A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis

I Will say at once that it is not an intellectual difficulty I am thinking of, not
anything that makes psycho-analysis hard for the hearer or reader to understand,
but an affective one— something that alienates the feelings of those who come
into contact with it, so that they become less inclined to believe in it or take an
interest in it. As will be observed, the two kinds of difficulty amount to the same
thing in the end. Where sympathy is lacking, understanding will not come very
easily.
My present readers, I take it, have not so far had anything to do with the
subject and I shall be obliged, therefore, to go back some distance. Out of a
great number of individual observations and impressions something in the nature
of a theory has at last shaped itself in psycho-analysis, and this is known by the
name of the ‘libido theory’. As is well known, psycho-analysis is concerned
with the elucidation and removal of what are called nervous disorders. A
starting-point had to be found from which to approach this problem, and it was
decided to look for it in the instinctual life of the mind. Hypotheses about the
instincts in man came to form the basis, therefore, of our conception of nervous
disease.
Psychology as it is taught academically gives us but very inadequate replies
to questions concerning our mental life, but in no direction is its information so
meagre as in this matter of the instincts.
It is open to us to make our first soundings as we please. The popular view
distinguishes between hunger and love, as being the representatives of the
instincts which aim respectively at the preservation of the individual and at the
reproduction of the species. We accept this very evident distinction, so that in
psycho-analysis too we make a distinction between the self-preservative or ego-
instincts on the one hand and the sexual instincts on the other. The force by
which the sexual instinct is represented in the mind we call ‘libido’—sexual
desire—and we regard it as something analogous to hunger, the will to power,
and so on, where the ego-instincts are concerned.
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 With this as a starting-point we go on to make our first important discovery.
We learn that, when we try to understand neurotic disorders, by far the greater
significance attaches to the sexual instincts; that in fact neuroses are the specific
disorders, so to speak, of the sexual function; that in general whether or not a
person develops a neurosis depends on the quantity of his libido, and on the
possibility of satisfying it and of discharging it through satisfaction; that the form
taken by the disease is determined by the way in which the individual passes
through the course of development of his sexual function, or, as we put it, by the
fixations his libido has undergone in the course of its development; and, further,
that by a special, not very simple technique for influencing the mind we are able
to throw light on the nature of some groups of neuroses and at the same time to
do away with them. Our therapeutic efforts have their greatest success with a
certain class of neuroses which proceed from a conflict between the ego-
instincts and the sexual instincts. For in human beings it may happen that the
demands of the sexual instincts, whose reach of course extends far beyond the
individual, seem to the ego to constitute a danger which threatens its self-
preservation or its self-esteem. The ego then assumes the defensive, denies the
sexual instincts the satisfaction they desire and forces them into those by-paths
of substitutive satisfaction which become manifest as nervous symptoms.
The psycho-analytic method of treatment is then able to subject this process
of repression to revision and to bring about a better solution of the conflict—one
that is compatible with health. Unintelligent opposition accuses us of one-
sidedness in our estimate of the sexual instincts. ‘Human beings have other
interests besides sexual ones,’ they say. We have not forgotten or denied this for
a moment. Our one-sidedness is like that of the chemist, who traces all
compounds back to the force of chemical attraction. He is not on that account
denying the force of gravity; he leaves that to the physicist to deal with.
During the work of treatment we have to consider the distribution of the
patient's libido; we look for the object-presentations to which it is bound and
free it from them, so as to place it at the disposal of the ego. In the course of this,
we have come to form a very curious picture of the original, primal distribution
of libido in human beings. We have been driven to assume that at the beginning
of the development of the individual
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 all his libido (all his crotic tendencies, all his capacity for love) is tied to
himself—that as we say, it cathccts his own ego. It is only later that, being
attached to the satisfaction of the major vital needs, the libido flows over from
the ego on to external objects. Not till then are we able to recognize the libidinal
instincts as such and distinguish them from the ego-instincts. It is possible for the
libido to become detached from these objects and withdrawn again into the ego.
The condition in which the ego retains the libido is called by us ‘narcissism’,
in reference to the Greek legend of the youth Narcissus who was in love with his
own reflection.
Thus in our view the individual advances from narcissism to object-love. But
we do not believe that the whole of the libido ever passes over from the ego to
objects. A certain quantity of libido is always retained in the ego; even when
object-love is highly developed, a certain amount of narcissism persists. The
ego is a great reservoir from which the libido that is destined for objects flows
out and into which it flows back from those objects. Object-libido was at first
ego-libido and can be transformed back into ego-libido. For complete health it
is essential that the libido should not lose this full mobility. As an illustration of
this state of things we may think of an amoeba, whose viscous substance puts out
pseudopodia, elongations into which the substance of the body extends but
which can be retracted at any time so that the form of the protoplasmic mass is
restored.
What I have been trying to describe in this outline is the libido theory of the
neuroses, upon which are founded all our conceptions of the nature of these
morbid states, together with our therapeutic measures for relieving them. We
naturally regard the premises of the libido theory as valid for normal behaviour
as well. We speak of the narcissism of small children, and it is to the excessive
narcissism of primitive man that we ascribe his belief in the omnipotence of his
thoughts and his consequent attempts to influence the course of events in the
external world by the technique of magic.
After this introduction I propose to describe how the universal narcissism of
men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the
researches of science.
(a) In the early stages of his researches, man believed at first that his
dwelling-place, the earth, was the stationary centre of the universe, with the sun,
moon and planets circling round it.
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 In this he was naïvely following the dictates of his sense-perceptions, for he felt
no movement of the earth, and wherever he had an unimpeded view he found
himself in the centre of a circle that enclosed the external world. The central
position of the earth, moreover, was a token to him of the dominating part played
by it in the universe and appeared to fit in very well with his inclination to
regard himself as lord of the world.
The destruction of this narcissistic illusion is associated in our minds with
the name and work of Copernicus in the sixteenth century. But long before his
day the Pythagorcans had already cast doubts on the privileged position of the
earth, and in the third century B.C. Aristarchus of Samos had declared that the
earth was much smaller than the sun and moved round that celestial body. Even
the great discovery of Copernicus, therefore, had already been made before him.
When this discovery achieved general recognition, the self-love of mankind
suffered its first blow, the cosmological one.
(b) In the course of the development of civilization man acquired a
dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not
content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his
nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he
attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which
permitted him to break the bond of community between him and the animal
kingdom. Curiously enough, this piece of arrogance is still foreign to children,
just as it is to primitive and primaeval man. It is the result of a later, more
pretentious stage of development. At the level of totemism primitive man had no
repugnance to tracing his descent from an animal ancestor. In myths, which
contain the precipitate of this ancient attitude of mind, the gods take animal
shapes, and in the art of earliest times they are portrayed with animals’ heads. A
child can see no difference between his own nature and that of animals. He is
not astonished at animals thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer an
emotion of fear which he feels for his human father onto a dog or a horse,
without intending any derogation of his father by it. Not until he is grown up
does he become so far estranged from animals as to use their names in
vilification of human beings.
We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches of Charles
Darwin and his collaborators and fore-runners
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 put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different
from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more
closely related to some species and more distantly to others. The acquisitions he
has subsequently made have not succeeded in effacing the evidences, both in his
physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them. This
was the second, the biological blow to human narcissism.
(c) The third blow, which is psychological in nature, is probably the most
wounding.
Although thus humbled in his external relations, man feels himself to be
supreme within his own mind. Somewhere in the nucleus of his ego he has
developed an organ of observation to keep a watch on his impulses and actions
and see whether they harmonize with its demands. If they do not, they are
ruthlessly inhibited and withdrawn. His internal perception, consciousness,
gives the ego news of all the important occurrences in the mind's working, and
the will, directed by these reports, carries out what the ego orders and modifies
anything that seeks to accomplish itself spontaneously. For this mind is not a
simple thing; on the contrary, it is a hierarchy of superordinated and
subordinated agencies, a labyrinth of impulses striving independently of one
another towards action, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts and of
relations with the external world, many of which are antagonistic to one another
and incompatible. For proper functioning it is necessary that the highest of these
agencies should have knowledge of all that is going forward and that its will
should penetrate everywhere, so as to exert its influence. And in fact the ego
feels secure both as to the completeness and trustworthiness of the reports it
receives and as to the openness of the channels through which it enforces its
commands.
In certain diseases—including the very neuroses of which we have made
special study—things are different. The ego feels uneasy; it comes up against
limits to its power in its own house, the mind. Thoughts emerge suddenly
without one's knowing where they come from, nor can one do anything to drive
them away. These alien guests even seem to be more powerful than those which
are at the ego's command. They resist all the well-proved measures of
enforcement used by the will, remain unmoved by logical refutation, and are
unaffected
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 by the contradictory assertions of reality. Or else impulses appear which seem
like those of a stranger, so that the ego disowns them; yet it has to fear them and
take precautions against them. The ego says to itself: ‘This is an illness, a
foreign invasion.’ It increases its vigilance, but cannot understand why it feels
so strangely paralysed.
Psychiatry, it is true, denies that such things mean the intrusion into the mind
of evil spirits from without; beyond this, however, it can only say with a shrug:
‘Degeneracy, hereditary disposition, constitutional inferiority!’ Psycho-analysis
sets out to explain these uncanny disorders; it engages in careful and laborious
investigations, devises hypotheses and scientific constructions, until at length it
can speak thus to the ego:—
‘Nothing has entered into you from without; a part of the activity of your own
mind has been withdrawn from your knowledge and from the command of your
will. That, too, is why you are so weak in your defence; you are using one part
of your force to fight the other part and you cannot concentrate the whole of your
force as you would against an external enemy. And it is not even the worst or
least important part of your mental forces that has thus become antagonistic to
you and independent of you. The blame, I am bound to say, lies with yourself.
You over-estimated your strength when you thought you could treat your sexual
instincts as you liked and could utterly ignore their intentions. The result is that
they have rebelled and have taken their own obscure paths to escape this
suppression; they have established their rights in a manner you cannot approve.
How they have achieved this, and the paths which they have taken, have not
come to your knowledge. All you have learned is the outcome of their work—
the symptom which you experience as suffering. Thus you do not recognize it as
a derivative of your own rejected instincts and do not know that it is a
substitutive satisfaction of them.
‘The whole process, however, only becomes possible through the single
circumstance that you are mistaken in another important point as well. You feel
sure that you are informed of all that goes on in your mind if it is of any
importance at all, because in that case, you believe, your consciousness gives
you news of it. And if you have had no information of something in your mind
you confidently assume that it does not exist there. Indeed, you go so far as to
regard what is “mental” as identical
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 with what is “conscious”—that is, with what is known to you— in spite of the
most obvious evidence that a great deal more must constantly be going on in
your mind than can be known to your consciousness. Come, let yourself be taught
something on this one point! What is in your mind does not coincide with what
you are conscious of; whether something is going on in your mind and whether
you hear of it, are two different things. In the ordinary way, I will admit, the
intelligence which reaches your consciousness is enough for your needs; and you
may cherish the illusion that you learn of all the more important things. But in
some cases, as in that of an instinctual conflict such as I have described, your
intelligence service breaks down and your will then extends no further than your
knowledge. In every case, however, the news that reaches your consciousness is
incomplete and often not to be relied on. Often enough, too, it happens that you
get news of events only when they are over and when you can no longer do
anything to change them. Even if you are not ill, who can tell all that is stirring in
your mind of which you know nothing or are falsely informed? You behave like
an absolute ruler who is content with the information supplied him by his highest
officials and never goes among the people to hear their voice. Turn your eyes
inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will
understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps, you will avoid falling
ill in future.’
It is thus that psycho-analysis has sought to educate the ego. But these two
discoveries—that the life of our sexual instincts cannot be wholly tamed, and
that mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and
come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions—these
two discoveries amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own
house. Together they represent the third blow to man's self-love, what I may call
the psychological one. No wonder, then, that the ego does not look favourably
upon psycho-analysis and obstinately refuses to believe in it.
Probably very few people can have realized the momentous significance for
science and life of the recognition of unconscious mental processes. It was not
psycho-analysis, however, let us hasten to add, which first took this step. There
are famous philosophers who may be cited as forerunners—above all the great
thinker Schopenhauer, whose unconscious ‘Will’ is equivalent
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 to the mental instincts of psycho-analysis. It was this same thinker, moreover,
who in words of unforgettable impressiveness admonished mankind of the
importance, still so greatly under-estimated by it, of its sexual craving1. Psycho-
analysis has this advantage only, that it has not affirmed these two propositions
which are so distressing to narcissism—the psychical importance of sexuality
and the unconsciousness of mental life —on an abstract basis, but has
demonstrated them in matters that touch every individual personally and force
him to take up some attitude towards these problems. It is just for this reason,
however, that it brings on itself the aversion and resistances which still hold
back in awe before the great name of the philosopher.
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1 [This last allusion is almost certainly to a passage in Schopenhauer's The
World as Will and Idea (first published 1819), an extract from which will be
found quoted in an Editor's Appendix, Standard Edition, 19,223-4. The
Appendix also lists further references in Freud's works to this view of
Schopenhauer's.

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 Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Freud, S. (1917). A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis. The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume
XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 135-144

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