to colloquial German, which pro- 
 fesses the same symbolism. The same symbol, how- 
 ever, is very often met with among Hungarians who 
 certainly did not know of those German expressions,
 
 192 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 and yet the Hungarian language has no similar syno- 
 nym for masturbation. On the other hand the sym- 
 bolic identification of tooth-pulling and castration 
 could in all the cases be made probable through 
 analysis. Dreams use tooth-pulling as a symbol for 
 castration, i. e. the punishment in the place of the 
 onanism. 
 
 In the formation of this symbol of onanism apart 
 from the external similarity of tooth and penis, 
 tooth-pulling and cutting off a penis a certain tem- 
 poral factor may not be without significance. Cas- 
 tration and tooth-pulling (falling out of the teeth) 
 are the first operative interventions with the possi- 
 bility of which the child is seriously threatened. It 
 is then not hard for the child to repress the more dis- 
 agreeable of the two interventions (castration) out 
 of the phantasy, and on the other hand to empha- 
 sise symbolically the tooth-pulling that resembles it. 
 This is probably the way in which sexual symbolism 
 altogether has come about. 
 
 There exists, by the way, even a tooth-neurosis of 
 its own (excessive dread of anything being done to 
 the teeth, e. g. by a dentist; continual boring and 
 probing into the cavities of hollow teeth; obsessions 
 concerned the teeth, etc.). In the analysis this neu- 
 rosis proves to be a derivative of onanism, or fear of 
 castration.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 TRANSITORY SYMPTOM-CONSTRUCTIONS DURING THE 
 ANALYSIS l 
 
 (Transitory Conversion, Substitution, Illusion, Hal- 
 lucination, "Character-Regression," and "Expres- 
 sion-Displacement"} 
 
 IT is in the transference that the physician, as well 
 as the patient, receives the really convincing im- 
 pressions as to the correctness of the analytical ex- 
 planation of symptoms. So long as the psychical 
 material afforded through free association is the 
 only proof that the patient has of the correctness of 
 the analytical explanations, they may seem to him 
 remarkable, surprising, even illuminating; he still 
 does not attain a conviction of their indubitable cor- 
 rectness, the feeling that they are the only explana- 
 tions possible, however honestly he may try to be- 
 come convinced, or even if he forces conviction on 
 himself with all his strength. It definitely looks as 
 if one could never reach any real convictions at all 
 
 1 Published in the Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse, Jahrd. II, 
 1912. 
 
 193
 
 194 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 through logical insight alone ; 2 one needs to have 
 lived through an affective experience, to have so to 
 speak felt it on one's own body, in order to gain 
 that degree of certain insight which deserves the 
 name of "conviction." The physician also who has 
 only learned analysis from books, without having 
 submitted his own mind to a thorough analysis and 
 gathered practical experience with patients, cannot 
 convince himself of the truth of its results; at the 
 most he gains a more or less high degree of confi- 
 dence, which may at times closely approach convic- 
 tion, but behind which there always still lurks a sup- 
 pressed doubt. 
 
 I wish here to bring forward a number of symp- 
 toms that I have seen arise with my patients during 
 the treatment and pass away through analysis, which 
 contributed in converting into certainty my impres- 
 sion of the truth of the Freudian mechanisms, and 
 aroused or strengthened the patients' confidence in 
 the matter. 
 
 Free association and the analytic scrutinising of 
 the incoming thoughts is not infrequently inter- 
 rupted in hysterics by the abrupt appearance of so- 
 matic phenomena of a sensory or motor nature. One 
 might at first sight be inclined to regard these con- 
 ditions as disagreeable disturbances of the analytic 
 work, and to treat them accordingly. If, however, 
 
 1 (The author is evidently speaking of psychological truths, 
 not of physical ones. Transl.)
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 195 
 
 one takes really seriously the principle of everything 
 that happens being strictly determined, one has to 
 seek an explanation for these phenomena also. If 
 one makes up one's mind to do so, and thus submits 
 these symptoms also to analysis, it becomes plain 
 that they really are representations, in symptom 
 form, of unconscious feeling and thought-excitations 
 which the analysis has stirred up from their inactiv- 
 ity (state of rest, equilibrium) and brought near 
 to the threshold of consciousness, but which before 
 becoming quite conscious in the last moment, so to 
 speak have been forced back again on account of 
 their painful character (to consciousness), whereby 
 their sum of excitation, which can no longer be quite 
 suppressed, becomes transformed into the production 
 of somatic symptoms. A symptom that has been 
 brought about in this way does not only represent 
 a certain sum of excitation, but it proves to be 
 determined in a qualitative manner also. For if at- 
 tention be directed to the nature of the symptom, to 
 the kind of motor or sensory state of stimulation or 
 of paralysis, to the organ in which it occurs, to the 
 occurrences and thoughts that immediately preceded 
 the formation of the symptom, and an effort be made 
 to discover its meaning, this somatic symptom is 
 shewn to be a symbolic expression for an unconscious 
 thought- or emotion-excitation that has been stimu- 
 lated through the analysis. If one now translates 
 the symptom for the patient from symbolic to con-
 
 196 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 ceptual language, it may happen, even when he had 
 no idea of this mechanism beforehand, that he at 
 once declares with great astonishment that the sen- 
 sory or motor state of stimulation or paralysis has 
 disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Obser- 
 vation of the patient shews unmistakably that the 
 symptom only ceases when the patient has recognised 
 our explanation to be the correct one, not when he 
 has merely understood it. In so doing the patient 
 very often betrays the fact of being "detected" 
 through smiling, laughing, blushing, or some other 
 sign of embarrassment; not infrequently he himself 
 confirms the correctness of our surmise or brings 
 at once memories of his past that strengthen our 
 supposition. 
 
 I had to interpret one of the dreams of an hys- 
 terical patient as a wish-phantasy; I told her that 
 this dream betrayed her dissatisfaction with her sit- 
 uation, her desire for a better educated and more 
 agreeable husband in a more distinguished position, 
 and especially the wish for more beautiful clothes. 
 At this moment the patient's attention was deflected 
 from the analysis by the sudden onset of toothache. 
 She begged me to give her something to ease the pain, 
 or at least to get her a glass of water. Instead of 
 doing so, I explained to the patient that by the 
 toothache she was perhaps only expressing in a meta- 
 phorical way the Hungarian saying "My tooth is
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 197 
 
 aching for these good things." 3 I said this not at 
 all in a confident tone, nor had she any idea that 
 I expected the pain to cease after the communica- 
 tion. Yet, quite spontaneously and very astonished, 
 she declared that the toothache had suddenly ceased. 
 
 Subsequent questioning of the patient established 
 the fact that she had striven to blind herself to the 
 trying situation in which she found herself on marry- 
 ing beneath her station. The interpretation of the 
 dream disclosed her unfulfilled wishes in such a man- 
 ner that she could scarcely escape its truth. She 
 managed nevertheless in the last moment to let the 
 "unpleasantness-censor" prevail, to drive the recog- 
 nition of my interpretation into the sphere of bodily 
 feeling by means of the association-bridge "My 
 tooth aches for it," and thus to transform into 
 toothache the painful insight. 
 
 The unconscious utilisation of this current expres- 
 sion was perhaps the final, but not the only, condition 
 of the symptom-formation. Psychical space, just as 
 physical space, has several dimensions, so that the 
 site of a point in it can only be determined exactly 
 by means of several coordinate axes. Put into psy- 
 cho-analytical language, that is: every symptom is 
 over-determined. Ever since childhood the patient in 
 question had fought against an unusually strong 
 
 ' (Compare the English expression: "My mouth waters for, 
 etc." Transl.)
 
 198 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 inclination to masturbation, and with masturbators 
 the teeth have a special symbolic significance. 4 The 
 factor of bodily predisposition also has always to be 
 considered in cases of this sort. 
 
 On another occasion the same patient brought her 
 repressed infantile-erotic phantasies to expression 
 in the form of a declaration of love addressed to the 
 physician, and received by way of reply instead of 
 the hoped-for response an explanation of the trans- 
 ference character of this access of feeling. There- 
 upon she immediately felt a curious paraesthesia in 
 the mucous membrane of the tongue, crying out: 
 "My tongue suddenly feels as though it were scalded 
 (abgebriiht)" At first she rejected my explanation 
 that with the word "abgebruht" she was only ex- 
 love advances, but the sudden and startling disap- 
 pearance of the paraesthesia after my explanation 
 gave her food for thought, and she presently admit- 
 ted that I had been right in my surmise. In this 
 case also the preference for the tongue as the site of 
 symptom-formation was determined by several con- 
 ditions, the analysis of which made possible the pene- 
 tration into the deeper layers of the unconscious 
 complexes. 
 
 It is very common indeed for patients to express a 
 
 suddenly appearing mental suffering by transitory 
 
 cardiac pains, the feeling of bitterness by a bitter 
 
 feeling in the tongue, and care by a sudden sense of 
 
 4 (Se Ch. VI, p. 163. Transl.)
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 199 
 
 pressure on the head. One neurotic used to utter his 
 aggressive intentions directed against me (more cor- 
 rectly: against his father) in the form of sensations 
 which he felt on those parts of the body where his 
 unconscious wanted to injure me: the feeling as 
 though he had suddenly received a blow on the head 
 turned out to be a murderous intention, a pricking 
 in the cardiac region to be one of stabbing. (Con- 
 sciously he is a masochist and his aggressive phanta- 
 sies can enter consciousness only in the form of the 
 self-borne talion punishment an eye for an eye: a 
 tooth for a tooth. ) Another patient regularly felt a 
 peculiar sense of giddiness as soon as we came to 
 talk about matters that severely tested his lack of 
 self-confidence. The analysis led to infantile experi- 
 ences in which, while at a considerable height, he felt 
 himself so helpless that he became giddy. The sud- 
 den appearance of heat or cold sensations may sig- 
 nify emotional stirrings (with a corresponding 
 name) in the patient or, conversely, may represent 
 the idea that the patient surmises the existence of 
 such feeling in the physician. 
 
 A "frightful sleepiness" overcame one patient 
 every time that she wanted to escape by a short cut 
 the analysis which was getting disagreeable to her. 
 Another one used this means to indicate her uncon- 
 scious erotic phantasies, which were associated with 
 this sleepy condition; she was one of those persons 
 who could endure sexual phantasies only when they
 
 200 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 were without self-reproach, e. g. only in the form 
 of an imaginary rape. 
 
 These transitory conversions are also to be ob- 
 served, though much less often, in the sphere of mo- 
 tility. By this I do not mean the "symptomatic 
 actions" in the sense of Freud's Psychopathology of 
 Everyday Life, which are higher, combined and co- 
 ordinated actions, but isolated, and sometimes pain- 
 ful, spasms in individual muscles or suddenly appear- 
 ing states of weakness resembling paralysis. 
 
 A neurotic who wanted to remain homosexual, and 
 who sought by every possible means to escape from 
 the heterosexual erotism that was powerfully press- 
 ing forward, got a cramp in the left leg every time 
 in the analysis that he managed to suppress phan- 
 tasies which threatened to produce an erection. He 
 discovered for himself the symbolic identification 
 "Leg:=Penis, Cramp=Erection." Drawing in of 
 the belly-wall with or without the feeling of retrac- 
 tion of the penis occurred with one patient every 
 time that he took more liberties with the physician 
 than his infantile cowed unconscious would allow him. 
 Analysis shewed the cramp to be a defensive meas- 
 ure against the feared punishment castration. Not 
 infrequently a convulsive clenching of the fist is re- 
 vealed to be an inclination to assault, a contraction 
 of the masseters to be a refusal to speak or a desire 
 to bite. 
 
 Transitory states of weakness in the whole mus-
 
 Symptom-Const ructions During Analysis 201 
 
 culature or in certain groups of muscles are some- 
 times to be explained as symptoms of moral weakness 
 or as a not wanting to carry out some action. The 
 conflict between two tendencies of equal strength can 
 express itself, as in dreams, in an inhibition of cer- 
 tain movements. 
 
 In the analysis of these passing conversion-symp- 
 toms one learns as a rule that something of the kind 
 has already happened before in the patient's life ; one 
 has then to search for the causes that evoked them 
 on the previous occasion. There occur, however, also 
 transitory symptoms that seem to the patient to be 
 .quite new, and which, according to him, have never 
 been experienced before the analysis ; even in such 
 cases it nevertheless remains for the most part unde- 
 cided whether they had not merely escaped the pa- 
 tient's introspection, which was less trained before 
 the analysis. A priori, however, one cannot dismiss 
 the possibility that the analysis, penetrating into the 
 disagreeable layers of the mind and disturbing its 
 apparent rest, can force the patient to make use of 
 quite new possibilities of symptom-formation. In 
 ordinary life or in a non-analytic treatment the 
 thought-connections would have come to a stop far 
 enough from the disagreeable areas. 
 
 Transitory obsessional phenomena may also occur 
 in the treatment. There is something similar to an 
 obsession in every association, however senseless, that 
 is a conscious substitute for an intelligent but re-
 
 202 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 pressed idea ("Replacement-associations," according 
 to Freud). Apparently senseless ideas of a true 
 obsessional character are sometimes produced, how- 
 ever, which definitely obsess the patient's thinking 
 and yield only to an analytic explication. An obses- 
 sional patient, for instance, suddenly interrupted the 
 free association with the thought: He couldn't un- 
 derstand why the word "window" should mean just 
 a window; why the letters w-i-n-d-o-w, which after 
 all are only senseless sounds and tones, should sig- 
 nify a corporeal object. He could not be brought to 
 give any further free associations: the idea of the. 
 meaning of the word window so strongly dominated 
 him that he was unable to produce any new thought. 
 For a while I allowed myself to be deceived by the in- 
 telligent patient, took up his idea, and discussed the 
 theory of speech-formation. But I soon saw that 
 the patient was not interested in the explanation, the 
 idea remaining in its obsessional form. Then it oc- 
 curred to me that it might be a piece of resistance 
 and I wondered how it was to be resolved. I re- 
 flected on what had preceded this obsessional asso- 
 ciation in the analysis, and recalled that just be- 
 fore it occurred I had explained to the patient the 
 meaning of a symbol and that he had seemed to ac- 
 cept my explanation with an acquiescing "yes." I 
 now expressed my surmise that the patient had not 
 been able to agree with this explanation, but had 
 repressed his contradiction. The repressed incredu-
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 203 
 
 lity then returned in the distorted guise of the 
 thought "why should the letters w-i-n-d-o-w signify 
 a window?" This should really run : "Why does the 
 symbol just explained signify just that object?" 
 With this explanation the interruption was removed. 
 
 Indirect contradiction, which here quite uncon- 
 sciously formed an obsession, evidently has its source 
 in similar conscious reactions of small children who 
 through their lack of courage and self-confidence are 
 compelled to adopt this mediate speech when they 
 want to contradict an adult. 5 
 
 Another obsessional patient let his incredulity be 
 recognised in a different way. He began not to un- 
 derstand any foreign words that I used, and then, as 
 I faithfully translated them for him for a while, he 
 maintained that he could not longer understand his 
 mother-tongue. He behaved absolutely like a de- 
 ment. I then explained to him that with this lack of 
 understanding he was unconsciously expressing his 
 disbelief. Really it was me (my remarks) that he 
 wanted to mock, but he repressed this inclination and 
 acted like an idiot, as if to say: If I were to accept 
 this nonsense, I would be a fool. From now on he 
 understood my explanations perfectly well. 6 
 
 6 1 said once to a boy, aged five, that he need not be afraid 
 of a lion, for the lion would run away if only he would look 
 him straight in the eyes. His next question was: "And a lamb 
 can sometimes eat up a wolf, can't it?" "You didn't believe 
 my story about the lion," said I. "No, not really but don't 
 be cross with me for it," answered the little diplomatist. 
 
 Analytical experience makes it highly probable that many
 
 04 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 A third obsessional patient was curiously obsessed 
 by the Slavonic term for doctor ("Lekar"). The 
 obsessional impulse came from the German homonym 
 of the word (=licker), a term of abuse which the 
 patient, a man of high ethical principles, could bring 
 out only indirectly. 
 
 In rare and exceptional cases true hallucinations 
 are evoked in the analysis hour. (Much more often, 
 of course, come memories of especial clearness and 
 vividness in respect to which, however, the patient 
 can none the less still behave in an objective way, 
 *. e. he can correctly estimate their unreality.) 
 
 One of my patients shewed a special capacity for 
 hallucinations, constantly making use of them when 
 the analysis came upon certain things that were pain- 
 ful to her. On such occasions she would suddenly 
 drop the thread of the free associations and produce 
 instead pure hallucinations with a fearful content: 
 she sprang up, crouched in a corner of the room, and 
 with signs of acute dread made convulsive movements 
 of defence and protection, after which she soon got 
 calm again. When she came to herself she could 
 tell me exactly the content of the hallucinated proc- 
 esses, and it turned out that they were phantasies 
 
 intelligent children at the stage of repression marked by the 
 latency period, before they have gone through the "great in- 
 timidation," regard adults as dangerous fools, to whom one can- 
 not tell the truth without running the risk of being punished 
 for it, and whose inconsistencies and follies have therefore to 
 be taken into consideration. In this children are not so very 
 wrong.
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 205 
 
 presented in a dramatic or symbolic form (fights with 
 wild animals, rape scenes, etc.), which were connected 
 with the associations immediately preceding the hal- 
 lucinations ; the analysis of them mostly brought to 
 light new memory material, affording her great re- 
 lief. The hallucinatory-symbolic representation was 
 thus merely the last means of escaping the conscious 
 recognition of certain pieces of insight. It could 
 also be neatly observed in this case how the associa- 
 tions gradually approached conscious knowledge, 
 and then suddenly glided away in almost the last 
 moment, allowing the excitement to regress on to 
 the sense area. 
 
 It is not rare for transitory illusionary deceptions 
 (especially of the sense of smell) to appear in the 
 analysis hour. In one case an illusionary "change in 
 the perceptual world" could be observed in the analy- 
 sis. I was just striving to make clear to a patient 
 her excessive ambition, arising from narcissistic fix- 
 ation, and said to her that she might be happier if 
 she could properly appreciate this, renounce a part 
 of the phantasies of self-importance, and be content 
 with smaller successes. In this moment she called 
 out, her face glowing: "It is wonderful, now I sud- 
 denly see everything, the room, the bookcase, so 'con- 
 cretely' clear in front of me; everything has bright 
 and natural colours and is so plastically arranged in 
 space." On further questioning I learnt that for 
 years she had not been able to see so "concretely,"
 
 206 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 the outer world appearing to her dull, faded, and 
 flat. The explanation was as follows: As a spoilt 
 child she obtained the satisfaction of all her desires ; 
 since she had been grown up the perfidious world had 
 not been so considerate to her wish-fancies, where- 
 upon "she had not been pleased with the world ;" she 
 projected this feeling into the optical sphere by see- 
 ing the world since then changed in the way described. 
 The prospect of reaching new possibilities of happi- 
 ness through renouncing a part of the wish-fulfil- 
 ments was similarly projected into the optical 
 sphere, and expressed itself there as illumination and 
 more vivid reality of the perceptual world. These 
 variations in optical excitability may be conceived 
 as "autosymbolic phenomena" in Silberer's sense, as 
 symbolic self-perception of psychical processes of 
 the "functional category." In this case, by the way, 
 it would be more correct to speak of transitory dis- 
 appearance of a symptom than of transitory crea- 
 tion of one. 
 
 Transitory character-regressions during the treat- 
 ment I should call a pretty frequent occurrence, the 
 essence of which consists in certain character traits 
 temporarily losing their sublimations and suddenly 
 regressing on to the primitive, infantile level of in- 
 stinct life from which they had taken their origin. 
 
 It is not rare, for instance, with certain patients 
 for an acute need for passing water to develop in the 
 analysis hour. Many hold out until the end of the
 
 Symptom-Constructions \Durmg Analysis 207 
 
 sitting, others suddenly get up and have to leave the 
 room sometimes with signs of anxiety in order to 
 attend to the need. In cases where the natural ex- 
 planation of the occurrence could be excluded (and 
 my communication concerns only such), I was able 
 to establish the following psychical origin of the ves- 
 ical excitation: It was always with very ambitious 
 and vain patients, who did not admit their vanity 
 to themselves, and who felt their ambitiousness 
 wounded in the most sensitive way by the psychical 
 material brought out in the analysis hour, also feel- 
 ing discouraged by the physician, without having 
 made this wounding of their ego completely con- 
 scious, or logically working it over and overcoming 
 it. With one of these patients the parallelism be- 
 tween the more or less wounding content of the an- 
 alytic conversation and the desire to micturate was 
 so noticeable that I could at will evoke the latter by 
 dwelling on a theme that was plainly disagreeable 
 to the patient. Analytic talking out on this theme 
 can reverse the "character-regression" or hinder its 
 reappearance. 
 
 An occurrence of this sort allows the process of 
 regression, established by Freud, to be observed as 
 it were in flagranti. It shews that a sublimated char- 
 acter trait can in the event of denial (of gratifica- 
 tion) assuming the corresponding sites of fixation 
 in the psychical development really fall back on 
 to the infantile level at which the satisfaction of
 
 208 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 the not yet sublimated impulse met with no hin- 
 drance. The saying "on revient toujours a ses pre- 
 miers amours" finds here its psychological confirma- 
 tion ; the person who is disappointed in his ambition 
 reaches back towards the auto-erotic foundation of 
 this passion. 7 
 
 Temporary rectal troubles (diarrhoea, constipa- 
 tion) often reveal themselves in the analysis as re- 
 gressions of the anal character. One patient suffered 
 from acute diarrhoea towards the end of the month, 
 when she had to send to her parents means of support 
 that in her unconscious she only unwillingly parted 
 with. Another compensated himself for the physi- 
 cian's fees by producing large quantities of intesti- 
 nal gas. 
 
 When a patient feels himself unkindly treated by 
 the physician he takes to onanism, if there is a cor- 
 responding auto-erotic fixation. He brings in the 
 form of this transference the confession of his child- 
 hood masturbation. As a child he gave up self-grati- 
 fication only in exchange for object-love (love of the 
 parents). If he feels himself disappointed in this kind 
 of love he relapses. Even patients who cannot re- 
 member ever having masturbated may one day come 
 with a confession of dismay that they have suddenly 
 had to give in to an irresistible impulse to self-grati- 
 fication. 
 
 * (Ambitiousness is unconsciously associated with urethra! 
 erotism. Transl.)
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 209 
 
 (These sudden regressions to anal, urethral, and 
 genital auto-erotism also explain why the disposition 
 of these erotisms to function in anxiety states \e. g. 
 dread of examinations] is so strong. The fact also 
 that in his fearful dread a man being hanged relaxes 
 both sphincters and ejaculates semen may be due, 
 apart from direct nervous stimulation, also to a 
 final convulsive regression to the pleasure sources of 
 life. I once saw a nephritic patient aged seventy, 
 who was tortured by acute headache and cutaneous 
 irritation, carrying out movements of onanism in 
 his despair.) 
 
 With male neurotics who feel themselves unkindly 
 treated by the physician homosexual obsessions may 
 appear, which often refer to the person of the latter. 
 This is a proof, which might almost be called ex- 
 perimental, that friendship is essentially sublimated 
 homosexuality, which in case of denial is apt to re- 
 gress on to its primitive level. 
 
 Expression displacements. I noticed with one pa- 
 tient that he yawned with striking frequency. I then 
 remarked that the yawning accompanied just those 
 analytic conversations whose content, since it was 
 important to him although disagreeable, would more 
 suitably have evoked interest than boredom. An- 
 other patient who came to treatment soon after this 
 brought me what I believe to be the solution of this 
 peculiar phenomenon. She also yawned often and at 
 inappropriate times, but in her case the yawning
 
 210 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 was sometimes accompanied with a flow of tears. 
 That gave me the idea that these patients' yawning 
 might be a distorted sigh, and in both cases the 
 analysis confirmed my surmise. The censorship ef- 
 fected in both cases the repression of certain dis- 
 agreeable emotional states that were aroused through 
 the analysis (pain, grief), but it was unable to bring 
 about a complete suppression, only a displacement of 
 the movements of expression, one that was enough, 
 however, to conceal from consciousness the real char- 
 acter of the emotional state. On turning my atten- 
 tion, after these observations, to the movements of 
 expression with other patients as well, I found that 
 there are other forms of "expression displacements." 
 One patient, for instance, had to cough every time 
 he wanted to avoid saying something to me; the in- 
 tended, but suppressed, speech then came through 
 nevertheless in the form of a cough. We see that 
 the displacement from one emotional expression to 
 another takes place along the line of physiological 
 vicinity (yawning sighing; talking coughing). A 
 cough may also represent a consciously or uncon- 
 sciously intended, and then suppressed, laugh, in 
 which case the displaced expression of the emotional 
 state as with a pure hysterical symptom contains 
 also the punishment for the satisfaction of pleasure. 
 Neurotic women often cough when they are being 
 medically examined, e. g., auscultated ; this also I be- 
 lieve may be regarded as a displacement of the
 
 Symptom-Constructions During Analysis 811 
 
 movements of laughter elicited by unconscious erotic 
 phantasies. After what has been said it will cause no 
 surprise if I add that in one case I was able to inter- 
 pret a temporary hiccough as representing a sob of 
 despair. These symptoms that only appear transi- 
 torily in the analysis also throw light on the chronic 
 hysterical symptoms of the same kind (spasms of 
 laughter and of crying). Really incredible but 
 none the less true is the occurrence of an "expres- 
 sion displacement" to which Professor Freud called 
 my attention. Many patients produce a rumbling in 
 the stomach when they have concealed some associa- 
 tions. The suppressed speech is turned into a ven- 
 triloquism ( Bauchreden) . 
 
 Besides the didactic value for physicians and pa- 
 tients, discussed at the beginning of the paper, these 
 "transitory symptom-formations" possess a certain 
 practical and theoretical significance. They offer us 
 points of attack for dealing with the patient's 
 strongest resistances, concealed as transferences, and 
 are thus of practical, technical value for the analy- 
 sis. And in giving us the opportunity to watch 
 symptoms of disease arise and disappear before our 
 eyes, they throw light on these processes in general. 
 They enable us to form theoretic conceptions of the 
 dynamics of disease, at least with many kinds of 
 disease. 
 
 We know from Freud that a neurotic disorder 
 comes about in three stages: the infantile fixation (a
 
 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 disturbance in the development of the sexual hun- 
 ger) constitutes the foundation of every neurosis; 
 the second stage is that of the repression, which re- 
 mains still without symptoms; the third that of the 
 outbreak of the disorder, the symptom-formation. 
 
 The experiences gathered here of "transitory 
 symptom-formations" make it probable that in the 
 great neuroses, as in these neuroses en miniature, 
 symptoms are formed only when repressed portions 
 of complexes threaten, for internal or external rea- 
 sons, to enter into associative connection with con- 
 sciousness, t. e. to become conscious, and when there- 
 by the equilibrium of a previous repression is dis- 
 turbed. The "unpleasantness" censorship watching 
 over the calm of consciousness then manages in the 
 last moment, so to speak, to deflect the excitation 
 from the progressive path, t. e. its path into con- 
 sciousness, and since the driving back into the old 
 repression situation does not succeed well to let a 
 part of the excitation and of the unconscious psy- 
 chical structures find at least a distorted expression 
 in symptoms.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE OF 
 REALITY * 
 
 development of the mentai lorms of activ- 
 L ity in the individual consists, as Freud has 
 shewn, in the resolution of the originally prevailing 
 pleasure-principle, and the repression mechanism pe- 
 culiar to it, by the adjustment to reality, i. e. by the 
 testing of reality that is based on judgment. Thus 
 arises out of the "primary" psychical stage, such as 
 is displayed in the mental activities of primitive be- 
 ings (animals, savages, children), and in primitive 
 mental states (dreams, neurosis, phantasy), the sec- 
 ondary stage of the normal man in waking thought. 
 At the beginning of its development the new-born 
 babe seeks to attain a state of satisfaction merely 
 through insistent wishing (imagining), whereby it 
 simply ignores (represses) the unsatisfying reality, 
 picturing to itself as present, on the contrary, the 
 wished-for, but lacking, satisfaction ; it attempts, 
 therefore, to conceal without effort all its needs by 
 means of positive and negative hallucinations. "It 
 
 1 Published in the Internal. Zeitschr, f . arztl. Psychoanalyse, 
 1913. 
 
 213
 
 21 4> Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 was only the non-appearance of the expected satis- 
 faction, the disappointment, that led to the abandon- 
 ment of this attempt at satisfaction by the halluci- 
 natory method. Instead, the psychical apparatus 
 had to decide to represent the actual circumstances 
 of the outer world to itself, and to strive to alter 
 reality. With this a new principle of mental activity 
 was initiated ; not what was pleasant was any longer 
 imagined, but what was real, even though it should 
 be unpleasant.'* 2 
 
 The significant essay in which Freud displayed to 
 us this fundamental fact of psychogenesis is confined 
 to the sharp differentiation between the pleasure and 
 the reality stages. Freud also concerns himself here, 
 it is true, with transitional states in which both prin- 
 ciples of mental functioning coexist (phantasy, art, 
 sexual life), but he leaves for the present unan- 
 swered the question whether the development of the 
 secondary form of mental activity from the pri- 
 mary takes place gradually or in a series of steps, 
 and whether such stages of development are to be 
 recognised, or their derivatives demonstrated, in the 
 mental life of the normal or abnormal. 
 
 An earlier work of Freud's, however, in which he 
 affords us deep insight into the mental life of ob- 
 sessional patients, 3 calls attention to a fact from 
 
 * Freud. "Fonnulierungen uber die zwei Prinzipien des psy- 
 chischen Geschehens." Jahrb. Bd. III. S. 1. 
 
 Freud. "Bemerkungen iiber eincn Fall von Zwangsneurose." 
 Jahrb. Bd. I. S. 411.
 
 Stages In the Development of Sense of Reality 215 
 
 which as a starting point one may attempt to bridge 
 over the gap between the pleasure and the reality 
 stages of mental development. 
 
 Obsessional patients who have submitted them- 
 selves to a psycho-analysis so it runs in that work 
 admit to us that they cannot help being convinced 
 of the omnipotence of their thoughts, feelings, and 
 wishes, good and bad. However enlightened they may 
 be, however much their academic knowledge and their 
 reason may strive to the contrary, they have the feel- 
 ing that their wishes in some inexplicable way get 
 realised. Of the truth of this state of affairs any 
 analyst can convince himself as often as he likes. 
 He will learn that the weal and woe of other people, 
 indeed their life and death, seem to the obsessional 
 patient to depend on certain thought processes and 
 actions, in themselves harmless, on which he engages. 
 The patient has to think of certain magical formu- 
 las, or carry out a certain action ; otherwise a great 
 misfortune will befall this or that person (mostly a 
 near relative). This conviction, though felt to be 
 superstitious, is not shaken even by repeated ex- 
 periences to the contrary. 4 
 
 Leaving aside the fact that analysis reveals such 
 obsessive thoughts and actions to be the substitutes 
 of wish-impulses that are logically correct, but which 
 
 4 This article was finished before use could be made of 
 Freud's article on "Animismus, Magie und Allmacht der Ge- 
 danken" (Imago, Jahrg. II, Heft I), which deals with the 
 same topic from other points of view.
 
 216 Contributions to Psyclw-Analysis 
 
 on account of their intolerableness have been re- 
 pressed, 5 and turning our attention exclusively to the 
 peculiar manifestation of this obsessional symptom, 
 we must admit that it constitutes a problem in itself. 
 
 Psycho-analytical experience has made it clear to 
 me that this symptom, the feeling of omnipotence, is 
 a projection of the observation that one has slavish- 
 ly to obey certain irresistible instincts. The obses- 
 sional neurosis constitutes a relapse of the mental 
 life to that stage of child-development characterised, 
 amongst other things, by there being as yet no inhib- 
 iting, postponing, reflecting thought-activity inter- 
 posed between wishing and acting, the wish-fulfilling 
 movement following spontaneously and unhesitating- 
 ly on the wishing an averting movement away from 
 something disagreeable, or an approach towards 
 something agreeable. 6 
 
 A part of the mental life, more or less removed 
 from consciousness, thus remains with the obsession- 
 al patient as the analysis shews on this childhood 
 level in consequence of an arrest in development (fix- 
 ation), and makes wishing equivalent to acting be- 
 
 Freud. Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre. 
 1906. S. 45 und 86. 
 
 It is well known that small children almost reflexly stretch 
 out their hands after every object that shines or in any other 
 way pleases them. They are to begin with also incapable of 
 foregoing any "naughtiness" that yields them any kind of 
 pleasure, whenever the stimulus causing this appears. A young 
 boy who had been forbidden to bore his finger into his nose 
 answered his mother, "I don't want to, but my hand does and 
 I can't prevent it."
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 217 
 
 cause just on account of the repression, of the 
 distraction of attention this repressed portion of 
 the mental life was not able to learn the difference 
 between the two activities, while the ego itself, which 
 has developed free from repression and grown wise 
 through education and experience, can only laugh at 
 this equating of the two. Hence the inner discord- 
 ance of the obsessional patient, the inexplicable oc- 
 currence of enlightenment and superstition side by 
 side. 
 
 Not being quite satisfied with this explanation of 
 the feeling of omnipotence as an autosymbolic phe- 
 nomenon, 7 I put to myself the question: Whence 
 then does the child get the boldness to set thinking 
 and acting as equivalents? Whence comes the feel- 
 ing of obviousness with which it stretches out its 
 hand after all objects, after the lamp hanging above 
 him as after the shining moon, in the sure expecta- 
 tion of reaching it with this gesture and drawing 
 it into the domain of its power? 
 
 I then recalled that according to Freud's assump- 
 tion "a piece of the old grandiose delusion of child- 
 hood was honestly confessed" in the omnipotence 
 phantasy of the obsessional patient, and I tried to 
 trace out the origin and fate of this delusion. In 
 this way I hoped also to learn something new about 
 the development of the ego from the pleasure to 
 
 1 This is what Silberer terms the self-perceptions that are 
 symbolically represented.
 
 fcl'8 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 the reality principle, since it seemed to me probable 
 that the replacement (to which we are compelled by 
 experience) of the childhood megalomania by the 
 recognition of the power of natural forces composes 
 the essential content of the development of the ego. 
 
 Freud declares an organisation that is a slave to 
 the pleasure principle, and which can neglect the 
 reality of the outer world, to be a fiction, one, how- 
 ever, which is almost realised in the young infant, 
 when one only takes into account the maternal care. 8 
 I might add that there is a stage in human develop- 
 ment that realises this ideal of a being subservient 
 only to pleasure, and that does so not only in imagi- 
 nation and approximately, but in actual fact and 
 completely. 
 
 I mean the period of human life passed in the 
 womb. In this state the human being lives as a para- 
 site of the mother's body. For the nascent being an 
 "outer world" exists only in a very restricted de- 
 gree; all its needs for protection, warmth, and 
 nourishment are assured by the mother. Indeed, it 
 does not even have the trouble of taking the oxy- 
 gen and nourishment that is brought to it, for it is 
 seen to that these materials, through suitable ar- 
 rangements, arrive directly into its blood-vessels. In 
 comparison with this an intestinal worm, for ex- 
 ample, has a good deal of work to perform, "tc 
 
 Jahrb. Bd. III. S. 2. Footnote. See also the controversy 
 between Bleuler and Freud on this question (Bleuler, "Das 
 autistische Denken." Jahrb. Bd. IV.).
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 219 
 
 change the outer world," in order to maintain itself. 
 All care for the continuance of the foetus, however, 
 is transferred to the mother. If, therefore, the hu- 
 man being possesses a mental life when in the womb, 
 although only an unconscious one, and it would be 
 foolish to believe that the mind begins to function 
 only at the moment of birth he must get from his 
 existence the impression that he is in fact omnipo- 
 tent. For what is omnipotence? The feeling that 
 one has all that one wants, and that one has noth- 
 ing left to wish for. The foetus, however, could 
 maintain this of itself, for it always has what is 
 .necessary for the satisfaction of its instincts, 9 and 
 so has nothing to wish for; it is without wants. 
 
 The childhood megalomania of their own omnipo- 
 tence is thus at least no empty delusion; the child 
 and the obsessional patient demand nothing impos- 
 sible from reality when they are not to be dissuaded 
 from holding that their wishes must be fulfilled ; they 
 are only demanding the return of a state that once 
 existed, those "good old days" in which they were 
 all-powerful {Period of unconditional omnipotence). 
 
 With the same right by which we assume the 
 transference of memory traces of the race's history 
 
 ' As a result of disturbances, such as through illness or in- 
 jury of the mother or of the umbilical cord, etc., necessity can 
 face a human being already in the mother's body, can rob him 
 of his omnipotence and compel him to the effort of "changing 
 the outer world," i. e. of performing work (an example being 
 the inspiration of amniotic fluid when in danger of suffoca- 
 tion.)
 
 220 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 on to the individual, indeed with more justification 
 than this, we may assert that the traces of intra- 
 uterine psychical processes do not remain without in- 
 fluence on the shaping of the psychical material pro- 
 duced after birth. The behaviour of the child im- 
 mediately after birth speaks for this continuity of 
 the mental processes. 10 
 
 The new-born child does not accommodate himself 
 uniformly as regards all his needs to the new situa- 
 tion which is visibly disagreeable to him. Imme- 
 diately after the delivery he begins to breathe, so 
 as to restore the provision of oxygen that has been 
 interrupted by the tying of the umbilical vessels ; the 
 possession of a respiratory mechanism, formed al- 
 ready in intra-uterine life, at once enables him ac- 
 tively to remedy the oxygen privation. If, however, 
 one observes the remaining behaviour of the new- 
 born child one gets the impression that he is far 
 from pleased at the rude disturbance of the wish-less 
 tranquillity he had enjoyed in the womb, and indeed 
 that he longs to rega'm this situation. Nurses in- 
 stinctively recognise this wish of the child, and as 
 soon as lie has given vent to his discomfort by strug- 
 gling and crying they deliberately bring him into a 
 situation that resembles as closely as possible the 
 one he has just left. They lay him down by the 
 
 10 Freud has incidentally pointed out that the sensations of 
 the child during the birth act probably evoke the first anx- 
 iety affect of the new being, which remains prefigurative for 
 all later anxiety and anxiousness.
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 
 
 warm body of the mother, or wrap him up in soft, 
 warm coverings, evidently so as to give him the il- 
 lusion of the mother's warm protection. They guard 
 his eye from light stimuli, and his ear from noise, and 
 give him the possibility of further enjoying the in- 
 tra-uterine absence of irritation, or, by rocking the 
 child and crooning to him monotonously rythmi- 
 cal lullabies, they reproduce the slight and monoto- 
 nously rhythmical stimuli that the child is not spared 
 even in utero (the swaying movements of the mother 
 when walking, the maternal heart-beats, the deadened 
 noise from without that manages to penetrate to the 
 interior of the body). 
 
 If we try, not only to feel ourselves into the soul 
 of the new-born babe (as the nurses do), but also 
 to think ourselves into it, we must say that the 
 helpless crying and struggling of the child is ap- 
 parently a very unsuitable reaction to the unpleas- 
 ant disturbance that the previous situation of being 
 satisfied has suddenty experienced as a result of 
 the birth. We may assume, supported by considera- 
 tions which Freud has expounded in the general part 
 of his Traumdeutung, 11 that the first consequence of 
 this disturbance is the hallucinatory re-occupation of 
 the satisfying situation that is missed, the untroubled 
 existence in the warm, tranquil body of the mother. 
 The first wish-impulse of the child, therefore, cannot 
 be any other than to regain this situation. Now the 
 "Freud. Die Traumdeutung. 3e Aufl., S. 376.
 
 222 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 curious thing is that pre-supposing normal care 
 this hallucination is in fact realised. From the sub- 
 jective standpoint of the child the previously un- 
 conditional "omnipotence" has changed merely in 
 so far, that he needs only to seize the wish-aims in 
 a hallucinatory way (to imagine them) and to alter 
 nothing else in the outer world, in order (after sat- 
 isfying this single condition) really to attain the 
 wish-fulfilment. Since the child certainly has no 
 knowledge of the real concatenation of cause and 
 effect, or of the nurse's existence and activity, he 
 must feel himself in the possession of a magical ca- 
 pacity that can actually realise all his wishes by 
 simply imagining the satisfaction of them. (Period 
 of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence.) 
 
 That the nurse guesses the hallucinations of the 
 child aright is shewn by the effect of her actions. As 
 soon as the first nursing measures are carried out 
 the child calms itself and goes to sleep. The first 
 sleep, however, is nothing else than the successful re- 
 production of the womb situation {which shelters as 
 far as possible from external stimuli), probably with 
 the biological function that the processes of growth 
 and regeneration can concentrate all energy on 
 themselves, undisturbed by the performance of any 
 external work. Some considerations, which cannot 
 be presented in this connection, have convinced me 
 that also every later sleep is nothing else than a 
 periodically repeated regression to the stage of the
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 
 
 magical-hallucinatory omnipotence, and through the 
 help of this to the absolute omnipotence of the womb 
 situation. According to Freud, one has to postulate 
 for each system subsisting by the pleasure-principle 
 arrangements by means of which it can withdraw 
 itself from the stimuli of reality. 12 Now it seems 
 to me that sleep and dreams are functions of such 
 arrangements, that is to say, remains of the hal- 
 lucinatory omnipotence of the small child that sur- 
 vive into adult life. The pathological counter-part 
 of this regression is the hallucinatory wish-fulfil- 
 ment in the psychoses. 
 
 Since the wish for the satisfying of instincts mani- 
 fests itself periodically, while the outer world pays 
 no attention to the occurrence of the occasion on 
 which the instinct is exerted, the hallucinatory rep- 
 resentation of the wish-fulfilment soon proves inade- 
 quate to bring about any longer a real wish-fulfil- 
 ment. A new condition is added to the fulfilment : the 
 child has to give certain signals thus performing a 
 motor exertion, although an inadequate one so that 
 the situation may be changed in the direction of his 
 disposition, and the "ideational identity" be followed 
 by the satisfying "perceptual identity." 13 
 
 The hallucinatory stage was already characterised 
 by the occurrence of uncoordinated motor discharges 
 (crying, struggling) on the occasion of disagreeable 
 
 u Freud. Jahrb., Bd. Ill, S. 3. 
 
 11 Freud. Die Traumdeutung. Loc. cit.
 
 224 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 affects. These are now made use of by the child as 
 magic signals, at the dictation of which the satis- 
 faction promptly arrives (naturally with external 
 help, of which the child, however, has no idea). The 
 subjective feeling of the child at all this may be 
 compared to that of a real magician, who has only 
 to perform a given gesture to bring about in the 
 outer world according to his will the most compli- 
 cated occurrences. 14 
 
 We note how the omnipotence of human beings 
 gets to depend on more and more "conditions" with 
 the increase in the complexity of the wishes. These 
 efferent manifestations soon become insufficient to 
 bring about the situation of satisfaction. As the 
 wishes take more and more special forms with de- 
 
 14 When I search in pathology for an analogy to these dis- 
 charges I have always to think of genuine epilepsy, that most 
 problematical of the major neuroses. And although I fully ad- 
 mit that in the question of epilepsy the physiological is difficult 
 to separate from the psychological, I may call attention to the 
 fact that epileptics are known to be uncommonly "sensitive" 
 beings, behind whose submissiveness frightful rage and do- 
 mineeringness can appear on the least occasion. This char- 
 acteristic has up to the present usually been interpreted as a 
 secondary degeneration, as the consequence of repeated at- 
 tacks. One should, however, think of another possibility, 
 namely whether the epileptic attacks are not to be considered 
 as regressions to the infantile period of wish-fulfilment by 
 means of uncoordinated movements. Epileptics would then be 
 persons with whom the disagreeable affects get heaped up and 
 are periodically abreacted in paroxysms. If this explanation 
 proves to be useful we should have to localise the place of fix- 
 ation for a later affliction of epilepsy in this stage of unco- 
 ordinated wish-manifestations. The irrational stamping of the 
 feet, clenching of the fists, and grinding of the teeth, etc., that 
 are to be seen in outbursts of anger would be a milder form 
 of the same regression in otherwise healthy persons.
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 
 
 velopment, they demand increasingly specialised sig- 
 nals. To begin with are such as, imitations of the 
 movement of sucking with the mouth when the infant 
 wants to be fed, and the characteristic expressions 
 by means of the voice and abdominal pressing when 
 it wants to be cleansed after excreting. The child 
 gradually learns also to stretch out its hand for the 
 objects that it wants. From this is developed later 
 a regular gesture-language : by suitable combinations 
 of gestures the child is able to express quite special 
 needs, which then are very often actually satisfied, 
 so that if only it keeps to the condition of the 
 expression of wishes by means of corresponding ges- 
 ture the child can still appear to itself as omnip- 
 otent: Period of omnipotence by the help of magic 
 gestures. 
 
 This period also has a representative in pathol- 
 ogy; the curious jump from the world of thought 
 into that of bodily processes, which Freud has dis- 
 covered hysterical conversion to be, 15 becomes more 
 intelligible to us when we view it as a regression to 
 the stage of gesture-magic. Psycho-analysis shews 
 us in fact that hysterical attacks present with the 
 help of gestures the repressed wishes of the patient as 
 fulfilled. In the mental life of the normal the count- 
 less number of superstitious gestures, or such as are 
 in some other way considered efficacious (gestures 
 of cursing, blessing, praying), is a remainder of that 
 
 " See Freud's works in the Studien iiher Hysteric, 1895.
 
 226 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 developmental period of the sense of reality in which 
 one still felt mighty enough to be able to violate the 
 regular order 16 of the universe. Fortune-tellers, 
 soothsayers, and the magnetisers continually find 
 belief in the assertion of such complete power of their 
 gestures, and the Neapolitan also averts the evil eye 
 with a symbolic gesture. 
 
 With the increase in the extent and complexity of 
 the wants goes naturally an increase, not only of 
 the "conditions" that the individual has to submit to 
 if he wishes to see his wants satisfied, but also of 
 the number of cases in which his ever more audacious 
 wishes remain unfulfilled even when the once effica- 
 cious conditions are strictly observed. The out- 
 stretched hand must often be drawn back empty, the 
 longed-for object does not follow the magic gesture. 
 Indeed, an invincible hostile power may forcibly op- 
 pose itself to this gesture and compel the hand to 
 resume its former position. Till now the "all-pow- 
 erful" being has been able to feel himself one with the 
 world that obeyed him and followed his every nod, 
 but gradually there appears a painful discordance 
 in his experiences. He has to distinguish between 
 certain perfidious things, which do not obey his will, 
 as an outer world, and on the other side his ego ; i. e. 
 between the subjective psychical contents (feelings) 
 and the objectified ones (sensations). I once called 
 the first of these stages the Introjection Phase of the 
 
 16 This being of course quite unsuspected.
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 227 
 
 pysche, since in it all experiences are still incorpo- 
 rated into the ego, and the later one the Projection 
 Phase. 11 One might also, following this terminol- 
 ogy, speak of the omnipotence stage as the introjec- 
 tion stage, the reality stage as the projection stage, 
 of the development of the ego. 
 
 Still even the objectifying of the outer world does 
 not at once destroy every tie between the ego and the 
 non-ego. The child learns, it is true, to be content 
 with having only a part of the world, the ego, at 
 his disposal, the outer world, however, often opposing 
 his wishes, but there still remains in this outer 
 world qualities that he has learned to know in him- 
 self, i. e. ego qualities. Everything points to the con- 
 clusion that the child passes through an animistic 
 period in the apprehension of reality, in which every 
 object appears to him to be endowed with life, and 
 in which he seeks to find again in every object his 
 own organs and their activities. 18 
 
 The derisive remark was once made against psy- 
 cho-analysis that, according to this doctrine, the 
 unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and 
 a vagina or anus in every concave one. I find that 
 this sentence well characterises the facts. The 
 child's mind (and the tendency of the unconscious 
 in adults that survives from it) is at first concerned 
 exclusively with his own body, and later on chiefly 
 
 17 Ch. II. 
 
 "On the subject of animism see also the essay "Ueber 
 Naturgefuhl" by Dr. Hanns Sachs (Imago, Jahrg. I.).
 
 228 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 with the satisfying of his instincts, with the pleas- 
 urable satisfactions that sucking, eating, contact 
 with the genital regions, and the functions of excre- 
 tion procure for him ; what wonder, then, if also his 
 attention is arrested above all by those objects and 
 processes of the outer world that on the ground of 
 ever so distant a resemblance remind him of his dear- 
 est experiences. 
 
 Thus arise those intimate connections, which re- 
 main throughout life, between the human body and 
 the objective world that we call symbolic. On the 
 one hand the child in this stage sees in the world 
 nothing but images of his corporeality, on the other 
 he learns to represent by means of his body the 
 whole multif ariousness of the outer world. This ca- 
 pacity for symbolic representation is an important' 
 completion of the gesture-language; it enables the 
 child not only to signalise such wishes as immediately 
 concern his body, but also to express wishes that re- 
 late to the changing of the outer world, now recog- 
 nised as such. If the child is surrounded by loving 
 care, he need not even in this stage of his existence 
 give up the illusion of his omnipotence. He still 
 only needs to represent an object symbolically and 
 the thing, believed to be alive, often really "comes" 
 to him ; for the animistically thinking child must have 
 this impression at the satisfaction of his wishes. 
 From the uncertainty regarding the arrival of the 
 satisfaction it gradually dawns on him, to be sure,
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 229 
 
 that there are also higher, "divine" powers (mother 
 or nurse), whose favour he must possess if the sat- 
 isfaction is to follow closely on the magic gestures. 
 Still this satisfaction also is not hard to obtain, es- 
 pecially with indulgent surroundings. 
 
 One of the bodily means that the child makes use 
 of for representing his wishes, and the objects he 
 wishes for, attains then an especial significance, one 
 that ranges beyond that of all other means of rep- 
 resentation speech, namely. Speech is originally 19 
 imitation, i. e. vocal representation, of sounds and 
 noises that are produced by things, or which can 
 be produced by their help ; the executive capacity of 
 the speech organs allows the reproduction of a much 
 greater multiplicity of objects and processes of the 
 outer world than was possible with the help of ges- 
 ture-language, and in a much simpler manner. 
 Speech symbolism thus gets substituted for gesture 
 symbolism : certain series of sounds are brought into 
 close associative connection with definite objects and 
 processes, and indeed gradually identified with these. 
 From this accrues the great progress : there is no 
 longer a necessity for the cumbrous figurative imagi- 
 nation and the still more cumbrous dramatic repre- 
 sentation ; the imagination and representation of the 
 series of sounds that we call words allow a far more 
 specialised and economic conception and expression 
 
 18 See Kleinpaul, Leben der Sprache (1893), and Sperber, 
 "Uber den Einfluss sexueller Momente auf Entstehung und 
 Entwicklung der Sprache," Imago, 1912.
 
 230 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 of the wishes. At the same time conscious thinking 
 makes speech symbolism possible by becoming asso- 
 ciated to thought processes that are in themselves 
 unconscious, and lending them perceptual qualities. 20 
 
 Now conscious thought by means of speech signs 
 is the highest accomplishment of the psychical ap- 
 paratus, and alone makes adjustment to reality pos- 
 sible by retarding the reflex motor discharge and the 
 release from unpleasantness. In spite of this the 
 child knows how to preserve his feeling of omnipo- 
 tence even in this stage of his development, for his 
 wishes that can be set forth in thoughts are still so 
 few and comparatively uncomplicated that the at- 
 tentive entourage concerned with the child's welfare 
 easily manages to guess most of these thoughts. The 
 mimic expressions that continually accompany 
 thinking (peculiarly so with children) make this kind 
 of thought-reading especially easy for the adults; 
 and when the child actually formulates his wishes 
 in words the entourage, ever ready to help, hastens 
 to fulfil them as soon as possible. The child then 
 thinks himself in possession of magic capacities, is 
 thus in the period of magic thoughts and magic 
 words . 21 
 
 It is this stage of reality development to which 
 
 20 See Freud, Traumdeutung, III Aufl., S. 401 and Jahrb., 
 Bd. Ill, S. I. 
 
 11 The psychological explanation of "magic" naturally does 
 not exclude the possibility of this belief containing also the 
 foreshadowing of physical facts (telepathy, etc.).
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 281 
 
 the obsessional patients seem to regress when they 
 are not to be dissuaded from the feeling of the omnip- 
 otence of their thoughts and verbal formulas, and 
 when, as Freud has shewn, they set thinking in the 
 place of acting. In superstition, in magic, and in 
 religious cults this belief in the irresistible power of 
 certain prayer, cursing, or magical formulas, which 
 one has only to think inwardly or only to speak 
 aloud for them to work, plays an enormous part. 22 
 
 This almost incurable megalomania of mankind is 
 only apparently contravened by these neurotics with 
 whom behind the feverish search for success one at 
 once comes across a feeling of inferiority (Adler), 
 which is well known to the patients themselves. An 
 analysis that reaches to the depths reveals in all such 
 cases that these feelings of inferiority are in no sense 
 something final, an explanation of the neurosis, but 
 are themselves the reactions to an exaggerated feel- 
 ing of omnipotence, to which such patients have be- 
 come "fixed" in their early childhood, and which has 
 made it impossible for them to adjust themselves to 
 any subsequent renunciation. The manifest seeking 
 for greatness that these people have, however, is 
 only a "return of the repressed," a hopeless attempt 
 to reach once more, by means of changing the outer 
 world, the omnipotence that originally was enjoyed 
 without effort. 
 
 "This "omnipotence" ("Motor power") is highly characteris- 
 tic also of obscene words. See Chapter IV.
 
 282 Contributions to Psycho- Analyst* 
 
 We can only repeat : All children live in the happy 
 delusion of omnipotence, which at some time or 
 other even if only in the womb they really par- 
 took of. It depends on their "Daimon" and their 
 "Tyche" whether they preserve the feelings of omnip- 
 otence also for later life, and become Optimists, or 
 whether they go to augment the number of Pessi- 
 mists, who never get reconciled to the renunciation 
 of their unconscious irrational wishes, who on the 
 slightest provocation feel themselves insulted or 
 slighted, and who regard themselves as step-children 
 of fate because they cannot remain her only or 
 favourite children. 
 
 Freud dates the end of the domination of the pleas- 
 ure-principle only from the complete psychical de- 
 tachment from the parents. It is also at this epoch, 
 which is extremely variable in individual cases, that 
 the feeling of omnipotence gives way to the full ap- 
 preciation of the force of circumstances. The sense 
 of reality attains its zenith in Science, while the il- 
 lusion of omnipotence here experiences its greatest 
 humiliation: the previous omnipotence here dissolves 
 into mere "conditions." (Conditionalism, determin- 
 ism.) Nevertheless, we possess in the doctrine of the 
 freedom of the will an optimistic philosophical dogma 
 that can still realise phantasies of omnipotence. 
 
 The recognition that our wishes and thoughts are 
 conditioned signifies the maximum of normal projec- 
 tion, . e. objectification. There is also, however, a
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 233 
 
 psychical disorder, paranoia, which has the charac- 
 teristic, among others, that in it even the person's 
 own wishes and thoughts are expelled into the outer 
 world, are projected. 23 It seems natural to locate 
 the fixation point of this psychosis in the period of 
 the final renunciation of omnipotence, i. e. in the 
 projection phase of the sense of reality. 
 
 The stages in the development of the sense of 
 reality have here been presented up to now only in 
 terms of the egoistic, so-called "ego-instincts," which 
 serve the function of self-preservation; reality has, 
 as Freud has established, closer connections with the 
 . ego than with sexuality, on the one hand because the 
 latter is less dependent on the outer world (it can 
 for a long time satisfy itself auto-erotically), on the 
 other hand because it is suppressed during the la- 
 tency period and does not come at all into contact 
 with reality. Sexuality thus remains throughout 
 life more subjected to the pleasure-principle, whereas 
 the ego has immediately to experience the bitterest 
 disappointment after every disregarding of reality. 2 * 
 If we now consider the feeling of omnipotence in sex- 
 ual development that characterises the pleasure 
 stage, we have to observe that here the "period of 
 unconditional omnipotence" lasts until the giving up 
 
 "See Freud, "Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen" (Kl. Schr. z. 
 Neurosenlehre, S. 45), "Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen tiber 
 einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia," 
 Jahrb., Bd. Ill, and Chapter V of this book. 
 
 "Freud. Jahrb., Bd. Ill, S. 5.
 
 234 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 of the auto-erotic kinds of satisfaction, a time when 
 the ego has already long adjusted itself to the in- 
 creasingly complicated conditions of reality, has 
 passed through the stages of magic gestures and 
 words, and has already almost attained the knowl- 
 edge of the omnipotence of natural forces. Auto- 
 erotism and narcissism are thus the omnipotence 
 stages of erotism, and, since narcissism never comes 
 to an end at all, but always remains by the side of 
 object-erotism, it can thus be said that in so far 
 as we confine ourselves to self-love in the matter of 
 love we can retain the illusion of omnipotence 
 throughout life. That the way to narcissism is at 
 the same time the constantly accessible way of re- 
 gression after every disappointment in an object of 
 love is too well known to need proof; auto-erotic 
 narcissistic regressions of pathological strength may 
 be suspected behind the symptoms of Paraphrenia 
 (Dementia praecox) and Hysteria, whereas the fix- 
 ation-points of the Obsessional Neurosis and of Par- 
 anoia should be found in the line of development of 
 "erotic reality" (the compulsion to find an object). 
 These relations, however, have not yet been ap- 
 propriately studied with all the neuroses, so that we 
 have to be content with Freud's general formulation 
 concerning the choice of neurosis, namely, that the 
 variety of the subsequent disorder is decided by 
 "which phase in the development of the ego and the
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 235 
 
 sexual hunger is affected by the determining inhibi- 
 tion of development." 
 
 One may nevertheless venture to add to this sen- 
 tence a second one ; we suspect that the wish-con- 
 stituent of the neurosis, . e. the varieties and aims of 
 the erotism that the symptoms present as fulfilled, 
 depends on where the fixation-point is in the phase 
 of the development of the sexual hunger, while the 
 mechanism of the neuroses is probably decided by 
 what stage in the development of the ego the indi- 
 vidual is in at the time of the determining inhibition. 
 It is very well thinkable that with the regression of 
 the sexual hunger to earlier stages of development 
 the level of the reality-sense that was dominant at 
 the time of fixation also becomes renascent in the 
 mechanisms of the symptom-formation. Since, that 
 is to say, this earlier kind of "reality-testing" is in- 
 comprehensible to the present ego of the neurotic, 
 there is nothing to prevent its being placed at the dis- 
 posal of the repression, and used for the presentation 
 of censured feeling- and thought-complexes. Hysteria 
 and the obsessional neurosis, for example, would ac- 
 cording to this conception be characterised on the one 
 hand by a regression of the sexual hunger to earlier 
 stages of development (auto-erotism, Oedipusism), 
 and on the other hand in their mechanisms by a re- 
 lapse of the reality-sense to the stage of magic ges- 
 tures (conversion) or of magic thoughts (omnipo-
 
 236 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 tence of thought). I repeat: It will need much 
 longer laborious work before the fixation-points of 
 all neuroses can be established with certainty. I 
 wish here only to point to one possibility of a so- 
 lution, one, it is true, that to me is plausible. 
 
 What we may conceive about the phylogenesis of 
 the reality-sense can at present be offered only as 
 a scientific prediction. It is to be assumed that we 
 shall some day succeed in bringing the individual 
 stages in the development of the ego, and the neu- 
 rotic regression-types of these, into a parallel with 
 the stages in the racial history of mankind, just 
 as, for instance, Freud found again in the mental 
 life of the savage the characters of the obsessional 
 neurosis. 25 
 
 In general the development of the reality-sense is 
 represented by a succession of repressions, to which 
 mankind was compelled, not through spontaneous 
 "strivings towards development," but through neces- 
 sity, through adjustment to a demanded renuncia- 
 tion. The first great repression is made necessary, 
 by the process of birth, which certainly comes about 
 without active cooperation, without any "intention" 
 on the part of the child. The foetus would much 
 rather remain undisturbed longer in the womb, but 
 it is cruelly turned out into the world, and it has to 
 forget (repress) the kinds of satisfaction it had got 
 
 * Freud. "Ueber einige Uebereinstimmungen im Seelenleben 
 der Wilden und der Neurotiker," Imago, Jahrg I, 1912.
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 237 
 
 fond of, and adjust itself to new ones. The same 
 cruel game is repeated with every new stage of de- 
 velopment. 26 
 
 It is perhaps allowable to venture the surmise that 
 it was the geological changes in the surface of the 
 earth, with their catastrophic consequences for 
 primitive man, that compelled repression of favour- 
 ite habits and thus "development." Such catastro- 
 phes may have been the sites of repression in the 
 history of racial development, and the temporal lo- 
 calisation and intensity of such catastrophes may 
 have decided the character and the neuroses of the 
 race. According to a remark of Professor Freud's, 
 racial character is the precipitate of racial history. 
 Having ventured so far beyond the knowable, we 
 have no reason to shrink before the last analogy and 
 from bringing the great step in individual repres- 
 sion, the latency period, into connection with the last 
 and greatest catastrophe that smote our primitive 
 ancestors (at a time when there were certainly hu- 
 man beings on the earth), i. e. with the misery of the 
 glacial period, which we still faithfully recapitulate 
 in our individual life. 27 
 
 18 If this thought is logically pursued, one must make oneself 
 familiar with the idea of a tendency of preservation, or re- 
 gression-tendency, also dominating organic life, the tendency to 
 further development, adaptation, etc., depending only on ex- 
 ternal stimuli. 
 
 17 Cases where development precedes the real needs seem to 
 contradict the conception that only external compulsion, and 
 never spontaneous impulse, leads to the giving up of accus- 
 tomed mechanisms (development). An example for this would
 
 288 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 The impetuous curiosity to know everything that 
 has just seduced me into enchanted vistas of the 
 past, and led me to bridge over the yet unknowable 
 by the help of analogies, brings me back to the 
 starting-point of these considerations: to the theme 
 of the acme and decline of the feeling of omnipotence. 
 Science has to repudiate this illusion, or at least al- 
 ways to know when she is entering the field of hy- 
 potheses and fancies. In fairy-tales, on the con- 
 trary, phantasies of omnipotence are and remain the 
 dominating ones. 28 Just where we have most humbly 
 to bow before the forces of Nature, the fairy-tale 
 comes to our aid with its typical motives. In reality 
 we are weak, hence the heroes of fairy-tales are 
 strong and unconquerable; in our activities and our 
 knowledge we are cramped and hindered by time and 
 space, hence in fairy-tales one is immortal, is in a 
 hundred places at the same time, sees into the future 
 and knows the past. The ponderousness, the solid- 
 ity, and the impenetrability of matter obstruct our 
 way every moment: in the fairy-tale, however, man 
 has wings, his eyes pierce the walls, his magic wand 
 
 be the development of the respiratory mechanism already in 
 utero. This happens, however, only in ontogenesis, and is here 
 to be regarded as a recapitulation of a compulsory process of 
 development in the history of the race. The playful practising 
 of animals (Gross) also are not the preliminary stages of a 
 future racial function, but repetitions of phylogenetically ac- 
 quired capacities. They thus allow of a purely historical-causal 
 explanation, and we are not compelled to regard them from the 
 point of view of finality. 
 
 * Cp. Riklin, Wunscherfullung und Symbolik im Marchen. 
 (Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Heft 2.)
 
 Stages in the Development of Sense of Reality 239 
 
 opens all doors. Reality is a hard fight for exist- 
 ence; in the fairy-tale the words "little table, be 
 spread" are sufficient. A man may live in perpetual 
 fear of attacks from dangerous beasts and fierce 
 foes; in the fairy-tale a magic cap enables every 
 transformation and makes us inaccessible. How 
 hard it is in reality to attain love that can fulfil 
 all our wishes ! In the fairy-tale the hero is irresist- 
 ible, or he bewitches with a magic gesture. 
 
 Thus the fairy-tale, through which grown-ups are 
 so fond of relating to their children their own un- 
 fulfilled and repressed wishes, really brings the for- 
 feited situation of omnipotence to a last, artistic 
 presentation.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 A LITTLE CHANT T CI,EER 1 
 
 A LADY a former patient of mine who had re- 
 tained her interest in psycho-analysis, called 
 my attention to the case of a little boy, which she 
 surmised would be of general interest. 
 
 The case was that of a five-year-old boy, Arpad 
 by name, who according to the unanimous reports of 
 all his relatives had developed up to the age of three 
 and a half in quite a regular way both mentally and 
 physically, and was said to have been a perfectly nor- 
 mal child; he spoke fluently and shewed considerable 
 intelligence. 
 
 All at once he became quite different. In the sum- 
 mer of 1910 the family went to an Austrian spa, 
 where they had also spent the previous summer, and 
 took rooms in the same house as in the year before. 
 Immediately after the arrival the child's demean- 
 our changed in a curious way. Hitherto he had 
 taken an interest in all the goings on, both indoors 
 and out of doors, that might attract the attention of 
 a child; from now on he was interested in only one 
 
 1 Published in the Internal. Zeitschr. f. arztl. Psychoanalyse, 
 1913. 
 
 240
 
 A Little Chanticleer 241 
 
 thing, and that was the fowl-house in the courtyard 
 of the dwelling. Early in the morning he hastened 
 to the poultry, watched them with tireless interest, 
 imitated their sounds and movements, and cried 
 when he was forcibly removed from the fowl-run. But 
 even when he was away from it he did nothing else 
 but crow and cackle. He did this unintermittingly 
 for hours at a time, and answered to questions only 
 with these animal cries, so that his mother was se- 
 riously concerned lest her child would lose his power 
 of speech. 
 
 This peculiar behaviour of little Arpad lasted 
 throughout the whole duration of the summer stay. 
 When the family returned to Budapest he began once 
 more to speak in a human way, but his talk was al- 
 most exclusively of cocks, hens, and chickens, at the 
 most with geese and ducks besides. His usual game, 
 repeated endlessly every day, was as follows: He 
 crumpled up newspaper into the shape of cocks and 
 hens, and offered them for sale; then he would take 
 some object (generally a small flat brush), call it a 
 knife, carry his "fowl" to the sink (where the cook 
 really used to kill the poultry, and cut the throat 
 of his paper hen. He shewed how the fowl bled, and 
 with his voice and gestures gave an excellent imi- 
 tation of its death agony. Whenever fowls were of- 
 fered for sale in the courtyard little Arpad got rest- 
 less, ran in and out of the door, and gave no peace 
 until his mother bought some. He wanted to witness
 
 242 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 their slaughter. Of live cocks, however, he was not 
 a little afraid. 
 
 The parents asked the child endless times why he 
 was so afraid of cocks, and Arpad always related the 
 same story: He had once gone out to the hen-coop, 
 had micturated into it, whereupon a fowl or capon 
 with yellow feathers (sometimes he said with brown) 
 came and bit his penis, and Ilona, the servant, had 
 dressed the wound. Then they cut the cock's throat, 
 so that he died. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, the parents remembered 
 this occurrence, which had happened in the first sum- 
 mer spent in the spa, when Arpad was only two and a 
 half years old. One day the mother had heard the 
 little one shrieking fearfully, and learnt from the 
 servant that he was frightened of a cock which had 
 snapped at his penis. Since Ilona was no longer in 
 the family's service it could not be ascertained 
 whether on that occasion Arpad had really been hurt 
 or (as the mother's memory went) had merely been 
 bandaged by Ilona to calm him. 
 
 The curious part of the matter was that the psychi- 
 cal after-effect of this experience had set in with the 
 child after a latent period of a whole year, on the 
 second visit to the summer residence, without any- 
 thing having happened in the meanwhile to which 
 the relatives could ascribe this sudden recurrence of 
 the fear of fowls and the interest in them. I did not, 
 however, let the negative nature of this evidence re-
 
 A Little Chanticleer 243 
 
 strain me from putting a question to the child's en- 
 tourage, one sufficiently justified by psycho-analyti- 
 cal experience, namely, whether in the course of the 
 latent period the child had not been threatened as 
 so often happens with the cutting off of his penis on 
 account of voluptuous playing with his genitals. 
 The answer, given unwillingly, was to the effect that 
 at the present time, it was true, the boy was fond of 
 playing with his member, for which he often got pun- 
 ished, that it was also "not impossible" that some- 
 one might have "jokingly" threatened to cut it off, 
 further that Arpad had had this bad habit "for a 
 long time," but whether he already had it in the lat- 
 ent year was no longer known. 
 
 In what comes presently it will be seen that in fact 
 Arpad had not been spared this threat at a later 
 date, so that we are entitled to regard the assump- 
 tion as probable that it was the threat experienced 
 in between which had so greatly excited the child on 
 re-visiting the scene of the first terrifying expe- 
 rience, in which the well-being of his member had sim- 
 ilarly been endangered. A second possibility is of 
 course not to be excluded, namely, that the first 
 fright already had been exaggerated by a still earlier 
 threat of castration, and that the excitement on re- 
 visiting the hen-coop is to be ascribed to the increase 
 of "sexual hunger" that had come about in the mean- 
 time. Unfortunately it was no longer possible to 
 reconstruct these time relationships, and we have to
 
 244 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 be content with the probability of the casual connec- 
 tion. 
 
 Personal investigation of the boy yielded nothing 
 striking or abnormal. Immediately on entering my 
 room his attention was attracted by a small bronze 
 mountain cock among the numerous other objects 
 lying about ; he brought it to me and asked "will you 
 give it to me?" I gave him some paper and a pencil 
 and he immediately drew a cock (not unskilfully). 
 Then I got him to tell me the story about the cock. 
 But he was already bored and wanted to get back to 
 his toys. Direct psycho-analytic investigation was 
 therefore impossible, and I had to confine myself to 
 getting the lady who was interested in the case and, 
 being a neighbour and friend of the family, could 
 watch him for hours at a time, to note down his cu- 
 rious remarks and gestures. I was able to establish 
 so much for myself, however, that Arpad was men- 
 tally very alert and also not untalented; his mental 
 interest and his talent were, it is true, peculiarly cen- 
 tered round the feathered folk of the fowl-run. He 
 clucked and crowed in a masterly way. Early in 
 the morning he woke the family a true Chanticleer 
 with a lusty crow. He was musical, but sang only 
 popular songs in which cock, fowl, or the like came, 
 being especially fond of the song: 
 
 "To Debreczen I must run, 
 There to buy a turkey-cock."
 
 A Little Chanticleer 245 
 
 then the songs: "Chicken, chicken, come, come, 
 come," and 
 
 "Under the window are two chickens, 
 Two little cocks and a hen." 
 
 He could draw, as was remarked above, but he con- 
 fined himself exclusively to birds with a large beak, 
 drawing these with considerable skill. One thus sees 
 the directions in which he was seeking to sublimate 
 his pathologically strong interest in these creatures. 
 The parents had finally to put up with his hobbies, 
 seeing that their interdictions did no good, and 
 bought for him various toy birds made of unbreak- 
 able material with which he carried out all sorts of 
 fanciful games. 
 
 Arpad was in general a pleasant little fellow, but 
 very defiant whenever he was reprimanded or beaten. 
 He hardly ever cried, and never begged for forgive- 
 ness. Apart from these character traits, however, 
 there were no traces of true neurotic traits to be 
 recognised. He was easily frightened, dreamt a 
 great deal (of fowls, of course) and often slept 
 badly (Pavor noctumus). 
 
 Arpad's curious sayings and actions, which were 
 noted down by the lady observer, mostly display an 
 unusual pleasure in phantasies about the cruel tor- 
 turing of poultry. His typical game, imitating the 
 slaughter of fowls, I have already mentioned ; to this
 
 246 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 should be added that even in his bird dreams it was 
 mostly "killed" cocks and hens that he saw. I will 
 here give a literal translation of some of his charac- 
 teristic sayings : 
 
 "I should like to have a live plucked cock," he 
 once said quite spontaneously. "He must have no 
 wings, no feathers, and no tail, only a comb, and he 
 must be able to walk like that." 
 
 He was playing in the kitchen with a fowl that had 
 just been slaughtered by the cook. All of a sudden 
 he went into the next room, fetched a curling-tongs 
 out of a drawer, and cried: "Now I will stick this 
 dead fowl's blind eyes." The slaughtering of poul- 
 try was quite a festival for him. He could dance 
 round the animals' bodies for hours at a time in a 
 state of intense excitement. 
 
 Someone, pointing to the slaughtered fowl, asked 
 him : "Would you like it to wake again ?" "The devil 
 I would; I would knock it down again at once my- 
 self." 
 
 He often played with potatoes or carrots (which 
 he said were fowls), slicing them into small pieces 
 with a knife. He could hardly be restrained from 
 throwing to the ground a vase that had fowls painted 
 on it. 
 
 The affects displayed in regard to fowls, however, 
 were by no means simply those of hate and cruelty, 
 but were plainly ambivalent. Very often he would 
 kiss and stroke the slaughtered animal, or he would
 
 A Little Chanticleer 24*7 
 
 "feed" his wooden goose with maize, as he had seen 
 the cook do; in doing this he clucked and peeped 
 continuously. Once he threw his unbreakable doll 
 (a fowl) in the oven because he could not tear it, 
 but then pulled it out again at once, cleansed it and 
 caressed it. The animal figures in his picture book, 
 however, had a worse time of it; he tore them in 
 pieces, was then naturally unable to bring them back 
 to life, and got very upset. 
 
 If such symptoms were observed in an adult in- 
 sane patient, the psycho-analyst would not hesitate 
 to interpret the excessive love and hate concerning 
 poultry as a transference of unconscious affects that 
 really referred to human beings, probably near rel- 
 atives, but which were repressed and could only mani- 
 fest themselves in this displaced, distorted way. He 
 would further interpret the desire to pluck and blind 
 the animals as symbolising castration intentions, and 
 regard the whole syndrome as a reaction to the pa- 
 tient's fear of the idea of his own castration. The 
 ambivalent attitude would then arouse in the ana- 
 lyst the suspicion that mutually contradictory feel- 
 ings in the patient's mind were balancing each other, 
 and on the basis of numerous experiential facts he 
 would have to surmise that this ambivalence prob- 
 ably referred to the father, who although other- 
 wise honoured and loved had at the same time to 
 be also hated on account of the sexual restrictions 
 sternly imposed by him. In a word, the analytic in-
 
 248 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 terpretation would run: The cock signified in the 
 syndrome the father. 2 
 
 In little Arpad's case we can spare ourselves the 
 trouble of making any interpretation. The work of 
 repression was not yet able entirely to conceal the 
 significance of his peculiarities; the original thing, 
 the repressed tendencies, could still be discerned in 
 his talk, and indeed it became evident at times with 
 a startling openness and crudity. 
 
 His cruelty was often displayed in regard to hu- 
 man beings also, and was strikingly often directed 
 against the genital region of adults. "I'll give you 
 one in the faeces, in your behind," he was fond of say- 
 ing to a boy somewhat older than himself. Once he 
 said, still more plainly, "I'll cut your middle out." 
 The idea of blinding occupied him pretty often. He 
 once asked his neighbour: "Can one make a person 
 blind with fire or with water?" (He was also highly 
 interested in the genitals of poultry. With every 
 fowl that was slaughtered they had to enlighten him 
 about the sex whether it was a cock, a hen, or a 
 capon.) 
 
 He ran to the bed of a grown-up girl and called 
 out: "I'll cut your head off, lay it on your belly, 
 
 1 In a very large number of analyses of dreams and neuroses 
 the figure of the father is discovered behind that of an animal. 
 See Freud, Schriften, etc. Ch. 1, and Internat. Zeitschr. f. 
 Psychoanalyse, Jahrg. I, Heft 2. Professor Freud tells me that 
 one of his next works in "Imago" will make use of this iden- 
 tity to explain totemism. (This has since appeared in book 
 form under the title "Totem und Tabu." Transl.)
 
 A Little Chanticleer 249 
 
 and eat it up.'* Once he said quite suddenly: "I 
 should like to eat a potted mother (by analogy: 
 potted fowl) ; my mother must be put in a pot and 
 cooked, then there would be a potted mother and I 
 could eat her." (He grunted and danced the while). 
 "I would cut her head off and eat it this way" (mak- 
 ing movements as if eating something with a knife 
 and fork). 
 
 After cannibalistic desires of this sort he would 
 at once get an attack of remorse, in which he maso- 
 chistically yearned for cruel punishments. "I want 
 to be burnt," he would then call out : "Break off my 
 foot and put it in the fire." "I'll cut my head off. I 
 should like to cut my mouth up so that I didn't have 
 any." 
 
 There can be no doubt that by fowl, cock, chicken 
 he meant his own family, for he said once quite spon- 
 taneously: "My father is the cock!" On another 
 occasion: "Now I am small, now I am a chicken. 
 When I get bigger I shall be a fowl. When I am 
 bigger still I shall be a cock. When I am biggest of 
 all I shall be a coachman." (The coachman who 
 drove their carriage seemed to impress him even 
 more than did his father) . 
 
 After this independent and uninfluenced admission 
 of the boy we can better understand the enormous 
 excitement with which he was never tired of watch- 
 ing the goings on in the fowl-yard. He could con- 
 veniently observe in the hen-coop all the secrets of
 
 250 Contributions to Psycho-Analyri* 
 
 his own family about which no information was 
 vouchsafed to him at home; the "helpful animals" 
 shewed him in an unconcealed way everything he 
 wanted to see, especially the continual sexual activ- 
 ity between cock and hen, the laying of eggs, and 
 the creeping out of the young brood. The dwelling 
 conditions at Arpad's are such that he had beyond 
 all question been an ear-witness to similar proceed- 
 ings (between the parents). The curiosity in this 
 way aroused he then had to satisfy by insatiable 
 gazing at animals. 
 
 We are also indebted to Arpad for the last confir- 
 mation of my assumption that the morbid dread of 
 cocks was ultimately to be traced to the threat of 
 castration for onanism. 
 
 One morning he asked the neighbour: "Tell me, 
 why do people die?" (Answer: Because they get old 
 and grow tired). "Hm! So my grandmother was 
 also old? No! She wasn't old, and yet she died. 
 Oh, when there's a God why does he always let me 
 fall down? And why does he make people have to 
 die ?" Then he began to get interested in angels and 
 souls, upon which he was given the explanation that 
 they are only fairy-tales. At this he got quite rigid 
 with fright and said : "No ! That's not true ! There 
 are angels. I have seen one who carries the dead 
 children to heaven." Then he asked, horrified: 
 "Why do children die?" "How long can one live?"
 
 A Little Chanticleer 251 
 
 It was only with great difficulty that he calmed 
 down. 
 
 It turned out then that early on the same day the 
 chamber-maid had suddenly lifted his bed-clothes and 
 found him manipulating his penis, whereupon she 
 threatened to cut it off. The neighbour tried to quiet 
 him and told him that no harm would be done to 
 him ; every child did things of that sort. Upon which 
 Arpad cried out indignantly: "That's not true! 
 Not every child ! My papa has never done anything 
 like that." 
 
 Now we understand better his unquenchable rage 
 towards the cock who wanted to do with his member 
 what the grown-ups threatened to do, and his awe for 
 this sexual animal which dared to do everything that 
 filled him with terror; we also understand the cruel 
 punishments that he pronounced on himself (on ac- 
 count of the onanism and the sadistic phantasies). 
 
 To complete the picture, so to speak, he began 
 later on to occupy himself greatly with religious 
 thoughts. Old, bearded Jews filled him with great 
 respect, mixed with dread. He begged his mother 
 to invite these beggars into the house. When one 
 actually came, however, he would hide and watch 
 him from a respectable distance; as one of these 
 was going away the boy let his head hang down and 
 said, "Now I am a beggar-fowl." Old Jews inter- 
 ested him, so he said, because they come "from God" 
 (out of the temple).
 
 252 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 In conclusion another utterance of Arpad's may be 
 given which shews that he had not watched the go- 
 ings on of the fowls so long for nothing. He told 
 his neighbour one day in all seriousness: "I shall 
 marry you and your sister and my three cousins and 
 the cook ; no, instead of the cook rather my mother." 
 He wanted, therefore, to be a real "cock of the roost."
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SYMBOLISM 
 
 The Symbolic Representation of the Pleasures and 
 Reality Principles in the Oedipus Myth 1 
 
 SCHOPENHAUER writes : 2 "Every work has its 
 origin in a happy thought, and the latter gives 
 the joy of conception ; the birth, however, the carry- 
 ing out, is, in my own case at least, not without 
 pain; for then I stand before my own soul, like an 
 inexorable j udge before a prisoner lying on the rack, 
 and make it answer until there is nothing left to ask. 
 Almost all the errors and unutterable follies of which 
 doctrines and philosophies are so full seem to me to 
 spring from a lack of this probity. The truth was 
 not found, not because it was unsought, but because 
 the intention always was to find again instead some 
 preconceived opinion or other, or at least not to 
 wound some favourite idea, and with this aim in view 
 subterfuges had to be employed against both other 
 
 1 Published in Imago, 1912. 
 
 1 Letter to Goethe, dated November the llth, 1815. 
 253
 
 Contributions to Psycho-Analyait 
 
 people and the thinker himself. It is the courage of 
 making a clean breast of it in face of every question 
 that makes the philosopher. He must be like Soph- 
 ocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concern- 
 ing his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable 
 enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror 
 awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in 
 our hearts the Jocasta, who begs Oedipus for God's 
 sake not to enquire further; and we give way to her, 
 and that is the reason why philosophy stands where 
 it does. 3 Just as Odin at the door of hell unceas- 
 ingly interrogates the old prophetess in her grave, 
 disregarding her opposition and refusals and prayers 
 to be left in peace, so must the philosopher interro- 
 gate himself without mercy. This philosophical 
 courage, however, which is the same thing as the sin- 
 cerity and probity of investigation that you attrib- 
 ute to me, does not arise from reflection, cannot 
 be wrung from resolutions, but is an inborn trend 
 of the mind." 
 
 The deep and compressed wisdom of these remarks 
 deserves to be discussed, and to be compared with 
 the results of psycho-analysis. 
 
 What Schopenhauer says about the psychical at- 
 titude requisite for scientific (philosophical) produc- 
 tion sounds like the application of Freud's formula 
 about the "principles of psychical happenings" 4 to 
 
 Not underlined in the original. 
 
 * Freud. Jahrb. d. Psychoanalyse, Bd. Ill, S. 1.
 
 Symbolism 55 
 
 the theory of Science. Freud distinguishes two such 
 principles: the pleasure-principle, which in the case 
 of primitive beings (animals, children, savages), as 
 in that of the more primitive mental states (in 
 dreams, wit, phantasy, neurosis, psychosis) plays 
 the leading part and allows processes to come about 
 that only strive for the shortest way of gaining 
 pleasure, while the psychical activity of acts that 
 might create feelings of unpleasantness (Urdust) is 
 withdrawn (repression) ; then the reality-principle, 
 which presupposes a higher development and growth 
 of the psychical apparatus, and has as its charac- 
 teristic that "in place of the repression, which ex- 
 cluded a number of the incoming ideas as creative 
 of unpleasantness (Unlust), impartial judgment ap- 
 pears, which has to decide whether a given idea is 
 true or false, i. e. in harmony with reality or not, 
 and which decides by comparison with the memory- 
 traces of reality." 
 
 Only one kind of thought activity remains free 
 from the tests of reality, even after the inauguration 
 of the higher principle, and subject solely to the 
 (pleasure-principle, namely, phantasy, while it is 
 Science that is most successful in overcoming the 
 pleasure-principle. 5 
 
 Schopenhauer's opinion, quoted above, on the men- 
 tal disposition requisite for scientific activity would 
 therefore run somewhat as follows if converted into 
 
 8 Freud. Loc. cit., S. 4.
 
 256 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 Freud's terminology: the thinker may (and should) 
 give his phantasy play, so as to be able to taste the 
 "joy of conception" new ideas are of course not to 
 be had in any other way 8 , but in order that these 
 phantastic notions may evolve into scientific ideas 
 they must first be submitted to a laborious testing 
 by reality. 
 
 Schopenhauer recognised with acute perception 
 that the greatest resistances raised against unprej- 
 udiced testing of reality, even in the case of a scien- 
 tist, are not of an intellectual, but of an affective na- 
 ture. Even the scientist has human failings and pas- 
 sions: vanity, jealousy, moral and religious bias tend- 
 ing to blind him to a truth that is disagreeable to 
 him ; and he is only too inclined to regard as true an 
 error that fits his personal system. 
 
 Psycho-analysis can only complement Schopen- 
 hauer's postulate in a single point. It has found that 
 the inner resistances may be fixed in the earliest child- 
 hood and may be completely unconscious; it there- 
 fore demands of every psychologist who enters on the 
 study of the human mind that he should thoroughly 
 investigate beforehand his own mental constitution 
 inborn and acquired down to the deepest layers 
 and with all the resources of the analytic technique. 
 
 Unconscious affects, however, may falsify the 
 truth not only in psychology, but also in all other 
 
 See on this point Robitschek, "Symbolisches Oenken in der 
 chemischen Forschung," Imago, Jahrg. I, Heft 1.
 
 Symbolism 257 
 
 sciences, so we have to formulate Schopenhauer's 
 postulate as follows : Everyone who works in Science 
 should first submit himself to a methodical psycho- 
 analysis. 
 
 The advantages that would accrue to Science from 
 this deepened self-knowledge on the part of the scien- 
 tist are evident. An enormous amount of power for 
 work, which is now wasted on infantile controver- 
 sies and priority disputes, could be put at the dis- 
 posal of more serious aims. The danger of "project- 
 ing into Science as a generally valid theory peculiar- 
 ities of one's own personality" (Freud 7 ) would be 
 much less. The hostile manner also in which, even 
 nowadays, new unusual ideas or scientific proposi- 
 tions are received when put forward by unknown au- 
 thors, unsupported by any authoritative personality, 
 would give way to a more unprejudiced testing by 
 reality. I will go so far as to maintain that, if this 
 rule of self-analysis were observed, the development 
 of the various sciences, whidh today is an endless 
 series of energy-wasting revolutions and reactions, 
 would pursue a much smoother, yet a more profitable 
 and an accelerated course. 
 
 It cannot be regarded as chance that the Oedipus 
 myth immediately occurred to Schopenhauer when he 
 wished to illustrate by a simile the correct psychical 
 attitude of the scientist in mental production and the 
 
 T Freud. "Ratschlage, etc." Zentralbl. f. Psychoanalyse, 
 Jahrj?. II.
 
 S58 Contributions to Psycho-Analyti* 
 
 inner resistances that arise against this correct way 
 of working. Had he been as we analysts are con- 
 vinced of the strict determination and determin- 
 ability of every psychical act, this thought would 
 surely have made him reflect. For us, who are the 
 fortunate possessors of the Freudian psychology 
 (which like a mental Dietrich provides a ready key 
 to so many locks that have till now been considered 
 impossible to open), it is not at all difficult to re- 
 trieve this piece of analysis. This idea that occurred 
 to Schopenhauer indicates his unconscious percep- 
 tion of the fact that of all inner resistances by far 
 the most significant is the resistance against the in- 
 fantile fixation on hostile tendencies against the fa- 
 ther and on incestuous ones towards the mother. 
 
 These tendencies, which through the civilised edu- 
 cation of the race and of the individual have become 
 intensely disagreeable, and have therefore been re- 
 pressed, draw with them into the repression a large 
 number of other ideas and tendencies associated with 
 these complexes, and exclude them from the free in- 
 terchange of thought, or at all events no longer allow 
 them to be treated with scientific objectivity. 
 
 The "Oedipus complex" is not only the nuclear 
 complex of the neuroses (Freud) ; the kind of atti- 1 
 tude adopted towards it also determines the most im- 
 portant character traits of the normal man, and in 
 part also the greater or lesser objectivity of the 
 scientist. A man of science who is prevented by the
 
 Symbolism 259 
 
 incest barrier from admitting to himself nascent in- 
 clinations of love and disrespect towards blood-re- 
 lations will so as to assure the repression of these 
 inclinations also not want, nor be able, to test 
 in their reality with the impartiality demanded by 
 Science the actions, works, and thoughts of other 
 authorities as well as the paternal one. 
 
 To decipher the feeling and thought content that 
 lies behind the wording of the Oedipus myth was thus 
 beyond even the power of a Schopenhauer, otherwise 
 so discerning. He overlooked the fact as did the 
 whole civilised world until Freud that this myth is 
 a distorted wish phantasy, the projection of re- 
 pressed wish-excitations (father-hate, mother-love) 
 with an altered pleasure-prefix ( abhorrence, shudder- 
 ing awe) on to an external power, "fate." This re- 
 construction of the real meaning of the myth, its in^ 
 terpretation as a "material phenomenon" ( Silberer) , 
 was thus alien to the philosopher. While writing this 
 letter he was himself dominated so I believe by af- 
 fects that would have debarred this insight. 
 
 The actual occasion that led Schopenhauer to 
 chose this comparison of himself with Oedipus may be 
 divined from the other parts of the letter. The neg- 
 lected philosopher saw himself recognised for the 
 first time by a man of Goethe's greatness and stand- 
 ing. He answered him with expressions of gratitude 
 that we are not accustomed to from the proud, self- 
 confident Schopenhauer: "Your Excellency's kind
 
 60 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 letter has given me great pleasure, because every- 
 thing coming from you is for me of inestimable value, 
 a sacred possession. Further, your letter contains 
 the praise of my work, and your approval outweighs 
 in my estimation that of any other." 
 
 That sounds absolutely like the enthusiastic grati- 
 tude of one man to an older respected one in whom 
 he hopes to find the long-sought protector, . e. to 
 find again the father. Besides God, King, and 
 national heroes, heroes of the spirit like Goethe are 
 also "revenants" of the father for countless men, who 
 transfer to them all the feelings of gratitude and re- 
 spect that they once shewed to their bodily father. 
 The subsequent quotation of the Oedipus myth, how- 
 ever, may well have been an unconscious reaction 
 against this perhaps rather extravagant expres- 
 sion of gratitude towards the father, a reaction that 
 allowed some display of the hostile tendencies that go 
 to make up the fundamentally ambivalent feeling- 
 attitude of a son towards his father. In favour of 
 this vie\7 speaks the fact that towards the end the let- 
 ter becomes more and more proud and self-confident. 
 Schopenhauer there asks Goethe to secure the publi- 
 cation of his chief work (Die Welt als Wille und Vor- 
 stellung), and now speaks to him as to an equal; 
 he lays a eulogising emphasis on the unusual value 
 of his book, the remarkable nature of its contents, 
 and the beauty of its style, closing with a few cool, 
 business-like lines, which might perhaps be called
 
 Symbolism 261 
 
 brusque. "I will ask you please to give me a quite 
 decisive answer without delay, because in case you do 
 not accept my proposal I will commission someone 
 who is going to the Leipsic fair to seek a publisher 
 there for me." 
 
 Perhaps it was just the aid of the attention that 
 had been deviated from the concrete meaning that 
 enabled Schopenhauer to decipher in this letter the 
 "functional symbolism" (which for some time escaped 
 ever; psycho-analysts) of certain details of the Oedi- 
 pus myth. 
 
 Silberer gives the name of functional symbol- 
 phenomena to those pictures occurring in dreams, 
 phantasies, myths, etc., in which not the content of 
 thought and imagination, but the way of function- 
 ing of the mind (e. g. its ease, difficulty, inhibition, 
 etc) is indirectly represented. 8 
 
 If we allow Schopenhauer's comparison and trans- 
 late it into analytical-scientific language, we have to 
 say that the two chief personages of Sophocles' trag- 
 edy also symbolise the two principles of mental ac- 
 tivity. Oedipus, "who, seeking enlightenment concern- 
 ing his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable en- 
 quiry, even when he divines that appalling horror 
 awaits him in the answer," represents the reality- 
 principle in the human mind, which permits none of 
 the emerging ideas, even those that produce pain, to 
 
 *Cp. Silberer's throughout original and pregnant works on 
 symbolism, especially those in the Jahrb. d. Psychoanalyse, Bd. 
 1-111.
 
 262 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 be repressed, but bids all to be equally tested as to 
 their intrinsic truth. Jocasta, "who begs Oedipus 
 for God's sake not to enquire further," is the per- 
 sonification of the pleasure-principle, which, regard- 
 less of objective truth, wants nothing else than to 
 spare the ego pain, to gain pleasure wherever pos- 
 sible, and, so as to reach this goal, bans to the un- 
 conscious whenever possible all ideas and thoughts 
 that threaten to set free pain. 
 
 Encouraged by Schopenhauer's interpretation and 
 its striking analytical confirmation, I venture to go 
 a step further and to raise the question whether it 
 is pure chance that in both the Oedipus myth and the 
 Edda Saga, also cited by our philosopher, the real- 
 ity-principle is represented by men (Oedipus, Odin) 
 and the pleasure-principle by women (Jocasta, 
 Erda). The psycho-analyst is not accustomed to 
 fly hastily to the idea of "accident," and would in- 
 cline rather to attribute to the Greek and Teutonic 
 peoples, as well as to Sophocles and Schopenhauer, 
 an unconscious knowledge of the bisexuality of every 
 human being. Schopenhauer actually says that most 
 human beings carry in them Oedipus and Jocasta. 
 In accord with this interpretation is the observation 
 of daily experience that in general in women the tend- 
 ency to repression the pleasure-principle, there- 
 fore prevails ; in men the capacity for objective 
 judgment and for tolerating painful insight the 
 reality-principle, therefore.
 
 Symbolism 63 
 
 An eye made keen by individual-psychological ex- 
 perience will certainly be able to discover and solve 
 many more significant symbols in Sophocles' tragedy. 
 I will only point out two very striking ones, both of 
 the category of "somatic symbol-phenomena" (Sil- 
 berer), in which, therefore, bodily states are mir- 
 rored. To start with, there is the name of the tragic 
 hero Oedipus, which in Greek means "swell-foot." 
 This apparently senseless and odd denomination at 
 once loses this character when we know that in 
 dreams and jokes, as well as in the fetishistic wor- 
 ship of the foot or in the neurotic dread of this mem- 
 ber, it symbolises the male organ. 
 
 The fact that this member is described in the hero's 
 name as swollen is sufficiently explained by its erecti- 
 bility. It cannot surprise us, by the way, that the 
 myth completely identifies with a phallus the man 
 who achieved the monstrous feat of sexual inter- 
 course with the mother, a feat no doubt conceived as 
 superhuman. 
 
 The other somatic symbol-phenomenon is Oedipus' 
 self-blinding as a punishment for his unconscious 
 committed sins. It is true that the tragedian gives 
 the explanation for this punishment : "For why was I 
 to see, When to descry no sight on earth could have 
 a charm for me?" * he makes Oedipus (not quite un- 
 equivocally) cry out. But certain psycho-analytical 
 
 (I quote throughout from Sir George Young's translation 
 of the Oedipus Tyrannus. Transl.)
 
 264 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 experiences, in which the eyes regularly have to be 
 interpreted as symbols of the genital organs, give me 
 the right to interpret the self-blinding as a displace- 
 ment of the really intended self-castration of Oedi- 
 pus, the talion punishment more comprehensible in 
 this connection. To the horrified question of the 
 Chorus, however; 
 
 Rash man, how could'st thou bear to outrage so 
 Thine eyes? What Power was it, what wrought on 
 
 thee? 
 the hero answers : 
 
 Apollo, Apollo fulfils, 
 
 O friends, my measure of ills 
 
 Fills my measure of woe. 
 
 In other words, it was the sun (Phoebus Apollo), 
 the most typical father-symbol; 10 the hero was no 
 longer to look him in the eyes, a consideration that 
 may have given a second determining factor for the 
 distortion of the castration punishment to blinding. 11 
 
 * Freud. "Nachtrag zur Analyse Schrebers," Jahrb. d. Psy- 
 choanalyse, Bd. III. 
 
 "These symbol interpretations will be at once evident to the 
 practised psycho-analyst, since he can find them confirmed in 
 his dream analyses countless times. While reading through this 
 article, however, I received from Dr. Otto Rank the informa- 
 tion that the correctness both of the interpretation of the 
 name Oedipus here attempted and that of the sexual-symbolic 
 explanation f self-binding could be determined with certainty 
 from comparative mythological studies. In his work that has 
 just appeared, "Das Inzest-motiv in Dichtung und Sage," these 
 interpretations are substantiated with a rich collection of facts, 
 which makes it pdssible for the non-analyst also to accept them.
 
 Symbolism 265 
 
 If we have once assimilated these interpretations, 
 it must amaze us to see how the folk-soul should 
 have managed to fuse together in this myth the 
 knowledge (distorted, it is true) of the most signifi- 
 cant content, the nuclear complex of the unconscious 
 (. e. the parental complex), with the most general 
 and comprehensive formula of mental activity. Our 
 amazement gives way to understanding, however, 
 when we have learnt from Otto Rank's fundamental 
 mytho-psychological works to grasp the way in 
 which the creative folk-soul works. Rank shewed 
 in a beautiful example 12 that the individual poet 
 "by means of his own complex-tones succeeds in clari- 
 fying and emphasising certain attributes of a trans- 
 mitted material," but that the so-called folk -produc- 
 tions are also to be regarded as the work of numerous 
 or countless individuals, who originate, transmit, 
 and decorate the tradition. "Only in this case," he 
 says further, "the story goes through a series of sim- 
 ilarly disposed individual minds, each of which works 
 in the same direction, at the production of general 
 human motives and the polishing of many disturbing 
 accessory works." 
 
 After the double interpretation of the Oedipus 
 myth we may imagine the crystallising process of 
 our myth, described by Rank, somewhat as follows : 
 
 Significant but unconscious psychical dontents 
 
 "Rank. "Der Sinn dcr Griselda-Fabel," Imago. Jahrg. I, 
 Heft 1.
 
 $66 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 (aggressive phantasies against the father, sexual 
 hunger for the mother with erection-tendencies, dread 
 lest the father would avenge the sinful intent with the 
 punishment of castration) procured, each for itself, 
 indirect symbolic representatives in the consciousness 
 of all men. Men with special creative capacities, 
 poets, give expression to these universal symbols. In 
 this way the mythical motives of exposure by the par- 
 ents, victory over the father, unconscious inter- 
 course with the mother, and self-blinding, might have 
 arisen in individuals independent of one another. In 
 the course of the passage of the myths through 
 countless poetic individual minds, one that Rank has 
 made probable, condensation of the separate motives 
 led secondarily to a greater unity, which then proved 
 to be durable and which was fashioned anew in much 
 the same form by all peoples and at all times. 13 
 
 It is probable, however, that in this, as also in 
 every other myth, and perhaps indeed with mental 
 productivity in general, parallel with the tendency to 
 give expression to psychical contents there is also an 
 unconscious aim at bringing to presentation the men- 
 tal ways of functioning that are operative in master- 
 ing these contents. 14 Only this latter fusion then 
 
 M See on this point Rank, Der Mythus von der Geburt des 
 Helden (Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Heft V). 
 
 "Silberer, to whom we owe the formulation of the idea of 
 functional symbolism, cites a long series of myths and fairy- 
 tales that can be resolved into both material and functional 
 symbol-phenomena. ("Phantasie und Mythos," Jahrb. d. Psy- 
 choanalyse, Bd. II.)
 
 Symbolism 
 
 267 
 
 yields the perfected myth, which without foregoing 
 any of its effect on men is transmitted unchanged 
 for hundreds of years. So was it with the Oedipus 
 myth, in which not only the most deeply repressed 
 feeling and thought complexes of mankind are rep- 
 resented in images, but also the play of the mental 
 forces that were operative in the attempt to master 
 these contents, differing according to sex and indi- 
 viduality. 
 
 For the correctness of this interpretation let some 
 passages from the tragedy itself bear witness : 
 
 Oedipus: And how can I help dreading 
 
 My mother's bed? 
 ,/ocasta: But why should men be fearful,. . 
 
 O'er whom Fortune is mistress, and 
 fore-knowledge 
 
 Of nothing sure? Best take life eas- 
 
 %, 15 
 As a man may. For that maternal 
 
 wedding, 
 Have you no fear; for many men ere 
 
 now 
 Have dreamed as much ; but he who by 
 
 such dreams 
 Sets nothing, has the easiest life of it. 
 
 ***** 
 11 The passages in Italics are not underlined in the original.
 
 268 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 Jocasta (to OEDIPUS, who, enquiring after the 
 frightful truth* summons the only witness of the 
 crime) : 
 
 Why ask who 'twas he spoke of ? 
 Nay, never mind never remember it 
 'Twas idly spoken ! 
 Oedipus: Nay, it cannot be 
 
 That having such a clue I should refuse 
 
 To solve the mystery of my parentage ! 
 
 Jocasta: For heaven's sake, if you care for your 
 
 own life, 
 Don't seek it! I am sick, and that's 
 
 enough! 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Jocasta: But I beseech you, hearken ! Do not do 
 
 it! 
 Oedipus: I will not hearken not to know the 
 
 whole. 
 
 Jocasta : I mean well ; and I tell you for the best ! 
 Oedipus: What you call best is an old sore of 
 
 mine. 
 Jocasta: Wretch, what thou art O might' st thou 
 
 never know! 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Oedipus: Break out what will, I shall not hesi- 
 tate, 
 
 Low though it be, to trace the sourct 
 of me. 
 
 *****
 
 Symbolism 269 
 
 Shepherd (who was ordered to kill the new-born 
 Oedipug, but who exposed him, to the open ) : 
 
 O, I am at the horror, now, to speak! 
 Oedipus: And I to hear. But I must hear no 
 less. 
 
 "The Jocasta in us," as Schopenhauer says, the 
 pleasure-principle, as we express it, wishes thus that 
 a man "should best take life easily, as a man may," 
 that he "set no store by" (suppresses) the things 
 that disturb him, e. g. that with the most superficial 
 motivation he should refuse to accord any signifi- 
 cance to phantasies and dreams about the death of 
 his father and sexual intercourse with his mother, 
 pay no attention to disagreeable and dangerous talk, 
 not search after the origin of things, but above all 
 it warns a man against recognising who he is. 
 
 The reality-principle, however, the Oedipus in 
 the human soul, does not allow the seductions of 
 pleasure to keep him from penetrating into even a 
 bitter or a horrible truth, it estimates nothing so 
 lowly as to be not worth testing, it is not ashamed 
 to seek the true psychological nucleus of even super- 
 stitious prophecies and dreams, and learns to endure 
 the knowledge that in the inmost soul aggressive and 
 sexual instincts dwell that do not pause even at the 
 barriers erected by civilisation between the son and 
 his parents.
 
 70 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 II 
 
 On Eye Symbolism 
 
 i 
 
 Relying on psycho-analytical experience, I have 
 tried to interpret Oedipus* self-blinding as a self- 
 castration. 17 I wish here to relate shortly the facts 
 on which I relied for the purpose of this interpreta- 
 tion. 
 
 1. A young lady suffered from a phobia of sharp 
 objects, especially needles. Her obsessive fear ran : 
 such an object might sometime put out her eyes. 
 Closer investigation of the case disclosed the fact 
 that the lady had for a number of years lived with 
 her friend in sexual intimacy, but had anxiously 
 guarded against permitting the intermissio penis, 
 which would have impaired her anatomical integrity 
 by rupturing the hymen. All sorts of accidents now 
 kept happening to her, most of which affected the 
 eye; most commonly unintentional self-inflicted in- 
 juries with needles. Interpretation : Substitution of 
 the genitals by the eyes, and representation of the 
 wishes and fears relating to the former by accidental 
 actions and phobias relating to the latter. 
 
 2. A myopic patient with conscious fears of in- 
 feriority and compensating grandiose phantasies 
 transferred all his hypochondriac and anxious feel- 
 
 14 Published in the Internal. Zeitschr. f. arztl. Psychoanalyse, 
 1913, as a contribution to the symposium on eye symbolism. 
 " See Chapter X, Section 1.
 
 Symbolism 271 
 
 ings, and an exaggerated sense of shame, on to his 
 short-sightedness; these feelings, however, relate in 
 his unconscious to the genitals. When a small child 
 he had sexual "omnipotent phantasies" concerning 
 his mother and sister ; later on painful realisation of 
 his sexual inferiority ("small penis" complex, hypo- 
 chondria, "states of weakness"), which was com- 
 pensated for by excesseive onanism and sadistic acts 
 of coitus. With the help of the symbolic equating: 
 eye genital, he managed to represent by means of 
 the eye a great part of his sexual wishes and fears. 
 An incomplete analytic enlightenment reduced his 
 hypochondria very appreciably. 
 
 3. I had the opportunity of getting to know a 
 family whose members suffered without exception 
 from an exaggerated fear of injuries and diseases 
 of the eye. The mere mention of bad or injured eyes 
 made them get pale, and the sight of such things 
 could lead to fainting. In one member of the family 
 the psychical disturbances of potency could be rec- 
 ognised to be the manifestations of masochism which 
 had appeared as a reaction against sadistic desires; 
 the fear of eye injuries was the reaction to the sa- 
 distic wish to injure the eye, a displacement of the 
 sadistic coitus wish. It had been very easy for the 
 sadistic-masochistic components of the sexual in- 
 stinct to be transferred from the genital to another 
 organ susceptible to injury. 
 
 Another member of this family extended fear and
 
 272 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 disgust for eyes on to corns as well ; in this not only 
 the external resemblance and the identity of the 
 name, 18 but a second symbolic equating (toe=penis) 
 played a part. This was evidently an attempt to 
 bring the symbol eye once more nearer to the real 
 thing (genital organ) with the help of a mediate 
 idea (corn). 
 
 4. A patient who was afraid of beetles when a 
 child developed at the time of puberty a dread of see- 
 ing himself in a mirror, especially of seeing his own 
 eyes and eyebrows. This dread turned out to be on 
 the one hand an auto-perception of his tendency to 
 repression (not wanting to look himself in the eye), 
 on the other hand a representation of the fear of 
 onanism. With the help of the idea of movability the 
 child succeeded in displacing his attention and affects 
 from the spontaneously movable (erectile) organ on 
 to the movable beetle. The beetle's vulnerability also, 
 the way in which even a child can so easily crush it 
 under foot, renders it a suitable object for taking the 
 place of the original object of attack, the sexual or- 
 gan. A further displacement then set the equally 
 movable and vulnerable eye in place of the beetle. 
 I might also mention that in Hungarian the pupil 
 is designated by a word meaning literally, "eye- 
 beetle." 
 
 5. In a whole series of anxiety dreams (mostly 
 
 u (Corns in German are called "Hiihneraugen," literally 
 "fowls' eyes." Transl.)
 
 Symbolism 273 
 
 recollected from childhood) eyes figure that grow 
 alternately larger and smaller. From the total con- 
 text I have had to regard these eyes as symbols of 
 the male sexual organ in its changing size (erection). 
 The apparent change in size of the eyes on opening 
 and closing the lids is obviously used by the child to 
 represent genital processes that are accompanied by 
 changes in size. Children's dread, often excessive, of 
 their parents' eyes has also, in my opinion, a sexual- 
 symbolic root. 
 
 6. In another series of dreams, eyes (as paired 
 organs) represent the testicles. Since the face 
 (apart from the hands) is the only uncovered part 
 of the body, children have to satisfy all their curi- 
 osity relating to other parts of the body on the head 
 and face of their adult friends, especially the par- 
 ents. Each part of the face thus becomes the rep- 
 resentative of one or more genital areas. The face 
 is specially well adapted (nose in the middle be- 
 tween the eyes and eyebrows, with the mouth below) 
 for representation of the penis, testicles, pubic hair, 
 and anus. 
 
 I have no doubt that the sense of embarrassment 
 one experiences on being stared at, and which keeps 
 one from staring hard at others, finds its explana- 
 tion in the sexual-symbolic significance of the parts 
 of the face. This must also go to explain the marked 
 effect of the hypnotiser's eyes on his medium. I may 
 refer also to the sexual symbolism in ogling, in the
 
 274 Contributions to Pgycho-4iia1if.<}i* 
 
 bashful drooping of the eyes, casting of the eyes on 
 someone, etc., further such expressions as "to cast 
 eyes at someone, to throw sheep's eyes," 9 etc. 
 
 7. Finally I may relate the case of an obsessional 
 patient who confirmed subsequently my interpreta- 
 tion of Oedipus' self-blinding. As a child he was 
 unusually spoilt, fixed on his parents, but very bash- 
 ful and modest. One day he learnt from other chil- 
 dren the real course of sexual relations between the 
 parents. At this he displayed intense anger at his 
 father, often with the conscious phantasy that he 
 was castrating him (the father), which was always 
 followed, however, by remorse and self-punishment. 
 Now one of these self-punishments was that he de- 
 stroyed the eyes in his own portrait. I was able to 
 explain to the patient that in doing so he was only 
 expiating in a disguised way the castration he had 
 wished to perform on his father, in accordance with 
 the Mosaic talion threat of punishment, "an eye for 
 an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," which, by the way, 
 takes for example just the two castration symbols, 
 blinding and tooth-extraction. 20 
 
 In a work on the stages in the development of the 
 sense of reality 21 I have attempted to explain the 
 origin of symbolism from the impulse to represent in- 
 fantile wishes as being fulfilled, by means of the 
 
 w (Cp. the modern slang expression, "to make a glad eye." 
 Transl.) 
 
 " See my remarks on tooth-symbolism in Chapter VI. 
 "Chapter VIII.
 
 Symbolism 275 
 
 child's own body. The symbolic identification of ex- 
 ternal objects with bodily organs makes it possible to 
 find again, on the one hand, all the wished-for ob- 
 jects of the world in the individual's body, on the 
 other hand, the treasured organs of the individual's 
 body in objects conceived in an animistic manner. 
 The tooth and eye symbolism would be examples of 
 the fact that bodily organs (principally the genital 
 ones) can be represented not only by objects of the 
 outer world, but also by other organs of the body. 
 In all probability this is even the more primary kind 
 of symbol-creation. 
 
 I imagine that this symbolic equating of genital 
 organs with other organs and with external objects 
 originally happens only in a playful way, out of ex- 
 uberance, so to speak. The equations thus arising, 
 however, are secondarily made to serve repression, 
 which seeks to weaken one member of the equation, 
 while it symbolically over-emphasises the other, more 
 harmless one by the amount of the repressed affect. 
 In this way the upper half of the body, as the more 
 harmless one, attains its sexual-symbolic significance, 
 and so comes about what Freud calls "Displacement 
 from below upwards." In this work of repression, 
 the eyes have proved to be specially adapted to re- 
 ceive the affects displaced from the genital region, 
 on account of their shape and changeable size, their 
 movability, their high value, and their sensitiveness. 
 It is to be supposed, however, that this displacement
 
 276 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 would not have succeeded so well, had not the eye al- 
 ready had from the beginning that significant libidi- 
 nous value that Freud describes in his "Sexualtheo- 
 rie" as a special component of the sexual instinct 
 (the impulse of sexual visual curiosity). 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Ontogenesis of Symbols 22 
 
 Dr. Beaurain's remarks 23 about the ways in which 
 the child comes to form its first general concepts 
 can be fully confirmed by whoever has had the oppor- 
 tunity to watch the mental development of the child, 
 either directly, or else indirectly via parents whose 
 powers of observation had been psychologically 
 sharpened. There can be no doubt that the child 
 (like the unconscious) identifies two things on the 
 basis of the slightest resemblancej displaces affects 
 with ease from one to the other, and gives the same 
 name to both. Such a name is thus the highly con- 
 densed representative of a large number of funda- 
 mentally different individual things, which, however, 
 are in some way or other (even if ever so distantly) 
 similar and are for this reason identified. Advance 
 in the knowledge of reality (intelligence) then mani- 
 
 * Published in the Internal. Zeitschr. f. arztl. Psychoanalyse, 
 1913. 
 
 * Beaurain, "Ueber das Symbol und die psychischen Bedin- 
 gungen fur sein Entstehen beim Kinde," in the same number 
 of the Zeitschrift.
 
 Symbolism 277 
 
 fests itself in the child in the progressive resolution 
 of such condensation-products into their elements, in 
 learning to distinguish from one another things that 
 are similar in one respect but otherwise different. 
 Many writers have already rightly grasped and de- 
 scribed this process ; Silberer's and Beaurain's com- 
 munications on the subject have brought further 
 confirmation and have deepened our insight into the 
 details of this development process in the mind. 
 
 All these authors see in the infantile inadequacy 
 of the capacity for making distinctions the chief 
 factor in the origination of the ontogenetic and phy- 
 Ipgenetic preliminary stages of the knowledge proc- 
 esses. 
 
 I should like here to raise an objection only 
 against designating all these preliminary stages in 
 knowledge with the word "Symbol;" similes, allego- 
 ries, metaphors, allusions, parables, emblems, and in- 
 direct representations of every sort might also in a 
 certain sense be conceived as products of this lack of 
 sharpness in distinction and definition, and yet they 
 are not in the psycho-analytical sense symbols. 
 Only such things (or ideas) are symbols in the sense 
 of psycho-analysis as are invested in consciousness 
 with a logically inexplicable and unfounded affect, 
 and of which it may be analytically established that 
 they owe this affective over-emphasis to unconscious 
 identification with another thing (or idea), to which 
 the surplus of affect really belongs. Not all similes,
 
 278 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 therefore, are symbols, but only those in which the 
 one member of the equation is repressed into the un- 
 conscious. 24 Rank and Sachs conceive a symbol in 
 the same sense. 25 "We understand by this," they 
 say, "a special kind of indirect representation which 
 is distinguished by certain peculiarities from other 
 allied kinds, such as the simile, the metaphor, the 
 allegory, the allusion, and other forms of figurative 
 representation of thought-material (of the rebus va- 
 riety)," and "it is a substitutive, illustrative replace- 
 ment-expression for something hidden." 
 
 This being so, it is more prudent not to assume that 
 the conditions under which symbols arise are identi- 
 cal with those for analogy-formation in general, but 
 to presuppose for this specific kind of analogy-for- 
 mation specific conditions of origin, and to search for 
 these. 
 
 Now analytical experience shews us in fact that 
 although the condition of intellectual insufficiency 
 has to be fulfilled with the formation of real symbols 
 as well, the chief conditions for their production are 
 not of an intellectual, but of an affective nature. I 
 will demonstrate this with individual examples from 
 sexual symbolism. 
 
 So long as the necessities of life do not compel 
 
 *See on this matter my remarks in earlier articles, Ch. VI, 
 Ch. VIII, Ch. X, Sect. 2, and my review on Jung's Libido essay 
 in the Internat. Zeitschr. f. arztl. Psychoanalyse, Jahrg. I, S. 
 393. 
 
 38 Rank und Sachs. Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse flir 
 die Geisteswissenschaften. 1913. S. 11. et seq. . . .
 
 Symbolism 279 
 
 them to adaptation and therewith to the knowledge 
 of reality, children concern themselves to begin with 
 only about the satisfaction of their instincts, i. e. 
 about the parts of the body where this satisfaction 
 takes place, about the objects suited to evoke this, 
 and about the actions that actually evoke the satis- 
 faction. Of the sexually excitable parts of the body 
 (erogenous zones), for instance, they are specially 
 interested in the mouth, the anus, and the genitals. 
 "What wonder, then, if also his attention is arrested 
 above all by those objects and processes of the outer 
 world that on the ground of ever so distant a re- 
 semblance remind him of his dearest experiences." 26 
 Thus comes about the "sexualisation of every- 
 thing." 2T In this stage small boys are prone to 
 apply the childish term for genitals to all long ob- 
 jects, they see an anus in every hole, urine in every 
 fluid, and faeces in every softish material. 
 
 A boy, aged about one and a half, said when he 
 was first shewn the Danube : "What a lot of spit !" 
 A two-year-old boy called everything that could 
 open, a door, including even his parents' legs, since 
 these can open and shut (be abducted and adducted). 
 
 Similar analogies are formed also within the sphere 
 of the bodily organs themselves: Penis and tooth, 
 anus and mouth, become equated. Perhaps the child 
 finds an equivalent in the upper part of the body 
 
 "Ch. VIII. P. 193. 
 
 9 (A well-known expression of the philologist Kleinpaul. 
 Transl.)
 
 280 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 (especially on the head and face) for every affective- 
 ly important part of the lower half. 
 
 This equating, however, is not yet symbolism. Only 
 from the moment when as the result of cultural edu- 
 cation the one member of the equation (the more im- 
 portant one) is repressed, does the other previously 
 less important member attain affective over-signifi- 
 cance and become a symbol of the repressed one. 
 Originally penis and tree, penis and church-steeple, 
 were consciously equated; but only with the repres- 
 sion of the interest in the penis do the tree and 
 church-steeple become invested with inexplicable and 
 apparently ungrounded interest; they become penis 
 symbols. 
 
 In this way also eyes become symbols of the geni- 
 talia, with which they had previously been identified 
 on the ground of extrinsic resemblance. There 
 thus comes about a symbolic over-emphasis of the 
 upper half of the body in general, after interest in 
 the lower half has been repressed, and all genital 
 symbols that play such an extensive part in dreams 
 (necktie, snake, tooth-drawing, box, ladder, etc.) 
 must have originated ontogenetically in the same 
 way. I should not be surprised if in a dream of the 
 boy mentioned above a door re-appeared as a symbol 
 of the parental lap, and in a dream of the other 
 boy's the Danube as a symbol of bodily fluids. 
 
 I desired with these examples to point out the 
 overwhelming significance of affective factors in the
 
 Symbolism 281 
 
 production of true symbols. It is they that have to 
 be taken into consideration in the first place when 
 one wishes to distinguish symbols from other psychi- 
 cal products (metaphors, similes, etc.), which are 
 also the result of condensation. One-sided consider- 
 ation of formal and rational conditions in the expla- 
 nation of psychical processes can easily lead one 
 astray. 
 
 For instance, one was formerly inclined to believe 
 that things are confounded because they are similar ; 
 nowadays we know that a thing is confounded with 
 another only because certain motives for this are 
 present; similarity merely provides the opportunity 
 for these motives to function. In the same way it 
 must be said that apperceptive insufficiency alone, 
 without consideration of the motives impelling to- 
 wards analogy-formation, do not adequately explain 
 the creation of symbols.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 SOME CLINICAL OBSERVATIONS ON PARANOIA AND 
 PARAPHRENIA J 
 
 (Contribution to the Psychology of "System- 
 Constmctions") 
 
 THE sister of a young artist called on me one 
 day and told me that her brother A., a very 
 talented man, had been behaving for some time in a 
 very peculiar manner. He had read a doctor's trea- 
 tise on the serum treatment of tuberculosis, 2 since 
 when he had been the whole time concerned only 
 about himself, had got his urine and sputum exam- 
 ined for abnormal constituents, and, although there 
 were none present, had undergone the serum treat- 
 ment with the doctor in question. It was soon plain 
 that it was not a question of a simple hypochondriac 
 moodiness with him. Not only the treatise, but also 
 
 1 Published in the Internal. Zeitschr. f. arztl. Psychoanalyse, 
 1914. 
 
 'This treatise, which traced almost all nervous and psychical 
 disturbances to tuberculosis, and advised a corresponding treat- 
 ment, gave my psychoneurotics plenty to do. 
 
 282
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraphrenia 28S 
 
 the doctor's personality made an unusual impression 
 on him. When on one occasion the doctor treated 
 him in a rather off-hand way, he immersed himself in 
 making notes (which the sister gave me to read) of 
 endless worryings as to how this behaviour of the 
 doctor could be harmonised with the fact that he 
 was a real savant (which he did not venture to 
 doubt. ) It then turned out that his hypochondriacal 
 ideas were interwoven in a larger philosophical sys- 
 tem, built, so to speak, into the structure of the lat- 
 ter. For a long time the young man had been in- 
 terested in Ostwald's natural philosophy, and was 
 an eager follower of his ; the energetic main idea and 
 the marked emphasis laid on the economic principle 
 in Ostwald's proposals had made a specially deep 
 impression on him. The statement that one should 
 accomplish as much as possible with as little expendi- 
 ture of energy as possible he wanted to realise in 
 every respect in the practical affairs of his life, but 
 in doing so he went to extremes that struck even his 
 sister (who had a specially high estimation of her 
 brother's intelligence) as peculiar. So long as he 
 only prescribed (in writing) uncommonly exact ar- 
 rangements for the day, in which every bodily and 
 every kind of mental activity was allotted a definite 
 time, he might still have passed as a specially dutiful 
 pupil of his master, but later he began to exaggerate 
 the tendency to economy to such an extent as to drive 
 it unconsciously, of course to downright absurd-
 
 284 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 ity. This became most evident when the amalgama- 
 tion with the hypochondriacal ideas came about. He 
 experienced paraesthesias in the most diverse organs, 
 among others in the legs ; he remarked that the lat- 
 ter ones disappeared when he lifted his leg. In order, 
 now, to deflect his attention (whose energy, accord- 
 ing to his convictions, he felt obliged to employ for 
 more valuable matters than the perception of bodily 
 states) from the sensations in the leg, his sister had 
 to hold his leg up in the air so that he could engross 
 himself in thought undisturbed, the most valuable ac- 
 complishment of which he was capable. The sister 
 often faithfully carried out this wish. Gradually he 
 came to see that he ought really not to perform any 
 work at all himself except thinking ; the carrying out 
 of his ideas in detail a subordinate task must be 
 left to people with feebler capacities. In this way 
 he finally became occupied only with the statement 
 of problems, and employed his whole time in reflect- 
 ing on ultimate scientific, psychological, and philo- 
 sophical questions. He directed those around him 
 to see to it, in ways exactly prescribed by him, that 
 he had absolute rest during his mental work. All 
 this still would not have caused his family any seri- 
 ous solicitude had he not given himself up to com- 
 plete inactivity, after having up till then conscien- 
 tiously carried out his projects. In his endeavour 
 to work "with the most favourable coefficients possi- 
 ble" he had thus brought himself to a point where he
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraphrenia 285 
 
 neglected the tasks that lay nearest to hand (since 
 they could not be literally harmonised with the the- 
 ory of energetic economy) ; the precept of creating 
 in the most economic way possible thus served him, 
 and quite consistently, for the purpose of giving up 
 creating altogether. He lay inactive for hours in 
 certain artificially arranged positions. This latter 
 I had to regard as a variety of catatonic posture, 
 and the purely psychical symptoms as fragments of 
 hypochondriacal and megalomaniac ideas ; I gave the 
 patient's family to understand that I considered the 
 case to be one of paranoid paraphrenia (dementia 
 praecox), and that the young man needed for the 
 time being to be certified as insane. The family at 
 first refused to accept the diagnosis and the advice, 
 although I left open the possibility that it might 
 prove to be a slight and passing attack. 
 
 Soon after, the sister came again and told me that 
 the brother had begged her to sleep in his room, on 
 the ground that he felt better so, which was good for 
 his mental capacity ; the sister assented to his wishes. 
 For a few nights he did nothing but get her to hold 
 his leg up. Then he began to talk to her of erotic 
 longings and erections, which disturbed him in his 
 work. In between he spoke of his father, who, he 
 said, had treated him too strictly, and towards whom 
 he had until then felt coldly; only now had he dis- 
 covered in her, as in the father, their fondness for 
 him. Suddenly he said: It was against energetic
 
 286 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 economy for him to satisfy his erotic needs with 
 strange women and for money; it would be simpler 
 and less trouble, not to mention without danger or 
 expense : in a word, more economical, if the sister, in 
 the interest of his psychical capacity and faithfully 
 following the "energetic imperative," gave herself to 
 him. After this occurrence (which, by the way, the 
 sister kept secret), and after the patient had threat- 
 ened to commit suicide, he was committed to an 
 asylum. 
 
 n 
 
 A very intelligent young man, B, who besides 
 punctiliously fulfilling his official duties achieved 
 quite remarkable poetic accomplishments, and whose 
 development I had watched for over fourteen years, 
 was always recognised by me to be one of those in- 
 sane persons, with delusions of grandeur and of per- 
 secution, who know how to keep their symptoms 
 within such bounds that they can still exist in society. 
 Since I liked his literary works and had several times 
 tried in vain, however to direct the interest of 
 some prominent people to him, he became very fond of 
 me. He called on me about once a month, told me 
 his troubles as to a father-confessor, and always 
 went away to some extent relieved. At his work his 
 colleagues and superiors so he told me placed him, 
 in the most painful situations. According to him, 
 he always did his duty, indeed, as a rule, more than
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraph re nia 287 
 
 was asked of him, and still (or perhaps for that very 
 reason!) they were all hostile to him. They were 
 evidently envious of him on account of his superior 
 intelligence and his high connections. When asked 
 about the annoyances under which he had to suffer, 
 he could only give as examples some trivial jokes of 
 his colleagues and a degree of disdain on the chief's 
 part that did not go beyond what is common enough. 
 He took his revenge in making a special note of all 
 the pieces of carelessness, of slackness, and of rule- 
 breaking, also of supposed unfair advantages, with 
 which the other officials could be charged. From 
 time to time, when his pent-up discontent broke out 
 in open rebellion, he would rake up all these matters, 
 mostly quite things of the past, and bring them to 
 the knowledge of the director, with the result that 
 he himself always incurred unpleasantnesses and re- 
 proofs, but sometimes his colleagues and superiors 
 likewise. Finally he really managed to embroil him- 
 self with almost everybody, and so was spared the 
 trouble of having to construe his colleagues' hostility 
 out of trivial indications ; he got himself thoroughly 
 hated ; every department was glad to get rid of him, 
 and made use of every opportunity to get him trans- 
 ferred to another. After such transferences there 
 were also "transference-improvements." 3 With 
 
 1 (Versetzunysbvasuruugen: A term used in German psychia- 
 try to denote the improvements that often come about with 
 insane patients merely as the result of their being transferred 
 from one locality, or part of the asylum, to another. Transl.)
 
 288 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 every new chief he expected that his virtues would 
 at last be recognised, and with each he believed that 
 he could remark unequivocal signs of special esteem 
 for his capacities and of great liking for him; but 
 soon enough it would turn out that the new chief was 
 no better than the previous ones. To be sure, these 
 previous ones had without doubt denounced him to 
 the new chief; the whole lot of them hung together, 
 etc. It went just as badly with him in his literary 
 activity. Those writers who were already recognised 
 constituted themselves so he told me into a com- 
 munity of mutual interests, a "maffia," which kept 
 back young talents. And yet, according to him, his 
 works were fit to stand beside the most renowned ones 
 in the literature of the world. 
 
 As regards sexuality his wants always seemed to be 
 slight. He had sometimes noticed that he was inex- 
 plicably fortunate with women, he pleased them all 
 without bothering himself much about them, he had 
 to take great care of himself in regard to them, etc., 
 (*. e. in addition to the delusions of persecution and 
 grandeur he also produced those of erotomania). 
 
 From communications made from time to time, the 
 deeper layers also of his mental existence became 
 known to me. He lived in poor circumstances, a fact 
 that led to an early estrangement with his father, 
 whom to begin with he had tenderly loved; he then 
 transferred (in his phantasy) the father-part to an 
 uncle, who had had considerable success in literary
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraphrenia 289 
 
 renown and in social rank, but he was soon obliged 
 to see that he had nothing to expect from this egoist, 
 so withdrew his love from him also and made as we 
 saw on the one hand vain attempts to find again the 
 lost father-imago in his superiors, while on the other 
 hand he withdrew his sexual hunger in a narcissistic 
 way on to himself, and took delight in his own dis- 
 tinguished attributes and achievements. 
 
 About the twelfth year of our acquaintanceship, 
 however, there came a break. In an over-intense in- 
 dignation at a supposed piece of bad treatment he at- 
 tacked his highest superior at the office (physically). 
 This led to a tedious and painful investigation, which 
 ended relatively favourably ; the patient was declared 
 to be "ill with his nerves" and was retired with a 
 pension. At about the same time as this perhaps 
 rather earlier, but especially after his dismissal from 
 his post he began to take an extensive interest in 
 psycho-analytical literature. 4 He read among other 
 things my essay on the connection between paranoia 
 and homosexuality. He put the question directly to 
 me, whether I considered him to be a paranoiac and 
 homosexual, and made very merry at the idea in a 
 patronising way. Still the idea seemed to have taken 
 root in him, and to have flourished alongside his pre- 
 vailing inactivity in other directions, for one day 
 he came to me, very excited and enthusiastic, saying 
 
 4 As it seemed to me to be quite without prospects I did not 
 want him to go through an analysis.
 
 290 Contribution* to L'syclio- Analysis 
 
 that on thinking it over he had to agree with my 
 opinion ( !) ; he used really to suffer from delusions 
 of persecution ; it had come over him like an illumina- 
 tion that deep down inside he was a homosexual; 
 he recollected various incidents that directly con- 
 firmed this, in his opinion. Now, so he said, he was 
 able to explain the curious sensations half fearful, 
 half libidinous that he always experienced in the 
 presence of an older friend or patron; he also un- 
 derstood now why he had the tendency to come so 
 near to me physically that he could feel my breath 
 in his face. 5 He now knew, further, why he accused 
 certain patrons of having homosexual intentions in 
 regard to him; it was simply that the wish was 
 father to the thought. 
 
 I was very pleased at this turn, not only out of 
 consideration for the patient's welfare, but also be- 
 cause the case supported my secret hope that per- 
 haps after all the outlook for the treatment of para- 
 noia in general might not be quite so desperate as it 
 has seemed. 
 
 A few days later the patient came back again. He 
 was still excited, but no longer so euphoric. He was 
 very afraid, he told me; the homosexual phantasies 
 that swept over him were more and more intolerable ; 
 he saw large phalli in front of him, which disgusted 
 
 1 This peculiarity of his I had already noticed in fact and had 
 interpreted in the sense of transferred erotism; naturally I had 
 taken care not to call his attention to it nor to explain the 
 symptom to him.
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraphrenia 291 
 
 him; he kept fancying paederastic situations with 
 other men (also with myself). I tried successfully 
 to calm him, telling him that it was only because 
 of their unaccustomed nature that these phantasies 
 had such an effect on him, and that later on he 
 would certainly not have so much to suffer from the 
 ideas. 
 
 Then for a few days I heard nothing of him, until 
 one of the members of his family called to tell me 
 that the patient, who for the past two or three days 
 had been inaccessible, had hallucinations, kept talk- 
 ing to himself, and had broken into his uncle's house 
 the day before, and then into a magnate's palace, 
 where he created a disturbance. Ejected from here, 
 he went home, and lay in bed refusing to speak a 
 word; every now and then, however, he was quite 
 clear and assured them that there was nothing wrong 
 with him and that he was not to be transported to 
 an asylum. 
 
 I visited the patient and found him in a deep cata- 
 tonic state (rigid posture, negativism, inaccessibil- 
 ity, hallucinations). When I came in he appeared to 
 recognise me and shook hands, but immediately after 
 he fell back into the catatonic stupor. It took weeks 
 before he gradually improved a little in the asylum 
 where he was confined, and months before he could be 
 discharged from there improved. When I saw him 
 again he did not have complete insight into his path- 
 ological state he objectified some of his feelings of
 
 292 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 being aggrieved, and a part of the old paranoiac de- 
 lusional formation was again active; on the other 
 hand, he fled terrified from homosexual thoughts, de- 
 nied that he was suffering from a psychosis, and no 
 longer believed in the casual connection between his 
 psychical experiences and homosexuality. Naturally 
 I did not try to penetrate further into his mind, nor 
 to restore his previous convictions. From now on 
 the patient avoided me in a striking manner ; I gath- 
 ered later that he had to be confined again because 
 of a recurrence of his excitement, this time for a 
 somewhat shorter period. 
 
 What is common to the two cases here communi- 
 cated (apart from the latent homosexuality demon- 
 strable in every case of paranoia and paraphrenia, a 
 matter I do not propose to discuss in more detail at 
 this point) 6 is that they both throw an interesting 
 light on the part played in paranoia by the forma- 
 tion of delusional systems. The patient A. became ill 
 in adopting en bloc a ready-made philosophical sys- 
 tem (Ostwald's natural philosophy), instead of tak- 
 ing the trouble to construct a system of his own. 
 Philosophical systems that seek to explain rationally 
 the whole order of the world, leaving no room over 
 for irrationality (*. e. for what is not yet explica- 
 ble), have been, as is well-known, compared with the 
 
 The reader may be referred to Freud's work on the subject 
 ("Ein autobiogr. beschr. Fall von Paranoia," Jahrb. d. Psycho- 
 analyse, Bd. Ill) and to my own, Chapter V of the present 
 book.
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraphrenia 293 
 
 paranoiac delusional systems. At all events such 
 systems excellently meet the needs of paranoiacs, 
 whose symptoms spring from the impulse to explain 
 rationally by the external order of the world their 
 own irrational inner strivings. It may be very 
 clearly seen here also how the adopted system grad- 
 ually gets more and more made use of to rationalise 
 the patient's own purely egocentric, repressed wishes 
 (doing nothing, incestuous desires in regard to the 
 sister). 
 
 Case B. shews again how fateful it may be for the 
 paranoiac when the system that he has laboriously 
 built up, and which allows him to be still socially 
 active, is suddenly torn from him. B. succeeded in 
 projecting all his ethically incompatible longings on 
 to the environment in his office ; he became the victim 
 of a systematic persecution. Dismissed from his 
 post, he had, so to speak, been robbed of his system ; 
 by chance he came across the psycho-analytical lit- 
 erature just at this time of the loss of his system, 
 and this although he had previously heard some- 
 thing of it for the first time was able to appear evi- 
 dent to him. For a short while he seemed inclined 
 to exchange his persecution system for what in our 
 opinion would be correct insight into his true per- 
 sonality, and to make friends with his own repressed 
 complexes. But it soon became plain that this in- 
 sight was unendurable to him, so that since he had 
 no other suitable system at his disposal, and since
 
 294 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 this made it possible for him to anchor at a second 
 neurotic point of fixation 7 he had to flee from the 
 turmoil of morbid dread into dementia. He recov- 
 ered from the paraphrenic attack only in so far as it 
 was possible for him to do away once more with the 
 psycho-analytical insight, and to reconstruct the 
 persecution system. 
 
 The close relations, such as these, between system- 
 formation and paranoia perhaps also explain the 
 fact that there is always a large crowd of psycho- 
 pathic hangers-on in the train of new scientific (e. g. 
 physical and philosophical) systems, discoveries, and 
 theories. In the therapeutic respect Case B. cau- 
 tions us to uphold Freud's pessimistic opinion as to 
 the psycho-analytic treatment of paranoia. 8 
 
 The peculiar catatonic posture of patient A. (ly- 
 ing with upraised leg) deserves, in my opinion, spe- 
 cial attention. The patient made the interpretation 
 of this symptom easy by transferring to the sister 
 the task of holding the leg, and by soon after ap- 
 proaching her with incestuous proposals. When we 
 take into consideration the long known symbolic iden- 
 tification of leg and penis, we may regard this cata- 
 
 1 (Referring to the fixation-point of paranoia at the nar- 
 cissistic-homosexual stage of infancy, that of paraphrenia [de- 
 mentia praecox] at the still earlier one of auto-erotism. 
 Transl.) 
 
 In contrast with Bjerre, who says he has cured a case of 
 paranoia by analysis (Jahrb. d. Psychoanalyse, Bd. II). This 
 case of Bjerre's was in my opinion, and Freud's, not a true 
 paranoia.
 
 Observations on Paranoia and Paraphrenia 295 
 
 tonic posture as a means of expression (and at the 
 same time a defensive measure) of repressed erection- 
 tendencies. It is thinkable that the collection of sim- 
 ilar observations will explain in this sense catatonic 
 rigidity in general: In support of this idea I can 
 bring forward a third case. 
 
 Ill 
 
 A paraphrenic who had an uncommonly keen ca- 
 pacity for self-observation spontaneously explained 
 to me that with all his curious catatonic postures 
 and movements he was seeking to defend himself from 
 erotic sensations in the various parts of the body 
 concerned. The extreme bowing forwards of the 
 body that he kept up for minutes at a time served, 
 for instance, "to break the erection of the intestine."
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE NOSOLOGY OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY (HOMO- 
 EROTISM) l 
 
 WHAT we have learned about homosexuality 
 through psycho-analysis may be put to- 
 gether in a few sentences. The first and most impor- 
 tant step towards a deeper knowledge of this instinct- 
 aim was the supposition by Fliess and Freud 2 that 
 really every human being traverses a psychically bi- 
 sexual stage in his childhood. 3 The "homosexual 
 component" falls later a victim to repression; only 
 a minor part of this component gets rescued in a 
 sublimated form in the cultivated life of adults, in 
 playing, in readiness for social help, in friendship 
 leagues, in club life, etc., a part that is not to be 
 underestimated. Insufficiently repressed homosexu- 
 
 1 Delivered at the Third Congress of the Internat. Psycho- 
 Analytical Association at Weimar, October 1911; Published in 
 the Internat. Zeitschr. f. a'rztl. Psychoanalyse, 1914. 
 
 * Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. 
 
 * On a previous occasion I proposed the use of the expression 
 "ambisexual" instead of that of "bisexual," it being thereby 
 expressed that the child in certain stage of development feels 
 amphi-erotically, t. e. can transfer his sexual hunger to man 
 and woman (father and mother) at the same time. In this 
 way the contrast between Freud's conception and Fliess' the- 
 ory of biological bisexuality would be clearly brought out. 
 
 296
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 297 
 
 ality can later, under certain circumstances, become 
 once more manifest, or express itself in neurotic 
 symptoms ; this is especially the case with paranoia, 
 concerning which the more recent investigations have 
 been able to establish that it is really to be conceived 
 as a disguised manifestation of the inclination to- 
 wards the person's own sex. 4 
 
 A newer point of view, which renders more easy the 
 understanding of homosexuality, we owe to Sadger 
 and Freud. Sadger discovered in the psycho-analy- 
 sis of several male homosexuals that intense hetero- 
 sexual inclinations had been displayed in their early 
 childhood ; indeed that their "Oedipus complex" 
 (love for the mother, attitude of hate towards the 
 father) had come to expression in a specially pro- 
 nounced manner. He considered that the homosex- 
 uality which later develops in them is really only an 
 attempt to restore the original relation to the 
 mother. In the homosexual pleasure-objects of his 
 desires the homosexual is unconsciously loving him- 
 self, while he himself (also unconsciously) is repre- 
 senting the feminine and effeminate part of the 
 mother. 
 
 This loving of oneself in the person of another hu- 
 man being Sadger called Narcissism. 5 Freud has 
 shewn us that narcissism possesses a much greater 
 and more general significance than had been thought, 
 
 4 Freud, Jahrb. d. Psychoanalyse, Bd. Ill; Ferenczi, Ch. V 
 of the present book. 
 
 * (Or, rather, borrowed the term from Naecke. Transl.)
 
 298 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 and that every human being has to pass through a 
 narcissistic stage of development. After the stage 
 of "polymorphous-perverse" auto-erotism, and be- 
 fore the real choice of an external love-object takes 
 place, every human being adopts himself as an ob- 
 ject of love, in that he collects the previously autistic 
 erotisms together into a unity, the "darling ego." 
 Homosexuals are only more strongly fixed than other 
 people in this narcissistic stage; the genital organ 
 similar to their own remains throughout life an es- 
 sential condition for their love. 
 
 All these pieces of knowledge, however, important 
 as they are in themselves, give no explanation of the 
 peculiarities of the sexual constitution and the spe- 
 cial experiences that lie at the base of manifest 
 homosexuality. 
 
 I may say at once that, in spite of much puzzling 
 over them, I have not succeeded in solving these ques- 
 tions. The aim of this communication is nothing 
 more than to bring forward some facts of experience 
 and points of view that have spontaneously forced 
 themselves on me in the course of many years* psy- 
 cho-analytic observation of homosexuals, and which 
 may be capable of rendering easier the correct noso- 
 logical classification of homosexual clinical pictures. 
 
 It seemed to me from the beginning that the des- 
 ignation "homosexuality" was nowadays applied to 
 dissimilar and unrelated psychical abnormalities. 
 Sexual relations with members of a person's own
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 299 
 
 sex are only a symptom, and this symptom may be 
 the form in which the most diverse psychical disor- 
 ders and disturbances of development, as well as 
 normal life, appear. It was thus a priori improba- 
 ble that everything to which the name "homosexu- 
 ality" is now applied would in a simple way yield it- 
 self as a clinical unity. The two types of homosex- 
 uality, for example, distinguished as "active" and 
 "passive" have been up to the present conceived as 
 obviously two forms in which the same condition may 
 appear; in both cases one spoke of "inversion" of 
 the sexual instinct, of "contrary" sexual sensation, 
 of "perversion," and overlooked the possibility that 
 in this way one might be confounding two essentially 
 different morbid states merely because a striking 
 symptom is common to both. Yet even superficial 
 observation of these two kinds of homo-erotism 6 
 shews that they belong in the pure cases, at all 
 events, to quite different syndromes, and that the 
 "acting" and the "suffering" homo-erotics represent 
 fundamentally different types of men. Only the 
 passive homo-erotic deserves to be called "inverted," 
 only in his case does one see real reversal of normal 
 psychical and perhaps also bodily characteris- 
 tics, only he is a true "intermediate stage." A man 
 
 The word comes from Karsch-Haack (Das gleichgeschlecht- 
 liche Leben der Naturvolker, 1911) and is in my opinion pre- 
 ferable to the ambiguous expression homosexuality, since it 
 makes prominent the psychical aspect of the impulse in con- 
 tradistinction to the biological- term "sexuality."
 
 300 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 who in intercourse with men feels himself to be a 
 woman is inverted in respect to his own ego (homo- 
 erotism through subject-inversion, or, more shortly, 
 "subject-homo-erotism") ; he feels himself to be a 
 woman, and this not only in genital intercourse, but 
 in all relations of life. 
 
 It is quite otherwise with the true "active homo- 
 sexual." He feels himself a man in every respect, is 
 as a rule very energetic and active, and there is noth- 
 ing effeminate to be discovered in his bodily or men- 
 tal organisation. The object of his inclination alone 
 is exchanged, so that one might call him a homo- 
 erotic through exchange of the love-object, or, more 
 shortly, an object-homo-erotic. 
 
 A further striking difference between the "sub- 
 jective" and the "objective" homo-erotic consists in 
 the fact that the former (the invert) feels himself 
 attracted by more mature, powerful men, and is on 
 friendly terms, as a colleague, one might almost say, 
 with women ; the second type, on the contrary, is al- 
 most exclusively interested in young, delicate boys 
 with an effeminate appearance, but meets a woman 
 with pronounced antipathy, and not rarely with ha- 
 tred that is badly, or not at all, concealed. The 
 true invert is hardly ever impelled to seek medical 
 advice, he feels at complete ease in the passive role, 
 and has no other wish than that people should put 
 up with his peculiarity and not interfere with the 
 kind of satisfaction that suits him. Not having to
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 301 
 
 fight with any inner conflicts, he can sustain fortu- 
 nate love-relationships for years, and really fears 
 nothing except external danger and being shamed. 
 With all this his love is feminine to the finest de- 
 tails. He lacks the sexual overestimation, which ac- 
 cording to Freud characterises a man's love; he is 
 not very passionate, and, as a true Narcissus, chiefly 
 demands from his lover the recognition of his bodily 
 and other merits. 
 
 The object-homo-erotic, on the other hand, is un- 
 commonly tormented by the consciousness of his ab- 
 normality ; sexual intercourse never completely satis- 
 fies him, he is tortured by qualms of conscience, and 
 overestimates his sexual object to the uttermost. 
 That he is plagued with conflicts and never comes to 
 terms with his condition is shewn by his repeated at- 
 tempts to obtain medical help for his trouble. It is 
 true that he often changes his companions in love, 
 not from superficiality, however, as the invert does, 
 but in consequence of painful disappointments and 
 of the insatiable and unsuccessful pursuit of the love- 
 ideal ("formation of series," as Freud calls it). 
 
 It may happen that two homo-erotics of different 
 types unite to make a pair. The invert finds in the 
 object-homo-erotic a quite suitable lover, who adores 
 him, supports him in material affairs, and is impos- 
 ing and energetic; the man of the objective type, on 
 the other hand, may find pleasure in just the mixture 
 of masculine and feminine traits present in the in-
 
 802 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 vert. (I also know active homo-erotics, by the way, 
 who exclusively desire non-inverted youths, and only 
 content themselves with inverts in the absence of the 
 former). 7 
 
 However simply these two character pictures of 
 homo-erotism lend themselves to distinction, they sig- 
 nify no more than a superficial description of syn- 
 dromes so long as they are not submitted to the re- 
 solving procedure of psycho-analysis, which alone 
 can render their mode of origin psychologically com- 
 prehensible. 
 
 Now I have had the opportunity of treating psy- 
 cho-analytically a number of male homo-erotics; 
 many for only a short period (a few weeks), others 
 for months, a whole year, and even longer. Rather 
 than narrate any anamneses in this summary, it 
 seems to me more instructive to condense my impres- 
 sions and experiences on homo-erotism into two psy- 
 cho-analytical Galton photographs. 8 
 
 I may at once forestall the final result of my in- 
 
 1 1 am conscious that, when I call inverts "female" and ob- 
 ject-homo-erotics "male," I am using terms the scope of which 
 is not sufficiently sharply defined. It may be just indicated 
 here that by maleness I understand activity (aggressivity) of 
 the sexual hunger, highly developed object-love with over- 
 estimation of the object, a polygamy that is in only apparent 
 contrast with the latter trait, and, as a distant derivative of 
 the activity, intellectual talent; by femaleness I understand 
 passivity (tendency to repression), narcissism and intuitiveness. 
 The psychical attributes of sex are, of course, mingled in every 
 individual although in unequal proportion. (Ambisexuality.) 
 
 1 A further motive for this is consideration for the patients' 
 anonymity, which it is especially important to preserve.
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 303 
 
 vestigations : Psycho-analysis shewed me that the 
 subject- and object-homo-erotism are really essen- 
 tially different conditions. The former is a true 
 "sexual intermediate stage" (in the sense of Magnus 
 Hirschfeld and his followers), thus a pure develop- 
 mental anomaly; object-homo-erotism, however, is a 
 neurosis, an obsessional neurosis. 
 
 In both types of amphi-erotism 9 the deepest lay- 
 ers of the mind and the oldest memory-traces still 
 bear testimony to the investment of both sexes, or 
 the relationship to both parents, with sexual hunger. 
 In the subsequent development, however, inversion 
 and object-homo-erotism diverge far from each 
 other. 
 
 We can dig down very deeply into the early his- 
 tory of the subject-homo-erotic and find already 
 everywhere signs of his inversion, namely, the abnor- 
 mal effeminate being. When merely a quite young 
 child he imagined himself in the situation of his 
 mother and not in that of his father ; he even brings 
 about an inverted Oedipus complex ; he wishes for his 
 mother's death so as to take her place with the fa- 
 ther and be able to enjoy all her rights; he longs for 
 her clothes, her jewelry, and of course also her 
 beauty and the tenderness shewn to her; he dreams 
 of begetting children, plays with dolls, and is fond of 
 
 ' This word renders, I believe, the psychological character of 
 what is intended better than the term "ambisexuality," pre- 
 viously suggested by me.
 
 304 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 dressing up as a girl. He is jealous of his mother, 
 claims for himself all his father's tenderness, where- 
 as his mother he rather admires as something envi- 
 ably beautiful. In many cases it is plainly to be 
 seen that the tendency to inversion, which is prob- 
 ably always constitutionally conditioned, is strength- 
 ened by external influences as well. "Only children" 
 who are spoilt, little favourites who grow up in an 
 exclusively feminine environment, boys who, because 
 they made their appearance in the place of the girl 
 that was longed for, are brought up in a girlish way, 
 can sooner become inverted, given the corresponding 
 predisposition in their sexual character. 10 
 
 On the other hand, the narcissistic nature of a boy 
 can provoke excessive indulgence on the parents' 
 part, and so lead to a vicious circle. Bodily attri- 
 butes also girlish figure and features, a wealth of 
 hair, and so on may contribute to the consumma- 
 tion of a boy being treated as a girl. In this way 
 the father's preference and its response may have 
 
 "Among boys who grow up without a father homo-erotics 
 are to be found relatively often. I imagine that the fixation 
 on the Imago of the father who was lost early or never known 
 results, at least in part, from the fact that under such cir- 
 cumstances the otherwise unavoidable conflict between father 
 and son is absent. ("A man always credits fate twice as 
 highly for something that is lacking as for something that he 
 really possesses; thus my mother's long accounts filled me with 
 more and more longing for my father, whom - I no longer 
 knew." G. Keller, "Der griine Heinrich," Cap. II.) In fam- 
 ilies where the father is alive, but is inferior or insignificant, 
 the son longs exceedingly for a "strong" man and remains in- 
 clined to inversion.
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 305 
 
 arisen altogether as a secondary process in relation 
 to the child's narcissism; I know cases in which a 
 narcissistic boy provoked the father's latent homo- 
 erotism in the form of excessive tenderness, the latter 
 then contributing not a little to the fixation of the 
 former's own inversion. 
 
 Nor can psycho-analysis tell us anything new con- 
 cerning the subsequent fate of these boys ; they stay 
 fixed in this early stage of development, and become 
 finally such personalities as we know well enough 
 from the autobiographies of urnings. I can here lay 
 stress on only a few points. Coprophilia and pleas- 
 ure in smell are deeply repressed with them, often to 
 the extent of aestheticism ; there is a fondness for 
 perfumes, and as a sublimation an enthusiasm for 
 art. Characteristic, further, is their idiosyncrasy 
 against blood and all bloody things. They are most- 
 ly very suggestible and can easily be hypnotised; 
 they are fond of imputing their first seduction to the 
 "suggestion" of a man who stared hard at them or 
 otherwise pursued them. Behind this suggestion 
 there lurks, of course, their own trauriatophilia. 
 
 Since analysis of inverts does not really elicit any 
 affects that might result in changing his previous 
 attitude towards the male sex, inversion (subject- 
 homo-erotism) is to be regarded as a condition in- 
 curable by analysis (or by any kind of psycho- 
 therapy at all). Psycho-analysis does not remain, 
 however, without any influence on the patient's beha-
 
 306 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 viour; it removes any neurotic symptoms that may 
 accompany the inversion, especially the morbid anx- 
 iety, which is often by no means slight. The invert 
 acknowledges his homo-erotism more frankly after 
 the analysis than before. It must further be re- 
 marked that many inverts are by no means quite 
 insusceptible to the endearments of the female sex. 
 It is through intercourse with woman (t. e. their 
 like) that they dispose of what may be called the 
 homosexual component of their sexuality. 
 
 How differently does the picture of object-homo- 
 erotism present itself even after only a superficial 
 analysis. After the very shortest examination those 
 suffering from it prove to be typical obsessional pa- 
 tients. They swarm with obsessions, and with obses- 
 sional procedures and ceremonies to guard against 
 them. A more penetrating dissection finds behind 
 the compulsion the torturing doubt, as well as that 
 lack of balance in love and hate which Freud discov- 
 ered to be the basis of the obsessional mechanisms. 
 The psycho-analysis of such homo-erotics as only 
 feel abnormally in reference to their love-object, and 
 are otherwise of a purely masculine type, has shewn 
 me plainly that this kind of homo-erotism in all its 
 phenomena is itself nothing else than a series of ob- 
 sessive feelings and actions. Sexuality in general is 
 obsessive enough, but, according to my experience, 
 object-homo-erotism is a true neurotic compulsion,
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 307 
 
 with logically irreversible substitution of normal sex- 
 ual aims and actions by abnormal ones. 
 
 The average (analytically investigated) early his- 
 tory of homo-erotics of the masculine type is some- 
 what as follows: 
 
 They were all very precocious sexually, and het- 
 ero-sexually aggressive (thus confirming Sadger's 
 finding). Their Oedipus phantasies were always 
 "normal," culminating in sexual-sadistic plans of as- 
 sault on the mother (or her representative) and 
 cruel death-wishes against the disturbing father. 
 Further, they were all intellectually precocious, and 
 in their impulse for knowledge created a number of 
 infantile sexual theories ; this forms also the founda- 
 tion of their later obsessional thinking. Apart from 
 aggressivity and intellectuality their constitution is 
 characterised by unusually strong anal-erotism and, 
 coprophilia. 11 In the earliest childhood they had 
 been severely punished by one of the parents 12 for a 
 
 u The view defended in this essay, that object-homo-erotism 
 is an obsessional neurosis, was strengthened when Freud, in his 
 work on "Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose," (this Zeit- 
 schrift, Jahrg. I, Heft 6) announced that the constitutional 
 basis of this neurosis is the fixation on a pregenital, sadistic- 
 anal-erotic stage in the development of the sexual hunger. It 
 was precisely sadism and anal-erotism that I found at the basis 
 also of object-homo-erotism, a fact that speaks decidedly in 
 favour of the inherent connection of these morbid states. See 
 also Ernest Jones, "Hass und Analerotik in der Zwangsneu- 
 rose," (this Zeitschrift, Jahrg. I, Heft 5). 
 
 11 It struck me how often it was the mother who administered 
 these reprovals to later homo-erotics, but I attached no special 
 significance to this circumstance until Professor Freud called 
 my attention to the importance of this very factor.
 
 308 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 hetero-erotic delinquency (touching a girl indecent- 
 ly, infantile attempt at coitus), and on such an oc- 
 casion (which was often repeated) had to suppress 
 an outburst of intense rage. Following on this they 
 became especially docile in the latency period (which 
 set in early), avoided the society of girls and women 
 half obstinately, half anxiously, and consorted ex- 
 clusively with their friends. In one of my patients 
 there occurred several times "irruptions" of homo- 
 erotic affection in the latency period ; in another the 
 latency was disturbed through overhearing parental 
 intercourse, after which the previous good conduct 
 was interrupted by a transitory period of naughti- 
 ness (revenge phantasies). When the sexual hunger 
 increases at the time of puberty the homo-erotic's 
 inclinations again turn at first towards the opposite 
 sex, but the slightest reproval or warning on the 
 part of someone they respect is enough to re-awaken 
 the dread of women, whereupon there takes place, 
 either immediately or shortly after, a final flight 
 from the female to his own sex. One patient when 
 he was fifteen fell in love with an actress about 
 whose morality his mother passed some not quite 
 flattering remarks ; since then he has never ap- 
 proached a woman and feels himself impulsively 
 drawn to young men. In the case of another pa- 
 tient puberty set in with an absolute frenzy of het- 
 erosexuality ; he had to have sexual intercourse every 
 day for a year, and obtained the money for it, if
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 309 
 
 necessary, in dishonourable ways. When he made 
 the house servant pregnant, however, and was called 
 to account for it by his father and vilified by his 
 mother, he applied himself with the same ardour to 
 the cult of the male sex, from which no effort has 
 been able to wean him ever since. 
 
 In the transference-relation to the physician ob- 
 ject-homo-erotics recapitulate the genesis of their 
 trouble. If the transference is a positive one from 
 the beginning then unexpected "cures" come about 
 even after a short treatment; on the slightest con- 
 flict, however, the patient relapses into his homo- 
 erotism, and only now, on the setting in of resistance, 
 does the real analysis begin. If the transference is 
 negative from the outset, as it is especially apt to 
 be with patients who come to the treatment not on 
 their own accord, but at their parents' bidding, then 
 it takes a long time to reach any real analytic work, 
 the patient wasting the hour with boastful and scorn- 
 ful narrations of his homo-erotic adventures. 
 
 In the object-homo-erotic's unconscious phantasy 
 the physician can represent the place of man and 
 woman, father and mother, reversals 13 of the most 
 diverse kind playing a very important part in this. 
 
 11 The dreams of homo-erotics are very rich in reversals. 
 Whole series of dreams have often to be read backwards. The 
 symptomatic action of making a slip of the tongue or pen in 
 the use of the gender of articles is common. One patient even 
 made up a bisexual number: the number 101 signified, as the 
 context shewed, that for him "backwards and forwards were 
 the same."
 
 810 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 It turns out that an object-homo-erotic knows how 
 to love the woman in a man; the posterior half of 
 man's body can signify for him the anterior half of 
 a woman's, the scapulae or nates assuming the sig- 
 nificance of the woman's breasts. It was these cases 
 that shewed me with especial plainness that this kind 
 of homo-erotism is only a substitution product of the 
 hetero-erotic sexual hunger. At the same time the 
 active homo-erotic satisfies in this way also his sadis- 
 tic and anal-erotic impulses ; this holds good not only 
 for the real paederasts, but also for the over-refined 
 boy lovers, those who anxiously shun all indecent 
 contact with boys; with the latter sadism and anal- 
 erotism are replaced by their reaction-formations. 
 
 In the light of psycho-analysis, therefore, the ac- 
 tive homo-erotic act appears on the one hand as sub- 
 sequent (false) obedience, which taking the paren- 
 tal interdiction literally really avoids intercourse 
 with women, but indulges the forbidden hetero-erotic 
 desires in unconscious phantasies ; on the other hand 
 the paederastic act serves the purpose of the original 
 Oedipus phantasy and denotes the injuring and sul- 
 lying of the man. 14 
 
 Considered from the intellectual aspect obsession- 
 al homo-erotism proves to be in the first place an 
 
 "One patient, whenever he felt himself insulted by a man, 
 especially by a superior, had at once to seek out a male prosti- 
 tute; only in this way was he able to save himself from an 
 outburst of rage. The supposed "love" for a man was here 
 essentially an act of violence and revenge.
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 311 
 
 over-correction of the doubt concerning the love to- 
 wards the man's own sex. The homo-erotic obses- 
 sional idea unites in a happy compromise the flight 
 from women, and their symbolic replacement, as well 
 as the hatred of men and the compensation of this. 
 Woman being apparently excluded from the love-life, 
 there no longer exists, so far as consciousness is con- 
 cerned, any further bone of contention between fa- 
 ther and son. 
 
 It is worth mentioning that most of the obsession- 
 al homo-erotics (as this type might also be called) I 
 have analysed make use of the intermediary stage 
 theory 15 of homosexual tendencies, which is now so 
 popular, to represent their condition as congenital, 
 and therefore not to be altered or influenced, or, to 
 use the expression from Schreber's "Denkwiirdigkei- 
 ten," "in harmony with the universe." They all re- 
 gard themselves as inverts, and are glad to have 
 found a scientific support for the justification of 
 their obsessional ideas and actions. 
 
 I have naturally also to say something here as to 
 my experience concerning the curability of this form 
 of homo-erotism. In the first place I observe that it 
 has not yet been possible (for me, at all events) to 
 cure completely a severe case of obsessional homo- 
 erotism. In a number of cases, however, I have been 
 able to record very far-reaching improvement, espe- 
 
 M (About equivalent to what we call the "third sex" theory 
 in English countries. Transl.)
 
 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 cially in the following directions: abatement of the 
 hostile attitude and feeling of repugnance towards 
 women; better control of the previously urgent im- 
 pulse for homo-erotic satisfaction, the direction of 
 the impulse being otherwise retained; awakening of 
 potency towards women, therefore a kind of amphi- 
 erotism, which took the place of the previously exclu- 
 sive homo-erotism, often alternating with the latter 
 in periodic waves. These experiences encourage me, 
 therefore, to expect that obsessional homo-erotism 
 will be just as curable by means of the psycho-ana- 
 lytic method as the other forms of obsessional neu- 
 rosis. In any case I imagine that the fundamental 
 reversion of an obsessional homo-erotism that has 
 been firmly rooted for a long time must need whole 
 years of analytic work. (In one very hopeful case I 
 was treating the cure had to be broken off for ex- 
 trinsic reasons after almost two years.) Only when 
 we have at our disposal cured cases, . e. cases an- 
 alysed to the end, will it be possible to pass a final 
 judgment on the conditions under which this neu- 
 rosis arises, and on the peculiarities of its disposi- 
 tional and accidental factors. 
 
 It is possible, indeed probable, that homo-erotism 
 is to be found not only in those here described, but 
 also in other syndromes; with the isolation of these 
 two types I certainly do not mean to exhaust all the 
 possibilities. In making the nosological distinction
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 313 
 
 of subject- from object-homo-erotism I only wanted 
 in the first place to direct attention to the confusion 
 of ideas that prevails even in the scientific literature 
 on the homosexuality problem. Psycho-analytic in- 
 vestigation shews further that nowadays the most 
 heterogeneous psychical states are treated alike un- 
 der the title "homosexuality;" on the one hand true 
 constitutional anomalies (inversion, subject-homo- 
 erotism), on the other hand psychoneurotic obses- 
 sional states (obsessional or object-homo-erotism). 
 The individual of the first kind feels himself to be a 
 woman with the wish to be loved by a man, the feel- 
 ing of the second is rather neurotic flight from 
 women than sympathy towards men. 
 
 In designating object-homo-erotism as a neurotic 
 symptom I come into opposition with Freud, who in 
 his "Sexualtheorie" describes homosexuality as a 
 perversion, neuroses on the contrary as the negative 
 of perversions. The contradiction, however, is only 
 apparent. "Perversions," i. e. tarrying at primitive 
 or preparatory sexual aims, can very well be placed 
 at the disposal of neurotic repression tendencies also, 
 a part of true (positive) perversion, neurotically 
 exaggerated, representing at the same time the nega- 
 tive of another perversion. 16 Now this is the case 
 with "object-homo-erotism.'* The homo-erotic com- 
 ponent, which is never absent even normally, gets 
 
 * (Abraham has shewn that the same is true of another per- 
 version: exhibitionism. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse. 1914. 
 Transl.)
 
 314 Contributions to Psycho-Analytii 
 
 here over-engaged with masses of affect, which in 
 the unconscious relate to another, repressed perver- 
 sion, namely, a hetero-erotism of such a strength as 
 to be incapable of becoming conscious. 
 
 I believe that of the two kinds of homo-erotism 
 here described the "objective'* one is the more fre- 
 quent and the more important socially; it makes a 
 large number of otherwise valuable men (psychoneu- 
 rotically disposed, it is true) impossible in society, 
 and excludes them from propagation. Further, the 
 constantly increasing number of object-homo-erotics 
 is a social phenomenon the importance of which is 
 not to be underestimated, and one that demands ex- 
 planation. As a provisional explanation I assume 
 that the extension of object-homo-erotism is an ab- 
 normal reaction to the disproportionately exagger- 
 ated repression of the homo-erotic instinct-compo- 
 nent by civilised man, i. e. a failure of this repres- 
 sion. 
 
 In the mental life of primitive peoples (as in that 
 of children) amphi-erotism plays a much greater 
 part than in that of civilised people. But even with 
 certain highly civilised races, e. g. the Greeks, it 
 used to be not merely a tolerated, but a recognised 
 kind of way for the satisfaction of desire; it is still 
 so in the Orient of today. In modern European re- 
 gions of culture, however, and in those attached to 
 them, not only is actual homo-erotism lacking, but 
 also the sublimation of it that appeared so obvious
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 815 
 
 to the people of antiquity, enthusiastic and devoted 
 friendship between men. It is in fact astounding to 
 what an extent present-day men have lost the ca- 
 pacity for mutual affection and amiability. Instead 
 there prevails among men decided asperity, resist- 
 ance, and love of disputation. Since it is unthink- 
 able that those tender affects which were so strongly 
 pronounced in childhood could have disappeared 
 without leaving a trace, one has to regard these 
 signs of resistance as reaction-formations, as defence 
 symptoms erected against affection for the same sex. 
 I would even go so far as to regard the barbarous 
 duels of the German students as similarly distorted 
 proofs of affection towards members of their own 
 sex. (Only slight traces still exist today in a posi- 
 tive direction; thus, in club and party life, in "hero 
 worship," in the preference of so many men for boy- 
 girls and for actresses in male parts, also in attacks 
 of cruder erotism in drunkenness, where the alcohol 
 reverses the sublimations.) 
 
 It looks, however, as if these rudiments of the love 
 for their own sex would not fully compensate the men 
 of today for losing the love of friends. A part of 
 the unsatisfied homo-erotism remains "free floating," 
 and demands to be appeased ; since this is impossible 
 under the conditions of present-day civilisation, this 
 quantity of sexual hunger has to undergo a displace- 
 ment, namely, on to the feeling-relationship to the 
 opposite sex. I quite seriously believe that the men
 
 316 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 of today are one and all obsessively heterosexual as 
 the result of this affective displacement ; in order to 
 free themselves from men, they become the slaves of 
 women. This may be the explanation of the "chiv- 
 alry" and the exaggerated, often visibly affected, 
 adoration of woman that has dominated the male 
 world since the middle ages ; it may also possibly be 
 the explanation of Don-Juanism, the obsessive and 
 yet never fully satisfied pursuit of continually new 
 heterosexual adventures. Even if Don Juan himself 
 would find this theory ridiculous, I should have to 
 declare him to be an obsessional invalid, who could 
 never find satisfaction in the endless series of women 
 (so faithfully drawn by Leporello in his book) be- 
 cause these women are really only substitutes for 
 repressed love-objects. 17 
 
 I do not wish to be misunderstood: I find it nat- 
 ural and founded in the psycho-physical organisa- 
 tion of the sexes that a man loves a woman incom- 
 parably better than his like, but it is unnatural that 
 a man should repel other men and have to adore 
 women with an obsessive exaggeration. What won- 
 der that so few women succeed in meeting these ex- 
 aggerated demands and in satisfying, as well as all 
 the other ones, also the man's homo-erotic needs by 
 being his "companion," without doubt one of the 
 commonest causes of domestic unhappiness. 
 
 "There also exists a Don-Juanism of unsatisfied hetero- 
 erotism.
 
 The Nosology of Male Homosexuality 317 
 
 The exaggeration of hetero-erotism for the pur- 
 pose of repressing love towards the same sex invol- 
 untarily reminds one of an epigram of Lessing's 
 ( Sinngedichte, Buch II, Nr C) : 
 
 "The unjust mob falsely imputed love of boys to the 
 
 righteous Turan. 
 To chastise the lies what else could he do but 
 
 sleep with his sister." 
 
 The reason why every kind of affection between 
 men is proscribed is not clear. It is thinkable that 
 the sense of cleanliness which has been so specially 
 reinforced in the past few centuries, . e. the repres- 
 sion of anal-erotism, has provided the strongest mo- 
 tive in this direction ; for homo-erotism, even the 
 most sublimated, stands in a more or less unconscious 
 associative connection with paederastia, i. e. an 
 anal-erotic activity. 
 
 The increasing number of obsessional homo-erotics 
 in modern society would then be the symptom of the 
 partial failure of repression and "return" of the 
 repressed material. 
 
 In a brief summary, therefore, the attempt to ex- 
 plain the prevalence of object-homo-erotism would 
 run somewhat as follows: The exaggerated repres- 
 sion of the homo-erotic instinct-component in pres- 
 ent-day society has resulted in general in a rather 
 obsessive reinforcement of hetero-erotism in men. If 
 now the hetero-erotism is also inhibited or strictly
 
 318 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 restrained, as is necessarily the case during educa- 
 tion, the consequence may easily be in the first 
 place with those who are predisposed to it for in- 
 dividual reasons a reverse displacement of the com- 
 pulsion from hetero-erotism to homo-erotism, i. e. 
 the development of a homo-erotic obsessional neu- 
 rosis.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE ONTOGENESIS OF THE INTEREST IN MONEY * 
 
 THE deeper psycho-analysis penetrates into the 
 knowledge of social-psychological productions 
 (myths, fairy-tales, folk-lore) the stronger becomes 
 the confirmation of the phylogenetic origin of sym- 
 bols, which stand out in the mental life of every indi- 
 vidual as a precipitate of the experiences of previous 
 generations. Analysis has still to perform the task 
 of separately investigating the phylogenesis and on- 
 togenesis of symbolism, and then establishing their 
 mutual relation. The classical formula of "Dai- 
 mon kai Tyche" in Freud's application (the co- 
 operation of heredity and experience in the genesis 
 of individual strivings) will finally become applied 
 also to the genesis of the psychical contents of these 
 strivings, and this also brings to the front the old 
 dispute about "congenital ideas," though now no 
 longer in the form of empty speculations. We may 
 already, however, anticipate to this extent, namely, 
 that for the production of a symbol individual expe- 
 riences are necessary as well as the congenital dispo- 
 
 1 Published in 'the Internat. Zeitschr. f. arztl. Psychoanalyse, 
 1914. 
 
 319
 
 320 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 sition, these providing the real material for the con- 
 struction of the symbol, while the congenital basis 
 preceding experience has perhaps only the value of 
 an inherited, but not yet functioning mechanism. 
 
 I wish here to examine the question of whether, and 
 to what extent, individual experience favours the 
 transformation of anal-erotic interest into interest 
 in money. 
 
 Every psycho-analyst is familiar with the sym- 
 bolic meaning of money that was discovered by 
 Freud, "Wherever the archaic way of thinking has 
 prevailed or still prevails, in the old civilisations, in 
 myths, fairy-tales, superstition, in unconscious think- 
 ing, in dreams, and in neuroses, money has been 
 brought into the closest connection with filth." 
 
 As an individual-psychological phenomenon paral- 
 lel with this fact Freud asserts that an intimate as- 
 sociation exists between the strongly marked eroge- 
 nicity of the anal zone in childhood and the charac- 
 ter trait of miserliness that develops later. In the 
 case of persons who later on were especially tidy, 
 economical, and obstinate, one learns from the ana- 
 lytic investigation of their early childhood that they 
 were of that class of infants "who refuse to empty 
 the bowel because they obtain an accessory pleasure 
 from defaecation," who even in the later years of 
 childhood "enjoyed holding back the stools," and 
 who recall "having occupied themselves in their child- 
 hood in all sorts of unseemly ways with the evacu-
 
 The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money 
 
 ated material." "The most extensive connections 
 seem to be those existing between the apparently so 
 disparate complexes of defaecation and interest in 
 money." 2 
 
 Observation of the behaviour of children and an- 
 alytic investigation of neurotics allow us now to es- 
 tablish some single points on the line along which 
 the idea of the most valuable thing that a man pos- 
 sesses (money) is developed in the individual into a 
 symbol "of the most worthless thing, which a man 
 casts aside as dejecta." 3 
 
 Experience gathered from these two sources shews 
 that children originally devote their interest with- 
 out any inhibition to the process of defaecation, and 
 that it affords them pleasure to hold back their 
 stools. The excrementa thus held back are really the 
 first "savings" of the growing being, and as such 
 remain in a constant, unconscious inter-relationship 
 with every bodily activity or mental striving that has 
 anything to do with collecting, hoarding, and saving. 
 
 Faeces are also, however, one of the first toys of 
 the child. The purely auto-erotic satisfaction af- 
 forded to the child by the pressing and squeezing of 
 the faecal masses and the play of the sphincter mus- 
 cles soon becomes in part, at least transformed 
 into a sort of object-love, in that the interest gets 
 displaced from the neutral sensations of certain or- 
 
 1 Freud. "Charakter und Analerotik," in his Sammlung kl. 
 Schr. z. Neurosenlehre, Bd. II, S. 132 et seq. 
 Freud. Loc. citi
 
 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 gans on to the material itself that caused these feel- 
 ings. The faeces are thus "introjected," and in this 
 stage of development which is essentially character- 
 ised by sharpening of the sense of smell and an in- 
 creasingly adroit use of the hands, with at the same 
 time an inability to walk upright (creeping on all 
 fours) they count as a valuable toy, from which 
 the child is to be weaned only through deterrents 
 and threats of punishment. 
 
 The child's interest for dejecta experiences its first 
 distortion through the smell of faeces becoming dis- 
 agreeable, disgusting. This is probably related to 
 the beginning of the upright gait. 4 The other at- 
 tributes of this material moistness, discolouration, 
 stickiness, etc. do not for the time being offend his 
 sense of cleanliness. He still enjoys, therefore, play- 
 ing with and manipulating moist street-mud when- 
 ever he has the chance, liking to collect it together 
 into larger heaps. Such a heap of mud is already in 
 a sense a symbol, distinguished from the real thing 
 by its absence of smell. For the child, street-mud is, 
 so to speak, deodourised dejecta. 
 
 As the child's sense of cleanliness increases with 
 the help of paedagogic measures street-mud also 
 becomes objectionable to him. Substances which on 
 account of their stickiness, moistures, and colour are 
 apt to leave traces on the body and clothing become 
 
 4 Freud conceives of the repression of anal-erotism and of 
 the pleasure in smell together in the human race as a result 
 of the upright posture, the erection from the earth.
 
 The Ontogenesis of the Interest m Money 323 
 
 despised and avoided as "dirty things." The symbol 
 of filth must therefore undergo a further distortion, 
 a dehydration. The child turns its interest to sand, 
 a substance which, while the colour of earth, is 
 cleaner and dry. The instinctive joy of children in 
 gathering up, massing together, and shaping sand is 
 subsequently rationalised and sanctioned by the 
 adults, whom it suits to see an otherwise unruly child 
 playing with sand for hours, and they declare this 
 playing to be "healthy," i. e. hygienic. 5 None the 
 less this play-sand also is nothing other than a cop- 
 ro-symbol deodourised and dehydrated filth. 
 
 Already in this stage of development, by the way, 
 there occurs a "return of the repressed.'* It gives 
 children endless pleasure to fill with water the holes 
 they dig in the sand, and so to bring the material of 
 their play nearer to the original watery stage. Boys 
 not infrequently employ their own urine for this irri- 
 gation, as though they wanted in this way to empha- 
 
 5 The habit of euphemistically disguising coprophilic tenden- 
 cies as "hygienic" is very widespread. The fairly harmless 
 behaviour of stool pedants is well-known, who devote to the 
 regulation of their bowel activities a considerable part of 
 the interest at their disposal; such persons, however, are rather 
 prone to fall into what has been called "stool-hypochondria." 
 A whole series of analyses, by the way, has convinced me that 
 in very many cases hypochondria is really a fermentation- 
 product of anal-erotism, a displacement of unsublimated co- 
 prophilic interests from their original objects on to other or- 
 gans and products of the body with an alteration of the 
 qualifying pleasure. The choice of the organ towards which 
 the hypochondria is directed is determined by special factors 
 (somatic disposition, pronounced erogenicity even in diseased 
 organs, etc.).
 
 324 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 sise quite clearly the relationship of the two mate- 
 rials. Even the interest for the specific odour of ex- 
 crement does not cease at once, but is only displaced 
 on to other odours that in any way resemble this. 
 The children continue to shew a liking for the smell 
 of sticky materials with a characteristic odour, espe- 
 cially the strongly smelling degenerated product of 
 cast off epidermis cells which collects between the 
 toes, nasal secretion, ear-wax, and the dirt of the 
 nails, while many children do not content themselves 
 with the moulding and sniffing of these substances, 
 but also take them into the mouth. The passionate 
 enjoyment of children in moulding putty (colour, 
 consistency, smell), tar, and asphalt, is well known. 
 I knew a boy who had an intense passion for the 
 characteristic smell of rubber materials, and who 
 could sniff for hours at a piece of indiarubber. 
 
 The smell of stables and of illuminating gas great- 
 ly pleases children at this age indeed, at much older 
 ages even and it is not chance that popular belief 
 appreciates places having these smells as being 
 "healthy," even as being a cure for diseases. A spe- 
 cial sublimation path of anal-erotism branches off 
 from the smell of gas, asphalt, and turpentine: the 
 fondness for substances with an agreeable odour, for 
 perfumes, by means of which the development of a 
 reaction-formation representation through the op- 
 posite is concluded. People with whom this kind 
 of sublimation occurs often develop in other respects
 
 The Ontogenesis of the Interest m Money 325 
 
 as well into aesthetes, and there can be no question 
 that aesthetics in general has its principal root in 
 repressed anal-erotism. 8 The aesthetic and playful 
 interest springing from this source not infrequently 
 has a share in the developing pleasure in painting 
 and sculpture. 7 
 
 Already in the mud and sand periods of copro- 
 philic interest it is striking how fond children are of 
 fabricating objects out of this material so far as 
 their primitive artistic skill allows or, more cor- 
 rectly, of imitating objects the possession of which 
 has a special value for them. They make out of them 
 different articles of diet, cakes, tarts, sweetmeats, 
 etc. The reinforcement of purely egoistic instincts 
 by coprophilia begins here. 
 
 Progress in the sense of cleanliness then gradually 
 makes even sand unacceptable to the child, and the 
 infantile stone age begins : the collecting of pebbles, 
 as prettily shaped and coloured as possible, in which 
 a higher stage in the development of replacement- 
 formation is attained. The attributes of evil odour, 
 moisture, and softness are represented by those of 
 absence of odour, dryness, and now also hardness. 
 We are reminded of the real origin of this hobby by 
 the circumstance that stones just as mud and sand 
 
 ' (See on this matter a monograph of mine in the Jahrbuch, 
 Bd. VI. Transl.) 
 
 7 1 have already in another connection pointed out the prob- 
 able part played by the childish interest in flatus in later fond- 
 ness for music. See Ch. IV.
 
 326 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 are gathered and collected from the earth. The 
 capitalistic significance of stones is already quite 
 considerable. (Children are "stone-rich" 15 in the 
 narrow sense of the word.) 
 
 After stones comes the turn of artificial products, 
 and with these the detachment of the interest from 
 the earth is complete. Glass marbles, buttons, 9 fruit 
 pips, are eagerly collected this time no longer only 
 for the sake of their intrinsic value, but as measures 
 of value, so to speak as primitive coins, converting 
 the previous barter exchange of children into an en- 
 thusiastic money exchange. The character of capi- 
 talism, however, not purely practical and utilitarian, 
 but libidinous and irrational, is betrayed in this 
 stage also: the child decidedly enjoys the collecting 
 in itself. 10 
 
 It only needs one more step for the identification 
 of faeces with gold to be complete. Soon even stones 
 begin to wound the child's feeling of cleanliness he 
 
 (A German idiom. Transl.) 
 
 Cp. L-pu Andreas-Salom6: "Vom friihen Gottesdienst." Im- 
 ago. II. 1913. 
 
 10 The German word "Besitz" (= possession) shews, by the 
 way, that man tries even in his speech to represent by the idea 
 of "sitting on it" that which is valuable to him, which belongs 
 to him. Rationalists evidently content themselves with the ex- 
 planation of this simile to the effect that the sitting on is 
 meant to express a concealing, protecting and guarding of the 
 valued object. The fact, however, that it is the buttocks and 
 not the hand which would be more natural with men that is 
 used to represent protection and defence speaks rather in 
 favour of the word "Besitz" being a copro-symbol. The final 
 decision on the point must be reserved for a philologist who has 
 had a psycho-analytic training.
 
 The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money 387 
 
 longs for something purer and this is offered to him 
 in the shining pieces of money, the high appreciation 
 of which is naturally also in part due to the respect 
 in which they are held by adults, as well as to the 
 seductive possibilities of obtaining through them 
 everything that the child's heart can desire. Orig- 
 inally, however, it is not these purely practical con- 
 siderations that are operative, enjoyment in the 
 playful collecting, heaping up, and gazing at the 
 shining metal pieces being the chief thing, so that 
 they are treasured even less for their economic value 
 than for their own sake as pleasure-giving objects. 
 The eye takes pleasure at the sight of their lustre 
 and colour, the ear at their metallic clink, the sense 
 of touch at play with the round smooth discs, only 
 the sense of smell comes away empty, and the sense 
 of taste also has to be satisfied with the weak, but 
 peculiar taste of the coins. With this the develop- 
 ment of the money symbol is in its main outlines 
 complete. Pleasure in the intestinal contents be- 
 comes enjoyment of money, which, however, after 
 what has been said is seen to be nothing other than 
 odourless, dehydrated filth that has been made to 
 shine. Pecwvia 'non olet. 
 
 In correspondence with the development of the or- 
 gan of thought that in the meanwhile has been pro- 
 ceeding in the direction of logicality, the adult's sym- 
 bolic interest in money gets extended not only to ob- 
 jects with similar physical attributes, but to all sorts
 
 328 Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 
 
 of things that in any way signify value or possession 
 (paper money, shares, bankbook, etc.). But what- 
 ever form may be assumed by money, the enjoyment 
 at possessing it has its deepest and amplest source 
 in coprophilia. Every sociologist and national econ- 
 omist who examines the facts without prejudice has 
 to reckon with this irrational element. Social prob- 
 lems can be solved only by discovering the real psy- 
 chology of human beings; speculations about eco- 
 nomic conditions alone will never reach the goal. 
 
 A part of anal-erotism is not sublimated at all, but 
 remains in its original form. 11 Even the most culti- 
 vated normal being displays an interest in his evacu- 
 ation functions which stands in a curious contradic- 
 tion to the abhorrence and disgust that he manifests 
 when he sees or hears about anything of the kind 
 in regard to other people. Foreign people and races, 
 as is well known, cannot "riechen" 12 each other. In 
 
 u The sum of anal-erotism present in the constitution is thus 
 shared in adults among the most diverse psychical structures. 
 Out of it develop: 1. The anal character traits in Freud's 
 sense. 2. Contributions to aesthetics and to cultural inter- 
 ests. 3. To hypochondria. 4. The rest remains unsublimated. 
 From the different proportion of the sublimated and the origi- 
 nal parts, from the preference for this or that form of sub- 
 limation, the most variegated character types arise, which must 
 naturally have their special conditional factors. Anal char- 
 acteristics are specially suited for rapid characterological ori- 
 entation concerning an individual, indeed concerning whole 
 races. The anal character, with his cleanliness, love for order, 
 defiance, and miserliness, sharply deviates from the pronounced 
 anal-erotic, who is tolerant on the matter of dirt, extravagant, 
 and easy-going. 
 
 " (A German idiom, meaning "cannot stand." "Riechen" 
 literally means to smell. Transl.)
 
 The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money 829 
 
 addition to the retention of the original form, how- 
 ever, there also exists a "return" of what is actually 
 concealed behind the money symbol. The intestinal 
 disorders, first observed by Freud, that follow on a 
 wounding of the money complex are examples of 
 this. 13 A further instance is the curious fact, which 
 I have noticed in countless cases, that people are eco- 
 nomical as regards the changing of under-linen in a 
 way quite out of proportion to their standard of liv- 
 ing in other respects. Meanness finally, therefore, 
 makes use of the anal character in order to gain once 
 more a piece of anal-erotism (tolerance of dirt). The 
 following is a still more striking example : A patient 
 could not recall any kind of coprophilic manipula- 
 tions, but soon after related without being asked that 
 he took a special pleasure in brightly shining copper 
 coins, and had invented an original procedure for 
 making them shine ; he swallowed the piece of money, 
 and then searched his faeces until he found the piece 
 of money, which during its passage through the ali- 
 mentary canal had become beautifully shining. 14 
 Here the pleasure in the clean object became a cover 
 
 "See Chapter VII. P. 176. "Temporary rectal troubles," 
 etc. 
 
 " The case reminds one of the coprophilic joke in which the 
 doctor who had succeeded in expelling by means of a purge 
 a piece of money that a child had swallowed was told he could 
 keep the money as his fee. As to the identification of money 
 and faeces see also the fairy-tale of "Eslein streck dich." The 
 word "Losung" (= deliverance) means proceeds of a sale (in 
 business), but in hunting speech it means the faeces of wild 
 animals.
 
 330 Contributions to Psycho- Analysis 
 
 for satisfaction of the most primitive anal-erotism. 
 The curious thing is that the patient was able to de- 
 ceive himself as to the real significance of his trans- 
 parent behaviour. 
 
 Apart from striking examples of this sort, the 
 erotic enjoyment of heaping in and gathering up gold 
 and other money pieces, the pleasurable "wallowing 
 in money," can be observed countless times in daily 
 life. Many people are ready enough to sign docu- 
 ments that bind them to pay large sums, and can 
 easily expend large amounts in paper money, but are 
 striking tardy in giving out gold coins or even the 
 smallest copper coins. The coins seem to "stick" to 
 their fingers. (Cp. also the expression "current 
 capital," and the reverse of this, "argent sec," which 
 is used in the Pranche-Comte. ) 15 
 
 The ontogenetic path of development of interest in 
 money, as here sketched, while shewing individual 
 differences dependent on the conditions of life, is 
 nevertheless on the whole among civilised people to be 
 regarded as a psychical process which seeks realisa- 
 tion under the most diverse circumstances, in one way 
 or another. It thus seems natural to regard this de- 
 velopmental tendency as a racial attribute, and to 
 suppose that the biogenetic ground principle is also 
 valid for the formation of the money symbol. It is 
 to be expected that phylogenetic and historical conv 
 
 u (To be "4 sec" is French vernacular for "hard up.' 
 TransL)
 
 The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money 331 
 
 parison of the path of individual development here 
 described will shew a parallelism with the develop- 
 ment of the money symbol in the human race in gen- 
 eral. Perhaps the coloured stones of primitive men 
 which have been found in cave excavations will then 
 be capable of interpretation ; observations concern- 
 ing the anal-erotism of savages (the primitive men 
 of today, who in many cases still live in the stage of 
 barter exchange and of pebble or shell money) should 
 considerably further this investigation of the history 
 of civilisation. 
 
 After what has been communicated, however, it is 
 already not improbable that the capitalistic interest, 
 increasing in correlation with development, stands 
 not only at the disposal of practical, egoistic aims 
 of the reality-principle, therefore but also that the 
 delight in gold and in the possession of money repre- 
 sents the symbolic replacement of, and the reaction^ 
 formation to, repressed anal-erotism, i. e., that it 
 also satisfies the pleasure-principle. 
 
 The capitalistic instinct thus contains, according 
 to our conception, an egoistic and an anal-erotic 
 component.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abraham, 47, 50, 61, 155, 313 
 Abreaction, 25, 29, 224 
 Abstinence, 14, 38, 186 
 Adler, 148, 231 
 Aetiological claims, 37, 39, 50, 
 
 52 
 Affect, 39, 50, 256, 272, 277, 
 
 305, 314, 315 
 
 Alcohol, 130, 158, 159, 161-164 
 Ambi-sexual, 184, 296, 302 
 Ambition, 59, 117, 207, 208 
 Ambivalency, 246, 247, 260 
 Amnesia, 77, 177 
 Amphi-erotism, 296, 303, 312, 
 
 314 
 
 Anaesthesia, 42, 75, 147 
 Anal, 208, 209, 320, 329 
 Anal-erotism, 16, 108, 134, 
 
 307, 310, 317, 320, 322, 
 
 324, 328-331 
 Andreas-Salome, 326 
 Animism, 227, 228, 275 
 Antipathy, 54, 64, 65, 82, 86 
 Anxiety, 30, 74, 82, 113, 115, 
 
 209, 220, 272, 306 
 Anxiety neurosis, 14, 34, 107, 
 
 130 
 Anxiety hysteria, 72, 74, 90, 
 
 163 
 
 Aprosexia, 186 
 Art, 116, 214 
 Association, 19, 20, 25, 44, 51, 
 
 98-100, 114, 116, 117, 119, 
 
 143, 145, 197, 202, 205, 
 
 211, 229, 317. See also: 
 
 Free Association. 
 Auto-erotism, 47, 49, 64, 77, 
 
 155, 208, 209, 233-236, 
 
 294, 298, 321. 
 Automatism, 37, 76 
 Auto-suggestion, 59, 71, 82-85 
 Autosymbolic phenomena, 217 
 Aversion, 43 
 
 Beaurain, 276 
 Bernheim, 58, 67 
 Bisexuality, 21, 184, 262, 296 
 Bjerre, 294 
 Bleuler, 218 
 Brev*r, 29 
 
 Castration, 34, 185, 186, 192, 
 200, 243, 247, 250, 264, 
 266, 270 
 
 Catalepsy, 69 
 
 Catalysis, 39 
 
 Catatonia, 285, 291, 94 
 
 Catharsis, 29 
 
 Censor, 93, 103-105, 109, 111, 
 113, 117, 127-129, 136, 210 
 
 Character, 37, 44, 47, 141, 145, 
 148, 150, 202, 206, 207, 
 237 
 
 Charcot, 58, 83 
 
 Childhood, 23, 26, 28, 31-33, 
 41, 50, 60, 63, 76, 79-81, 
 90, 104, 106-108, 110, 111, 
 147, 179, 185, 197, 208, 
 216-219, 231, 256, 273-275, 
 296, 297, 307, 315, 320 
 
 Childish memories: See In- 
 fantile memories. 
 
 Claustrophobia, 51 
 
 Cleanliness, 322, 325, 328 
 
 333
 
 334 
 
 Index 
 
 Cohabitation: See Coitus. 
 
 Coitus, 13-16, 19, 23, 29, 89, 
 108, 135, 146, 158-161, 166, 
 168, 180, 187-191, 250, 263, 
 266, 269, 271, 274, 301, 308 
 
 Complexes, 12, 25, 29, 36, 39, 
 
 42, 43, 45, 51, 52, 56, 57, 
 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 72, 80, 
 83, 86, 88, 91, 96, 112, 118, 
 125, 128, 129, 135, 143-148, 
 177, 198, 212, 235, 258, 
 265, 267, 271 ,293, 321, 
 329. See also: Father- 
 complex, mother-complex, 
 GEdipus-complex. 
 
 Compulsion, 25, 77, 237, 306, 
 318 
 
 Compulsion neurosis: See Ob- 
 sessional neurosis. 
 
 Condensation, 100, 113, 115, 
 118, 126, 266, 276 
 
 Congenital, 27, 28, 148, 319, 
 320 
 
 Conscience, 23, 122, 177, 301 
 
 Consciousness, 16-19, 21, 35, 
 
 43, 48, 53, 65, 66, 112, 
 113, 140, 147, 152, 175, 
 195, 199, 210, 212, 277, 
 301 311 
 
 Conversion, 154, 185, 200, 235 
 Coprolalia, 150 
 Coprophemia, 150 
 Coprophilia, 38, 66, 143, 150, 
 
 305, 307, 323, 325, 328, 
 
 329 
 
 Cover-memory, 22, 76 
 Cowardice, 15, 17, 19, 20, 200 
 Cruelty, 19, 78, 79, 107, 119, 
 
 245, 246, 248, 249, 307 
 Curiosity, 74, 116, 122, 144, 
 
 176, 250, 273, 275 
 
 Day dreams, 18, 43, 102 
 Defaecation, 320, 321 
 Delusions of grandeur: See 
 
 Grandiose delusions. 
 Delusions of persecution, 48, 
 
 157, 170, 175, 176, 179, 
 183, 286, 288, 290, 293, 294 
 
 Dementia praecox, 47, 130, 
 154, 163, 179, 234, 285, 294 
 
 Depression, 30 
 
 Determinism, 100, 195, 232, 
 258 
 
 Disgust, 65, 144, 151, 167 
 
 Displacement, 39, 49, 56, 60, 
 118, 120, 154, 202, 210, 
 211, 264, 271, 272- 275, 
 276, 316, 318, 323 
 
 Disposition, 209 
 
 Docility, 308 
 
 Dreams, 19, 21, 42, 71, 94-119, 
 121, 123-131, 191, 192, 
 196, 201, 213, 245, 246, 
 255, 261-264, 269, 272, 
 280, 320 
 
 Von Ehrenfels, 22 
 Ejaculatio praecox, 13, 191 
 Emotion, 35, 65, 74, 109, 186, 
 
 195 
 
 Environment, 24, 50, 66 
 Erection, 13, 14, 23, 200, 273, 
 
 285, 295 
 Erogenous zone, 15, 90, 108, 
 
 189, 279, 320 
 Erotomania, 288 
 Excitation, 104, 107-110, 188- 
 
 191, 195, 207 
 Exhibitionism, 16, 105, 106, 
 
 108, 167, 172, 177, 313 
 Expression displacement, 209- 
 
 212 
 
 Faeces, 321, 326, 329 
 Father-complex, 70, 75, 78-80 
 Ferenczi, 12, 34, 36, 164, 231, 
 
 233, 270, 274, 277, 278, 
 
 325, 328 
 
 Fetishism, 16, 22 
 Fixation, 25, 26, 31, 33, 58, 
 
 61, 87, 179, 205, 207, 208, 
 
 211, 216, 224, 234, 236, 
 
 258, 294, 304, 307 
 Flatus, 134, 143
 
 Index 
 
 335 
 
 Fliess, 184, 190, 296 
 Fore-pleasure, 188, 190 
 Forgetting, 16, 72, 100, 127, 
 
 149 
 Free association, 22, 99, 110, 
 
 129, 193, 194, 202, 204 
 Freud, 11, 13-42, 45-47, 49, 
 52-57, 59-66, 71-73, 76, 80, 
 85, 86, 90-92, 96-99, 101- 
 103, 106-115, 117, 124, 125, 
 128-132, 136-141, 144, 150, 
 154-156, 184, 187, 191, 200, 
 202, 207, 211, 213-217, 
 220-225, 230-237, 248, 254- 
 257, 259, 264, 275, 276, 
 292, 294, 296, 297, 301, 
 306, 307, 313, 319-322, 329 
 Functional symbolism, 261, 266 
 
 Gesture, 42, 151, 217, 225, 
 226, 228, 229, 234, 235, 
 241 
 
 Grandiose delusions, 155, 165, 
 217, 270, 286, 288 
 
 Gross, Otto, 39 
 
 Hallucinations, 21, 44, 96, 137- 
 139, 141, 145, 149, 156, 
 189, 204, 205, 214, 221- 
 223, 291 
 
 Hate, 19, 21, 36, 39, 41, 42, 
 44, 48, 49, 63, 64, 78, 175, 
 182, 246, 247, 258-260, 287, 
 297, 306 
 
 Heredity, 28, 319 
 
 Hirschfield, 303 
 
 Homo-erotism, 253, 318 
 
 Homosexuality, 20, 43, 65, 75, 
 91, 134, 143, 156, 157, 161, 
 162, 167, 169, 170, 175, 
 176, 179, 182, 184, 200, 209, 
 289-292, 294, 296-300, 306, 
 311, 316 
 
 Hostility: See Hate. 
 
 Hyperaesthesia, 14, 188 
 
 Hypnagogic, 21 
 
 Hypnotism, 54, 55, 58-60, 63, 
 64, 67-77, 80, 83-88, 91, 
 92, 305 
 
 Hypochondria, 14, 30, 82, 270, 
 271, 282-285, 323, 328 
 
 Hysteria, 35, 36, 46, 54, 66, 
 73, 75, 83, 86, 108, 130, 
 133, 143, 177, 185, 194, 
 196, 210, 211, 234, 235 
 
 Ibsen, 20, 21 
 
 Ideational identity, 223 
 
 Identification, 37, 52, 74, 77, 
 117, 176, 191, 275-277, 
 280, 326 
 
 Idiosyncrasy, 38, 66 
 
 Ignotus, 18 
 
 Imitation, 225, 229, 241, 245 
 
 Impotence, 12, 13, 15, 22, 26, 
 27, 31-34, 51, 61, 114, 123, 
 161 
 
 Incest, 31, 33, 34, 61, 80, 87, 
 107, 136, 148, 185, 186, 
 259, 293, 294. 
 
 Infantile, 15, 19, 20, 23, 25-29, 
 31, 32, 65, 70, 71, 73, 82, 
 84, 86-89, 91, 93, 107, 108, 
 111, 136, 143-146, 151-153, 
 175, 176, 185, 199, 200, 
 206, 207, 211, 224, 257, 
 
 258, 274, 277, 305, 308, 
 325 
 
 Infantile memories, 33, 70, 84, 
 
 90, 101, 108, 110 
 Inferiority, 28, 146, 231 
 Inhibition, 33, 114, 125, 133, 
 
 136, 144, 147, 149, 201, 
 
 235, 261, 317 
 Interpretation, 88, 95-97, 99, 
 
 101, 102, 114-117, 121, 
 
 124-126, 129, 161, 197, 248, 
 
 259, 262-267, 270, 274, 294, 
 331 
 
 Intra-uterine, 83, 218-222, 232, 
 238
 
 Index 
 
 Introjection, 47, 49-53, 55, 57, 
 
 226, 322 
 Inversion, 299-306, 311, 313 
 
 Jealousy, 44, 65, 74, 80, 159- 
 
 166, 168 
 Jokes, 115, 137, 141, 151. See 
 
 also: Wit. 
 
 Jones, Ernest, 93, 307, 325 
 Jung, 13, 47, 51, 52, 61, 78, 
 
 82, 83, 87, 177, 278 
 
 Kartch-Haack, 299 
 Keller, 304 
 
 Kleinpaul, 49, 151, 229 
 Kleptomania, 39 
 
 Latency period, 144-149, 233, 
 
 236 
 Latent dream content, 99, 100, 
 
 109, 113, 136 
 Lesring, 317 
 
 Maeder, 155, 156 
 
 Manifest dream content, 99, 
 113, 118, 120 
 
 Masochism, 16, 75, 81, 108, 271 
 
 Masturbation, 13, 23, 50, 73, 
 122, 168, 185, 186, 188, 
 192, 198, 208. See also: 
 Onanism. 
 
 Megalomania, 117, 219, 231, 
 285. See also: Omnipo- 
 tence. 
 
 Memories, 16, 75, 90, 100, 134, 
 137, 149, 196, 204, 242. 
 See also: Infantile mem- 
 ories. 
 
 Memory images, 22, 118, 120, 
 137, 139 
 
 Memory traces, 15, 32, 138, 
 219", 255, 303 
 
 Mental conflict, 32, 56. See 
 also: Psychical conflict. 
 
 Mereschkovszky, 78 
 
 Micturition: See Urine. 
 
 Miserliness, 320, 328 
 
 Money, 45, 319-321, 326, 331 
 Mother-complex, 75 
 Mouth-eroti jin : See Oral erot- 
 ism. 
 Muthmann. 12 
 
 Naecke, 297 
 
 Narcissism, 167, 205, 233, 234, 
 289, 297, 298, 301, 305. 
 See also: Megalomania. 
 
 Negativism, 80, 87, 291 
 
 Neurasthenia, 34, 130, 186-191 
 
 Neurosis, 23, 32, 35, 36, 41, 
 45-47, 51, 77, 82-85, 98, 
 111, 122, 130, 154, 184, 
 186, 192, 212, 213, 216, 
 231, 234, 235 255, 303, 307, 
 312, 313, 317, 318 
 
 Nietzsche, 70 
 
 Nuclear complex, 136, 258, 
 265 
 
 Nymphomania, 170 
 
 Obedience, 32, 71, 77, 80, 81, 93 
 Object-erotism, 234 
 Object-love, 49, 65, 67, 74, 77, 
 
 185, 208, 234, 298, 300, 
 
 302, 306, 315, 321 
 Obscene, 105, 132-138, 14O-145, 
 
 149-153, 160 
 Obsession, 25, 99, 192, 202, 
 
 203, 209, 215, 216, 306 
 Obsessional, 50, 130, 202, 215, 
 
 216, 231, 274, 306, 307, 
 
 310-317, 318 
 Obsessional neurosis, 46, 185, 
 
 218, 234, 235, 303, 306, 
 
 312, 318 
 Obsessive, 17, 25, 54, 150, 152, 
 
 271, 306, 316 
 Odour: See Smell. 
 CEdipus complex, 26, 41, 91, 
 
 136, 235, 258, 259, 297, 
 
 307, 310 
 Omnipotence, 77, 215-219, 228, 
 
 225, 227-235, 238, 231, 371. 
 
 See also: Megalomania.
 
 Index 
 
 337 
 
 Onanism, 32, 185, 192, 208, 
 209, 250, 251, 271, 272. 
 See also: Masturbation. 
 
 Ontozenesis, 48, 138, 238, 276, 
 277, 319, 330 
 
 Oral erotism, 16, 108, 189 
 
 Over-determined, 197 
 
 Paederastia, 291, 310, 317 
 
 Paraesthesia, 14, 19, 34, 186, 
 198, 284 
 
 Paralysis, 75, 84, 130, 195, 
 196, 200 
 
 Paranoia, 47, 65, 130, 154-157, 
 159, 162, 167, 170, 175, 
 177, 179, 183, 184, 233, 
 234, 282, 285, 289-294, 297 
 
 Paraphrenia, 234, 282, 285, 
 292, 298. See also: De- 
 mentia praecox. 
 
 Parent, 40, 42, 60-65, 67, 69, 
 77, 81-84, 87, 91, 93, 102, 
 116, 135, 136, 143, 151, 
 
 265, 266, 273, 274, 276, 
 281, 307, 308, 310 
 
 Pathogenesis, 28, 129, 157 
 Pavor nocturnus, 107, 245 
 Perception, 138, 140, 175, 206, 
 217, 230, 256, 258, 272, 
 284 
 
 Perceptual identity, 138, 223 
 Persecution: See Delusions of 
 
 persecution. 
 Perseveration, 237 
 Perversions, 107, 108, 132, 144, 
 150, 178, 180, 181, 298, 
 299 313 
 
 Phantasy, 14, 16, 18-20, 23, 
 26, 33-36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 
 47, 52, 73, 82, 83, 90, 92, 
 118, 122, 144, 146, 148, 
 175-178, 185, 187-189, 191, 
 192, 196, 198-200, 204, 
 205, 211, 213, 217, 232, 
 238, 245, 251, 255, 256, 261, 
 
 266, 269-271. 274, 288, 291, 
 307-310 
 
 Phylogenesis, 236, 238, 277 
 Pleasure principle, 213, 218, 
 
 223, 232, 233, 255, 262, 
 
 269, 331 
 
 Preconscious, 31, 64 
 Predisposition, 28, 33, 85 
 Presentation, 42, 121, 124, 125, 
 
 131, 239 
 Projection, 48, 49, 92, 154, 175, 
 
 177, 183, 216, 227, 232, 
 
 233, 259 
 
 Prophylactic, 29, 34 
 Psychical conflict, 12, 96. See 
 
 also: Mental conflict. 
 Psychogenesis, 214 
 Psychoneurosis, 11, 14, 16, 20, 
 
 24, 32, 34, 46, 52, 54-57, 
 
 60, 61, 76, 83-85, 97, 99, 
 
 104, 128, 130, 152, 163, 
 
 186, 187, 282, 313 
 Psychopathology, 49, 200 
 Psycho-sexual, 16, 21, 24, 25, 
 
 27, 29, 31-34, 46, 61 
 Puberty, 24, 27-30, 122, 135, 
 
 146. 149, 272, 308 
 
 Rank, Otto, 191, 264-266, 278 
 
 Rationalism, 293, 323 
 
 Reaction-formation, 36, 51, 
 53, 66, 88, 148, 231, 247, 
 251, 310, 315, 324, 331 
 
 Reality principle, 218, 255, 
 261, 262, 269, 331 
 
 Reflex-arc, 15 
 
 Regression, 137, 140, 145, 153, 
 205-207, 209, 224, 225, 234- 
 237 
 
 Reminiscence, 70, 71. See also: 
 Memories. 
 
 Representation, 83, 138, 148, 
 195, 205, 213, 223, 228, 
 229, 262, 267, 276, 277 
 
 Repression, 16, 24, 33, 40, 56, 
 90, 100, 107, 134, 143, 148, 
 203, 204, 210-213, 217, 235- 
 237, 248, 255, 258, 259,
 
 338 
 
 Index 
 
 262, 272, 275, 280, 296, 
 302, 313, 314, 317, 322. 
 
 Resistences, 57, 62, 63, 87, 133, 
 134, 256 
 
 Respect, 26, 63, 65, 72, 135 
 
 Reversals 309 
 
 Riklin, 238 
 
 Sachs, Hang, 227, 278 
 Sadger, 61, 179, 297, 307 
 Sadism, 16, 108, 307 
 Schopenhauer, 253, 262, 269 
 Sexual hunger, 25, 39, 45, 46, 
 48, 57, 61, 64, 66, 73, 78, 
 87, 156, 184, 187-190, 212, 
 235, 243, 266, 289, 296, 
 302, 303, 308, 315 
 Sexual intercourse: See Coitus. 
 Shame, 31, 100, 133, 134, 144, 
 
 151, 271 
 Silbertr, 207, 217, 261, 266, 
 
 277 
 Smell, 79, 143, 160, 205, 305, 
 
 322, 324, 325, 327 
 Somatic, 194, 195, 263 
 Somnambulism, 76 
 Sperber, 229 
 Steiner, 13, 25 
 Stekel, 13, 25, 39, 40 
 Stimulation, 84 
 Sublimation, 66, 70, 73, 162, 
 
 163, 169, 176, 182, 184, 
 206-209, 245, 305, 314, 315, 
 
 323, 324, 328 
 
 Subsequentness, 20, 76, 310 
 Substitution, 45, 46, 154, 185, 
 
 307 310 
 
 Suggestion, 31, 34, 54, 58-60, 
 62, 64, 67-69, 71, 75, 77, 
 81, 83-86, 88, 90-93, 154, 
 181, 305 
 
 Symbol, 53, 96, 99, 104, 108, 
 114, 124, 179, 192, 202, 
 264, 266, 272-278, 280, 281, 
 319, 321-323, 326, 327, 329, 
 330 331 
 
 Symbolism, 37, 108, 122-124, 
 
 191, 192, 229, 253, 381, 
 
 266, 270, 273-275, 278, 280, 
 
 319 
 Sympathy, 21, 43, 62, 65, 66, 
 
 73, 86 
 
 Symptom-complex, 14, 88 
 Symptom-formation, 111, 197, 
 
 198, 201, 211, 212, 235 
 
 Transference, 35-42, 45, 47, 
 49, 50, 51, 55, 58, 63, 65, 
 67, 72-74, 79, 80, 85, 87, 
 89, 154, 161, 168, 193, 198, 
 208, 211, 219, 247, 287, 
 309 
 
 Transference-improvement, 
 287 
 
 Trauma, 12, 33 
 
 Traumatophilia, 305 
 
 Typical dreams, 106 
 
 Unconscious, The, 18, 22, 31, 
 36, 37, 40-43, 53, 55, 58, 
 61, 62, 65, 71, 72, 82, 86, 
 97, 107, 129, 138, 227, 262, 
 265, 276, 278 
 
 Unconscious wishes, 17, 27, 
 32, 47, 65, 104, 232 
 
 Unpleasantness principle, 5(5, 
 64, 65, 255 
 
 Urethral, 108, 208, 209 
 
 Urine, 20, 110, 206, 207, 279, 
 323 
 
 Urning, 305 
 
 Voyeur, 16, 150 
 
 Wagner, 49 
 
 Wish-fulfilment, 18, 101-103, 
 
 108, 109, 112, 113, 206, 
 
 216, 222-224 
 Wit, 42, 71, 115, 124, 140, 255. 
 
 See also: Jokes. 
 Womb: See Tntra-uterine. 
 Word-association, 177 
 
 Yawning, 209, 210 
 
 Zone: See Erogenous zone.
 
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