33

it are of determinative significance in the building of the
child’s character, and in the content of his later neuroses.
It is unavoidable and quite normal that the child should make
his parents the objects of his first object-choice. But his
libido must not remain fixed on these first chosen objects, but
must take them merely as a prototype and transfer from these
to other persons in the time of definite object-choice. The
breaking loose (Ablösung) of the child from his parents is
thus a problem impossible to escape if the social virtue of the
young individual is not to be impaired. During the time that
the repressive activity is making its choice among the partial
sexual impulses and later, when the influence of the parents,
which in the most essential way has furnished the material for
these repressions, is lessened, great problems fall to the work
of education, which at present certainly does not always solve
them in the most intelligent and economic way.
Gentlemen, do not think that with these explanations of the
sexual life and the sexual development of the child we have
too far departed from psychoanalysis and the cure of neurotic
disturbances. If you like, you may regard the psychoanalytic
treatment only as a continued education for the overcoming
of childhood-
remnants (Kindheitsresten).

FIFTH LECTURE

Ladies and Gentlemen: With the discovery of infantile sex-
uality and the tracing back of the neurotic symptoms to erotic
impulse-components we have arrived at several unexpected
formulæ for expressing the nature and tendencies of neurotic
diseases. We see that the individual falls ill when in conse-
quence of outer hindrances or inner lack of adaptability the
satisfaction of the erotic needs in the sphere of reality is de-
nied. We see that he then flees to sickness, in order to find
with its help a surrogate satisfaction for that denied him. We
recognize that the symptoms of illness contain fractions of the
sexual activity of the individual, or his whole sexual life, and
we find in the turning away from reality the chief tendency
and also the chief injury of the sickness. We may guess that
the resistance of our patients against the cure is not a simple
one, but is composed of many motives. Not only does the
ego of the patient strive against the giving up of the repres-
sions by which it has changed itself from its original constitu-
tion into its present form, but also the sexual impulses may
not renounce their surrogate satisfaction so long as it is not
certain that they can be offered anything better in the sphere
of reality.

The flight from the unsatisfying reality into what we call,
 

34

FREUD

on account of its biologically injurious nature, disease, but
which is never without an individual gain in pleasure for the
patient, takes place over the path of regression, the return to
earlier phases of the sexual life, when satisfaction was not
lacking. This regression is seemingly a twofold one, a temporal,
in so far as the libido or erotic need falls back to a temporally
earlier stage of development, and a formal, since the original
and primitive psychic means of expression are applied to the
expression of this need. Both sorts of regression focus in
childhood and have their common point in the production of
an infantile condition of sexual life.

The deeper you penetrate into the pathogenesis of neurotic
diseases, the more the connection of neuroses with other prod-
ucts of human mentality, even the most valuable, will be re-
vealed to you. You will be reminded that we men, with the
high claims of our civilization and under the pressure of our
repressions, find reality generally quite unsatisfactory and so
keep up a life of fancy in which we love to compensate for
what is lacking in the sphere of reality by the production of
wish-fulfillments. In these phantasies is often contained very
much of the particular constitutional essence of personality
and of its tendencies, repressed in real life. The energetic
and successful man is he who succeeds by dint of labor in
transforming his wish fancies into reality. Where this is not
successful in consequence of the resistance of the outer world
and the weakness of the individual, there begins the turning
away from reality. The individual takes refuge in his satisfy-
ing world of fancy. Under certain favorable conditions it still
remains possible for him to find another connecting link be-
tween these fancies and reality, instead of permanently becom-
ing a stranger to it through the regression into the infantile.
If the individual who is displeased with reality is in possession
of that artistic talent which is still a psychological riddle, he
can transform his fancies into artistic creations. So he escapes
the fate of a neurosis and wins back his connection with reality
by this round-about way.¹ Where this opposition to the real
world exists, but this valuable talent fails or proves insufficient,
it is unavoidable that the libido, following the origin of the
fancies, succeeds by means of regression in revivifying the in-
fantile wishes and so producing a neurosis. The neurosis
takes, in our time, the place of the cloister, in which were
accustomed to take refuge all those whom life had undeceived
or who felt themselves too weak for life. Let me give at this
point the main result at which we have arrived by the psycho-

¹Compare, Rank, Otto: Der Künstler, Ansätze zu einer Sexual-
Psychologie. 56 p. Heller & Co., Wien, 1907.

35

analytic investiga-
tion of neurotics, namely, that neuroses have
no peculiar psychic content of their own, which is not also to
be found in healthy states; or, as C. G. Jung has expressed it,
neurotics fall ill of the same complexes with which we sound
people struggle. It depends on quantitative relationships, on
the relations of the forces wrestling with each other, whether
the struggle leads to health, to a neurosis, or to compensatory
over-functioning (Ueberleistung).

Ladies and gentlemen, I have still withheld from you the
most remarkable experience which corroborates our assump-
tions of the sexual impulse-forces of neurotics. Every time
that we treat a neurotic psychoanalytically, there occurs in
him the so-called phenomenon of transfer (Uebertragung),
that is, he applies to the person of the physician a great
amount of tender emotion, often mixed with enmity, which
has no foundation in any real relation, and must be derived in
every respect from the old wish-fancies of the patient which
have become unconscious. Every fragment of his emotive
life, which can no longer be called back into memory, is accord-
ingly lived over by the patient in his relations to the physician,
and only by such a living of them over in the “transfer” is he
convinced of the existence and the power of these unconscious
sexual excitations. The symptoms, which, to use a simile
from chemistry, are the precipitates of earlier love experiences
(in the widest sense), can only be dissolved in the higher tem-
perature of the experience of transfer and transformed into
other psychic products. The physician plays in this reaction,
to use an excellent expression of S. Ferenczi¹⁾, the rôle of a
catalytic ferment, which temporarily attracts to itself the affect
which has become free in the course of the process.

The study of trans-
fer can also give you the key to the
understanding of hypnotic suggestion, which we at first used
with our patients as a technical means of investigation of the
unconscious. Hypnosis showed itself at that time to be a
therapeutic help, but a hindrance to the scientific knowledge of
the real nature of the neuroses, since it cleared away the psychic
resistances from a certain field, only to pile them up in an un-
scalable wall at the boundaries of this field. You must not
think that the phenomenon of transfer, about which I can un-
fortunately say only too little here, is created by the influence
of the psychoanalytic treatment. The transfer arises sponta-
neously in all human relations and in the relations of the patient
to the physician; it is everywhere the especial bearer of thera-
peutic influences, and it works the stronger the less one knows

¹⁾S. Ferenczi: Introduction und Uebertragung. Jahrbuch f. psycho-
anal. u. psychopath. Forschungen, Bd. I, H. 2, 1909.

36

of its presence. Accordingly psychoanalysis does not create
it, it merely discloses it to consciousness, and avails itself of
it, in order to direct the psychic processes to the wished for
goal. But I cannot leave the theme of transfer without stress-
ing the fact that this phenomenon is of decisive importance
to convince not only the patient, but also the physician. I
know that all my adherents were first convinced of the cor-
rectness of my views through their experience with transfer,
and I can very well conceive that one may not win such a
surety of judgment so long as he makes no psychoanalysis,
and so has not himself observed the effects of transfer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am of the opinion that there are,
on the intellectual side, two hindrances to acknowledging the
value of the psychoanalytic view-
point: first, the fact that we
are not accustomed to reckon with a strict determination of
mental life which holds without exception, and second, the
lack of knowledge of the peculiarities through which uncon-
scious mental processes differ from those conscious ones with
which we are familiar. One of the most widespread resistances
against the work of psychoanalysis with patients as with per-
sons in health reduces to the latter of the two moments. One
is afraid of doing harm by psychoanalysis, one is anxious about
calling up into consciousness the repressed sexual impulses of
the patient, as though there were danger that they could over-
power the higher ethical strivings and rob him of his cultural
acquisitions. One can see that the patient has sore places in
his soul life, but one is afraid to touch them, lest his suffering
be increased. We may use this analogy. It is, of course,
better not to touch diseased places when one can only cause
pain. But we know that the surgeon does not refrain from
the investigation and reinvestigation of the seat of illness, if
his invasion has as its aim the restoration of lasting health.
Nobody thinks of blaming him for the unavoidable difficulties
of the investigation or the phenomena of reaction from the
operation, if these only accomplish their purpose, and gain for
the patient a final cure by temporarily making his condition
worse. The case is similar in psychoanalysis; it can lay claim
to the same things as surgery; the increase of pain which
takes place in the patient during the treatment is very much
less than that which the surgeon imposes upon him, and es-
pecially negligible in comparison with the pains of serious
illness. But the consequence which is feared, that of a dis-
turbance of the cultural character by the impulse which has
been freed from repression, is wholly impossible. In relation
to this anxiety we must consider what our experiences have
taught us with certainty, that the somatic and mental power
of a wish, if once its repression has not succeeded, is incom-
 

37

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

parably stronger when it is unconscious than when it is con
scious, so that by being made conscious it can only be weakened.
The unconscious wish cannot be influenced, is free from all
strivings in the contrary direction, while the conscious is in
hibited by those wishes which are also conscious and which
strive against it. The work of psychoanalysis accordingly
presents a better substitute, in the service of the highest and
most valuable cultural strivings, for the repression which has
failed.

Now what is the fate of the wishes which have become free
by psychoanalysis, by what means shall they be made harmless
for the life of the individual? There are several ways. The
general consequence is, that the wish is consumed during the
work by the correct mental activity of those better tendencies
which are opposed to it. The repression is supplanted by a
condemnation carried through with the best means at one’s
disposal. This is possible, since for the most part we have to
abolish only the effects of earlier developmental stages of the
ego. The individual for his part only repressed the useless
impulse, because at that time he was himself still incompletely or
ganized and weak; in his present maturity and strength he
can, perhaps, conquer without injury to himself that which is
inimical to him. A second issue of the work of psychoanalysis
may be that the revealed unconscious impulses can now arrive
at those useful applications which, in the case of undisturbed
development, they would have found earlier. The extirpation
of the infantile wishes is not at all the ideal aim of develop
ment. The neurotic has lost, by his repressions, many sources
of mental energy whose contingents would have been very
valuable for his character building and his life activities. We
know a far more purposive process of development, the so
called sublimation (Sublimirung), by which the energy of in
fantile wish-excitations is not secluded, but remains capable
of application, while for the particular excitations, instead of
becoming useless, a higher, eventually no longer sexual, goal
is set up. The components of the sexual in-
stinct are especially
distinguished by such a capacity for the sublimation and ex
change of their sexual goal for one more remote and socially
more valuable. To the contributions of the energy won in
such a way for the functions of our mental life we probably
owe the highest cultural consequences. A repression taking
place at an early period excludes the sublimation of the re
pressed impulse; after the removal of the repression the way
to sublimation is again free.

We must not neglect, also, to glance at the third of the
possible issues. A certain part of the suppressed libidinous
excitation has a right to direct satisfaction and ought to find

38

it in life. The claims of our civilization make life too hard
for the greater part of humanity, and so further the aversion
to reality and the origin of neuroses, without producing an
excess of cultural gain by this excess of sexual repression.
We ought not to go so far as to fully neglect the original
animal part of our nature, we ought not to forget that the
happiness of individuals cannot be dispensed with as one
of the aims of our culture. The plasticity of the sexual
components, manifest in their capacity for sublimation, may
cause a great temptation to accomplish greater culture-
effects by a more and more far reaching sublimation. But just as
little as with our machines we expect to change more than a
certain fraction of the applied heat into useful mechanical
work, just as little ought we to strive to separate the sexual
impulse in its whole extent of energy from its peculiar goal.
This cannot succeed, and if the narrowing of sexuality is
pushed too far it will have all the evil effects of a robbery.
I do not know whether you will regard the exhortation with
which I close as a presumptuous one. I only venture the in-
direct presentation of my conviction, if I relate an old tale,
whose application you may make yourselves. German litera-
ture knows a town called Schilda, to whose inhabitants were
attributed all sorts of clever pranks. The wiseacres, so the
story goes, had a horse, with whose powers of work they were
well satisfied, and against whom they had only one grudge,
that he consumed so much expensive oats. They concluded
that by good management they would break him of this bad
habit, by cutting down his rations by several stalks each day,
until he had learned to do without them altogether. Things
went finely for a while, the horse was weaned to one stalk a
day, and on the next day he would at last work without
fodder. On the morning of this day the malicious horse was
found dead; the citizens of Schilda could not understand why
he had died. We should be inclined to believe that the horse
had starved, and that without a certain ration of oats no work
could be expected from an animal.

I thank you for calling me here to speak, and for the
attention which you have given me.