The Third Blow

In Sigmund Freud’s lecture series, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, the Austrian neurologist speaks on the three great scientific outrages that humanity has had to endure against its “naive self-love” (Lectures 284). He details the first as being Copernicus’ heliocentric model, the second being Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the third to be his own theory of psychoanalysis. The bulk of this outrage was disseminated by prevailing neurological thought, as turn of the century philosophical trends emphasized reason through empirical observation, inciting the application of strict analytical methodology towards clinical psychiatry. Such concepts led to new psychological theories that asserted the existence of a strict connection between mental illness and biological causes and began to incorporate the usage of disease classifications in the explanation of mental disorders. Sigmund Freud’s clash with this psychological status quo is symbolic of the larger confrontation with humanity’s stubborn psyche as he strived to prove that, rather than merely being rooted in organic factors, mental disorders are determined by subliminal processes and imbued with psychic meaning.

Freud’s first efforts in evaluating how individual symptoms of mental illness truly generate within a patient emanates from his early work in clinical research on hysteria. Through Freud’s 1895 sessions and analysis of Emma, a patient who suffered from symptoms of hysteria and hysterical repression, he recognized that such symptoms must arise not from biological causes, but from “special psychical determinants” (Emma 353). Moreover, he recognizes that he must consider “the special psychical determinant” from an angle of the “natural characteristics of sexuality” as symptoms, such as Emma’s hysteria, have only historically arisen in cases where a patient has experienced psychosexual trauma (Emma 353).

Emma was at first subject to the symptom of being unable to enter shops alone. This phobia was originally believed to have stemmed from an incident when she was 12 years old, in which she had entered a shop alone and ran away in fright after she saw two shop-assistants laughing at her. “In connection with this, she was led to recall that the two of them were laughing at her clothes and that one of them had pleased her sexually” (Emma 353). However, the fact that even a child’s company is enough to make her feel safe in a shop, and that her clothes are not a determinant in her present entering of shops, proves that this aroused memory is not the true explanation behind her hysteria nor the underlying determinants of her symptoms.

Nevertheless, analysis reveals that she had a previous, prepubescent experience with a shop-keeper that aids in understanding the affect of fright and resulting trauma at 12 years old. At eight years old she attempted to buy sweets from a shop, where she experienced the shop-keeper grabbing her genitals through her clothes. Despite the first incident of sexual assault, she chose to return to the store once more – a choice which she now reproached herself for, “as though she had wanted in that way to provoke the assault” (Emma 354). Despite Emma denying having this assault in mind during the later incident, associative links are established between the two scenes due to her being alone in both situations, as well as the laughter of the shop-assistants unconsciously reminding her of the grin of the shop-keeper. The associative process and memory of the assault then aroused a sexual release which was not something felt during the original experience of assault “because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered” (Emma 355). This sexual release transformed into a feeling of anxiety over the possibility of the shop-assistants repeating the assault, causing her to flee from the store.

Freud finds that Emma’s fear of assault and her phobia of being alone in stores is a rational construction given the associative process; however, the only element of the original assault to become conscious during the later scene was that of clothes, and not the assault itself. In order to rationalize the conscious element of clothes and her experience of sexual release, Emma consciously made a series of false connections that portrayed the shop-keepers laughing at her clothes and one of them sexually pleasing her. Thus, the clothes act as a symbol of the entire associative process and serve as a bridge between the two scenes. This mental bridge caused the second incident to then transform into the psychical expression of what was never consciously registered in the first event because it came before any conscious awareness of sexuality. Therefore, Freud concludes that Emma’s hysterical symptoms stem from the memory of the assault which “has only become a trauma by deferred action” (Emma 354). In this case, the deferred action was the deferred sexual release experienced at 12 caused by the onset of puberty.

Freud’s work with Emma and his notion of deferred action highlights a paradoxical concept where “a memory arouses an affect which it did not give rise to as an experience” (Emma 356). Through this framework, Freud theorized the idea of the hysterical proton-pseudos which allows the previously deemed unintelligible nature of hysteric symptoms to be understood through the form of unconscious mechanisms known as primary processes. Freud explains that an individual unconsciously utilizes primary processes as a way to subvert displeasure by displacing it temporarily with mental conformities. Primary processes, often seen in the form of dreams, can involve “the disappearance of [the power of] selection, of efficiency and of logic in the passage [of thought]” (Emma 356); therefore, an individual’s ego bypasses the use of primary processes through constant attention to perceptions as a way to avoid unexpected displeasure.

In the case of the hysterical proton-pseudos, it is not a perception but a memory that releases an affect, causing the ego to be slow to react and allowing a primary process. He claims that affects in this form of a deferred action are most always experienced in the sexual realm due to the retardation of puberty as compared with the rest of the individual's development. In fact, “every adolescent individual has memory-traces which can only be understood with the emergence of sexual feelings of his own; and accordingly, every adolescent must carry the germ of hysteria within him” (Emma 357). Therefore, Freud reasons that hysterical symptoms do not originate from biological means, but instead arise psychically from premature sexual experiences whose affects are only presented through later memory-traces of said experience.

Sigmund Freud’s early work in theorizing the hysterical proton-pseudos helps to articulate how symptoms may arise through the affects of processes relating to past experiences. However, it is not until the early 1900’s where he delves further into the meaning that lies behind such neurotic symptoms. It’s in this analysis of the symptom’s underlying meaning where the explicit criticism and contrasting methodology of contemporary psychiatric thought is first evident. In his 1917 lecture, The Sense of Symptoms, he notes “that clinical psychiatry takes little notice of the outward form or content of individual symptoms'', whereas he claims his psychoanalysis differs and is able to show that these neurotic symptoms do in fact carry a meaning connected to the individual experience of the patient (Lectures 257).

In The Sense of Symptoms, Freud shifts his analytical focus onto the neurotic symptoms of obsessional neurosis. He found, in comparison to hysteria, the disease is not “so obtrusively noisy”, but rather “it behaves more like a private affair of the patient's, it dispenses almost entirely with somatic phenomena, and creates all its symptoms in the mental sphere” (Lectures 257). Undoubtedly, the clinical research on Emma’s symptoms of hysterical repression provided the groundwork for explaining the manner in which general symptoms of mental disorders are first produced. Nonetheless, Freud’s decision to focus on the solely psychologically produced symptoms of obsessional neurosis is a choice to focus exclusively on a disease that allows “the plainest indication of there being a special region of the mind, shut off from the rest” (Lectures 277).

Freud offers an example of a case where a 30 year old woman was struck by a constant obscure compulsion to place herself in a definite spot next to a table where she would then call upon her maid and give her a trivial task or dismiss her outright. Following insisting questions from Freud, the woman came to an epiphany as to the origins of her obsessional neurosis. Ten years prior, she married a much older man who happened to be severely impotent and unable to properly consummate the marriage on the bridal night. After countless times running between their rooms, he surrendered to his impotence and chose to splash red ink haphazardly onto the bed sheets in a way that failed to support evidence of sexual intercourse all the while stating that his sexual failure is enough to make one “feel ashamed in front of the housemaid when she makes the bed” (Lectures 262).

Freud further digs into the intimate relationship between the patient’s bridal night and her compulsions, where he comes to further realizations and indications as to their potential symbolism and meaning. He finds that the table represents the bed, and the woman has taken the role of her husband running between rooms. Therefore by having the maid come before the table, which Freud has now discovered contains a large red ink stain, the husband “whose part she was playing, did not feel ashamed in front of the maid; accordingly the stain was in the right place” (Lectures 262-263). The wife has taken the scene of her bridal night, transformed it, and by doing so “she was putting it right” (Lectures 263). Furthermore, through her belief that the maid shows indifference to the stain on the table, she defends her husband and further convinces herself that he had no need to be ashamed in front of the maid, and thus he was not truly impotent.

Through this illustrated example of a prior patient, Freud demonstrates the deeply personal symbolism that lies within the particular details of an obsession, and generally, “that neurotic symptoms have a sense, like parapraxes and dreams, and that they have an intimate connection with the patient's experiences” (Lectures 269). In the specific case of the patient, her neurotic symptoms compelled actions that protected “her husband from malicious gossip, justified her separation from him and enabled him to lead a comfortable separate life” (Lectures 262). Through these neurotic efforts to correct the scene and protect her husband's humility, it is clear the patient is trapped in a temporal frigidity as she perpetually mantains “the intention of correcting a distressing portion of the past and … putting her beloved husband in a better light” (Lectures 276). Consequently, Freud is able to generalize that neurotic symptoms cause an individual to be entirely “‘fixated’ to a particular portion of their past, as though they could not manage to free themselves from it”, demonstrating the sense of symptoms as undeniably materializing through a connection to an individual’s past experiences (Lectures 272).

In his 1917 lecture, Traumatic Fixation—The Unconscious, Sigmund Freud scrutinizes how a neurotic symptom’s direct connection to an ultimately symbolic meaning provides “unshakeable proof of the existence—or, if you prefer it, of the necessity for the hypothesis—of unconscious mental processes” (Lectures 277). In order to logically come to such a conclusion, it is necessary to realize that the aforementioned patient was markedly aware of the obsessional effects of her neurotic symptoms. However, “in precisely the same way as a hypnotized subject”, she never consciously comprehended the meaning nor intention behind those symptoms (Lectures 279). Moreover, in the case of Emma’s hysteria, her phobia of entering stores alone was brought about by the ego’s permittance of a primary process, an unconscious process that arose from deferred sexual release in relation to the memory of assault at eight years old. Despite the experience happening at eight years old, she falsely believed it was related to the later scene due to deferred action. Through these examples, Freud concludes that, while neurotic symptoms are themselves conscious, “their psychical predeterminants … are unconscious, at least until we have made them conscious to the patient by the work of analysis” (Lectures 277).

Freud’s analysis of the sense of neurotic symptoms serves as proof of the existence of unconscious psychological processes, as these symptoms would fail to ever exist without a definite unconscious experience that provides the symptom with meaning. Accordingly, he displays the inadequacy of clinical psychiatry to properly pass judgment on psychoanalysis’ notion of the unconscious as a function of conscious affects, as they are “only acquainted with the unconscious as a concept … and have never interpreted dreams or found a sense and intention in neurotic symptoms” (Lectures 278). In fact, the psychiatric approach that considers mental disorders as being rooted in biological causes actually serves to prove the very existence of unconscious processes as more than merely a concept, or “une façon de parler.” This is observed in how “psychiatry gives names to the different obsessions but says nothing further about them” (Lectures 259). In which case, these various obsessions and their symptoms have been proven by Freud’s clinical case studies to have a meaning rooted in the unconscious. Therefore, when the failure of psychiatry’s biological approach to do more than merely categorize these symptoms is contrasted against psychoanalysis’ empirical evidence that these symptoms necessitate unconscious processes to even exist, it is blatant which line of reasoning has more legitimacy.

Through his illustration of clinical examples, Freud has logically displayed that neurotic symptoms result from certain psychological processes that should have inevitably become known to the consciousness, but instead the processes “had been somehow disturbed and were obliged to remain unconscious” (Lectures 279). This very notion of neurotic symptoms is integral to how psychoanalysis operates within the realm of therapeutic practice. Freud claims “that symptoms disappear when we have made their unconscious predeterminants conscious”; however, this must be knowledge gained by the patient's own inner change and not through the knowledge of the physician (Lectures 279). He then confirms the proficiency of this technique through an example of his own success with the patient, who, after refusing to accept the interpretations proposed by Freud, “occupied herself with the possibilities put before her, collected associations to them, produced recollections and made connections, until by her own work she had accepted all the interpretations” (Lectures 265).

While Freud has revealed his own example of therapeutic success with a patient through psychoanalytical practices and concepts, clinical psychiatry remains grounded in the same ignorant rut that has stalled all progress due to their denial of the role of the unconscious. In fact, their failures to properly assign meaning to neurotic symptoms due to such a denial leaves them only with the option to cast value judgments on those afflicted with neurotic symptoms, deeming them “degenerates”. It is this exact condemnation and failure to fulfill the Hippocratic oath that Freud aims to reverse through his development of psychoanalysis, which he has proved through logical observation and clinical studies to be efficacious in curing neurotic symptoms. On account of his confidence in his own research into the unconscious psychological process, he even poses a challenge on behalf of the true existence of the unconscious: “we can challenge anyone in the world to give a more correct scientific account of this state of affairs, and if he does we will gladly renounce our hypothesis of unconscious mental processes” (Lectures 276).

Sigmund Freud is tirelessly brazen in the development and propagation of psychoanalysis, further decreeing that clinical psychiatry’s committing of such a flagrant “disregard of all considerations of academic civility” neglects the true benevolence and medical virtue that lies within psychoanalysis and its acknowledgement of the role of the unconscious (Lectures 285). In truth, Freud’s overall promotion of the ego having to “content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind” has only received such scathing criticism because psychoanalysis seemed to be fated “to give it its most forcible expression and to support it with empirical material which affects every individual” (Lectures 284). While Freud considers his present psychological research to be science’s third blow to “human megalomania”, it is truthfully the psychiatric old guard who were the ones to fling the most detrimental insults towards humanity through their ethically dubious hindrance of psychological development.