The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud

      EIGHTEENTH LECTURE

       GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES

       TRAUMATIC FIXATION — THE UNCONSCIOUS

       Table of Contents

      I said last time that we would not continue our work from the standpoint of our doubts, but on the basis of our results. We have not even touched upon two of the most interesting conclusions, derived equally from the same two sample analyses.

      In the first place, both patients give us the impression of being fixated upon some very definite part of their past; they are unable to free themselves therefrom, and have therefore come to be completely estranged both from the present and the future. They are now isolated in their ailment, just as in earlier days people withdrew into monasteries there to carry along the burden of their unhappy fates. In the case of the first patient, it is her marriage with her husband, really abandoned, that has determined her lot. By means of her symptoms she continues to deal with her husband; we have learned to understand those voices which plead his case, which excuse him, exalt him, lament his loss. Although she is young and might be coveted by other men, she has seized upon all manner of real and imaginary (magic) precautions to safeguard her virtue for him. She will not appear before strangers, she neglects her personal appearance; furthermore, she cannot bring herself to get up readily from any chair on which she has been seated. She refuses to give her signature, and finally, since she is motivated by her desire not to let anyone have anything of hers, she is unable to give presents.

      In the case of the second patient, the young girl, it is an erotic attachment for her father that had established itself in the years prior to puberty, which plays the same role in her life. She also has arrived at the conclusion that she may not marry so long as she is sick. We may suspect she became ill in order that she need not marry, and that she might stay with her father.

      It is impossible to evade the question of how, in what manner, and driven by what motives, an individual may come by such a remarkable and unprofitable attitude toward life. Granted of course that this bearing is a general characteristic of neurosis, and not a special peculiarity of these two cases, it is nevertheless a general trait in every neurosis of very great importance in practice. Breuer’s first hysterical patient was fixated in the same manner upon the time when she nursed her very sick father. In spite of her recuperation she has, in certain respects, since that time, been done with life; although she remained healthy and able, she did not enter on the normal life of women. In every one of our patients we may see, by the use of analysis, that in his disease-symptoms and their results he has gone back again into a definite period of his past. In the majority of cases he even chooses a very early phase of his life, sometime a childhood phase, indeed, laughable as it may appear, a phase of his very suckling existence.

      The closest analogies to these conditions of our neurotics are furnished by the types of sickness which the war has just now made so frequent — the so-called traumatic neuroses. Even before the war there were such cases after railroad collisions and other frightful occurrences which endangered life. The traumatic neuroses are, fundamentally, not the same as the spontaneous neuroses which we have been analysing and treating; moreover, we have not yet succeeded in bringing them within our hypotheses, and I hope to be able to make clear to you wherein this limitation lies. Yet on one point we may emphasize the existence of a complete agreement between the two forms. The traumatic neuroses show clear indications that they are grounded in a fixation upon the moment of the traumatic disaster. In their dreams these patients regularly live over the traumatic situation; where there are attacks of an hysterical type, which permit of an analysis, we learn that the attack approximates a complete transposition into this situation. It is as if these patients had not yet gotten through with the traumatic situation, as if it were actually before them as a task which was not yet mastered. We take this view of the matter in all seriousness; it shows the way to an economic view of psychic occurrences. For the expression “traumatic” has no other than an economic meaning, and the disturbance permanently attacks the management of available energy. The traumatic experience is one which, in a very short space of time, is able to increase the strength of a given stimulus so enormously that its assimilation, or rather its elaboration, can no longer be effected by normal means.

      This analogy tempts us to classify as traumatic those experiences as well upon which our neurotics appear to be fixated. Thus the possibility is held out to us of having found a simple determining factor for the neurosis. It would then be comparable to a traumatic disease, and would arise from the inability to meet an overpowering emotional experience. As a matter of fact this reads like the first formula, by which Breuer and I, in 1893–1895, accounted theoretically for our new observations. A case such as that of our first patient, the young woman separated from her husband, is very well explained by this conception. She was not able to get over the unfeasibility of her marriage, and has not been able to extricate herself from this trauma. But our very next, that of the girl attached to her father, shows us that the formula is not sufficiently comprehensive. On the one hand, such baby love of a little girl for her father is so usual, and so often outlived that the designation “traumatic” would carry no significance; on the other hand, the history of the patient teaches us that this first erotic fixation apparently passed by harmlessly at the time, and did not again appear until many years later in the symptoms of the compulsion neurosis. We see complications before us, the existence of a greater wealth of determining factors in the disease, but we also suspect that the traumatic viewpoint will not have to be given up as wrong; rather it will have to subordinate itself when it is fitted into a different context.

      Here again we must leave the road we have been traveling. For the time being, it leads us no further and we have many other things to find out before we can go on again. But before we leave this subject let us note that the fixation on some particular phase of the past has bearings which extend far beyond the neurosis. Every neurosis contains such a fixation, but every fixation does not lead to a neurosis, nor fall into the same class with neuroses, nor even set the conditions for the development of a neurosis. Mourning is a type of emotional fixation on a theory of the past, which also brings with it the most complete alienation from the present and the future. But mourning is sharply distinguished from neuroses that may be designated as pathological forms of mourning.

      It also happens that men are brought to complete deadlock by a traumatic experience that has so completely shaken the foundations on which they have built their lives that they give up all interest in the present and future, and become completely absorbed in their retrospections; but these unhappy persons are not necessarily neurotic. We must not overestimate this one feature as a diagnostic for a neurosis, no matter how invariable and potent it may be.

      Now let us turn to the second conclusion of our analysis, which however we will hardly need to limit subsequently. We have spoken of the senseless compulsive activities