Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

by Sigmund Freud

our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are residues and mnemic symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences.

At another point in the same town, not far from London Bridge, you will find a towering, and more modern, column, which is simply known as ‘The Monument’. It was designed as a memorial of the Great Fire, which broke out in that neighbourhood in 1666 and destroyed a large part of the city. These monuments, then, resemble hysterical symptoms in being mnemic symbols; up to that point the comparison seems justifiable.

Not only do they remember painful experiences of the remote past, but they still cling to them emotionally; they cannot get free of the past and for its sake they neglect what is real and immediate. This fixation of mental life to pathogenic traumas is one of the most significant and practically important characteristics of neurosis.

In the first place, it must be emphasized that Breuer’s patient, in almost all her pathogenic situations, was obliged to suppress a powerful emotion instead of allowing its discharge in the appropriate signs of emotion, words or actions.

One was driven to assume that the illness occurred because the affects generated in the pathogenic situations had their normal outlet blocked, and that the essence of the illness lay in the fact that these ‘strangulated’ affects were then put to an abnormal use.

and in part they underwent a transformation into unusual somatic innervations and inhibitions, which manifested themselves as the physical symptoms of the case. For this latter process we coined the term ‘hysterical conversion’.

emotionally cathected mental process; it represents a far more intense expression of the emotions, which has entered upon a new path. When the bed of a stream is divided into two channels, then, if the current in one of them is brought up against an obstacle, the other will at once be overfilled. As you see, we are on the point of arriving at a purely psychological theory of hysteria, with affective processes in the front rank.

A second observation of Breuer’s, again, compels us to attach great importance, among the characteristics of the pathological chain of events, to states of consciousness. Breuer’s patient exhibited, alongside of her normal state, a number of mental peculiarities: conditions of ‘absence’, confusion, and alterations of character. In her normal state she knew nothing of the pathogenic scenes or their connection with her symptoms; she had forgotten the scenes, or at all events had severed the pathogenic link.

can be several mental groupings, which can remain more or less independent of one another, which can ‘know nothing’ of one another and which can alternate with one another in their hold upon consciousness. Cases of this kind, too, occasionally appear spontaneously, and are then described as examples of ‘double conscience’.¹ If, where a splitting of the personality such as this has occurred, consciousness remains attached regularly to one of the two states, we call it the conscious mental state and the other, which is detached from it, the unconscious one.

Wherever there is a symptom there is also an amnesia, a gap in the memory, and filling up this gap implies the removal of the conditions which led to the production of the symptom.

You will find in Janet a theory of hysteria which takes into account the prevailing views in France on the part played by heredity and degeneracy. According to him, hysteria is a form of degenerate modification of the nervous system, which shows itself in an innate weakness in the power of psychical synthesis. Hysterical patients, he believes, are inherently incapable of holding together the multiplicity of mental processes into a unity, and hence arises the tendency to mental dissociation.

In that way I succeeded, without using hypnosis, in obtaining from the patients whatever was required for establishing the connection between the pathogenic scenes they had forgotten and the symptoms left over from those scenes. But it was a laborious procedure, and in the long run an exhausting one; and it was unsuited to serve as a permanent technique.

The force which was maintaining the pathological condition became apparent in the form of resistance on the part of the patient.

All these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of this internal struggle was that the idea which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable wish fell a victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with all its attached memories, and was forgotten. Thus the incompatibility of the wish in question with the patient’s ego was the motive for the repression; the subject’s ethical and other standards were the repressing forces. An acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have produced a high degree of unpleasure; this unpleasure was avoided by means of repression, which was thus revealed as one of the devices serving to protect the mental personality.

Let us suppose that in this lecture-room and among this audience, whose exemplary quiet and attentiveness I cannot sufficiently commend, there is nevertheless someone who is causing a disturbance and whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention from my task. I have to announce that I cannot proceed with my lecture; and thereupon three or four of you who are strong men stand up and, after a short struggle, put the interrupter outside the door. So now he is ‘repressed’, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the interruption shall not be repeated, in case the individual who has been expelled should try to enter the room once more, the gentlemen who have put my will into effect place their chairs up against the door and thus establish a ‘resistance’ after the repression has been accomplished.

Metaphor for repression and resistance

You will now see in what it is that the difference lies between our view and Janet’s. We do not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for synthesis on the part of the mental apparatus; we explain it dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces and recognize it as the outcome of an active struggling on the part of the two psychical groupings against each other.

his shouting and banging on the door with his fists interfere with my lecture even more than his bad behaviour did before. In these circumstances we could not fail to be delighted if our respected president, Dr. Stanley Hall, should be willing to assume the role of mediator and peacemaker. He would have a talk with the unruly person outside and would then come to us with a request that he should be re-admitted after all: he himself would guarantee that the man would now behave better. On Dr. Hall’s authority we decide to lift the repression, and peace and quiet are restored. This presents what is really no bad picture of the physician’s task in the psycho-analytic treatment of the neuroses.

To put the matter more directly. The investigation of hysterical patients and of other neurotics leads us to the conclusion that their repression of the idea to which the intolerable wish is attached has been a failure. It is true that they have driven it out of consciousness and out of memory and have apparently saved themselves a large amount of unpleasure. But the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious. It is on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute for what had been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the same feelings of unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by the repression. This substitute for the repressed idea - the symptom - is proof against further attacks from the defensive ego; and in place of the short conflict an ailment now appears which is not brought to an end by the passage of time.

Summary thus far

There are a number of such opportune solutions, which may bring the conflict and the neurosis to a happy end, and which may in certain instances be combined. The patient’s personality may be convinced that it has been wrong in rejecting the pathogenic wish and may be led into accepting it wholly or in part; or the wish itself may be directed to a higher and consequently unobjectionable aim (this is what we call its ‘sublimation’); or the rejection of the wish may be recognized as a justifiable one, but the automatic and therefore inefficient mechanism of repression may be replaced by a condemning judgement with the help of the highest human mental functions - conscious control of the wish is attained.

Solutions to a repressed idea

and was dissimilar to it in proportion to the degree of distortion it had undergone under the influence of the resistance. But, owing to its nature as a symptom, it must nevertheless have a certain similarity to what we were in search of; and if the resistance were not too great, we ought to be able to guess the latter from the former. The idea occurring to the patient must be in the nature of an allusion to the repressed element, like a representation of it in indirect speech.

We see, then, that if in our search for a repressed complex in one of our patients we start out from the last thing he remembers, we shall have every prospect of discovering the complex, provided that the patient puts a sufficient number of his free associations at our disposal. Accordingly, we allow the patient to say whatever he likes, and hold fast to the postulate that nothing can occur to him which is not in an indirect fashion dependent on the complex we are in search of.

But closer observation shows that such a stoppage of the flow of ideas never in fact occurs. It appears to happen only because the patient holds back or gets rid of the idea that he has become aware of, under the influence of the resistances which disguise themselves as various critical judgements about the value of the idea that has occurred to him. We can protect ourselves against this by warning him beforehand of this behaviour and requiring him to take no notice of such criticisms.

When we are awake we are in the habit of treating dreams with the same contempt with which patients regard the associations that are demanded of them by the psycho-analyst. We dismiss them, too, by forgetting them as a rule, quickly and completely. Our low opinion of them is based on the strange character even of those dreams that are not confused and meaningless, and on the obvious absurdity and nonsensicalness of other dreams. Our dismissal of them is related to the uninhibited shamelessness and immorality of the tendencies openly exhibited in some dreams.

If you inspect the dreams of very young children, from eighteen months upwards, you will find them perfectly simple and easy to explain. Small children always dream of the fulfilment of wishes that were aroused in them the day before but not satisfied. You will need no interpretative art in order to find this simple solution; all you need do is to enquire into the child’s experiences on the previous day (the ‘dream-day’).

Certainly the most satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams would be to find that adults’ dreams too were like those of children - fulfilments of wishful impulses that had come to them on the dream-day. And such in fact is the case.

The first and most serious objection is that the content of adults’ dreams is as a rule unintelligible and could not look more unlike the fulfilment of a wish. And here is the answer. Such dreams have been subjected to distortion; the psychical process underlying them might originally have been expressed in words quite differently.

The manifest content of the dream is the distorted substitute for the unconscious dream-thoughts and this distortion is the work of the ego’s forces of defence - of resistances. In waking life these resistances altogether prevent the repressed wishes of the unconscious from entering consciousness; and during the lowered state of sleep they are at least strong enough to oblige them to adopt a veil of disguise.