Freud, Sigmund (1916-004/1937.en): Some character-types met with in psycho-analytic work

SOME CHARACTER-TYPES MET WITH IN
PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK¹
(1915)

WHEN the physician is carrying out psycho-
analytic treatment of a neurotic, his interest is by no means
primarily directed to the patient’s character. He is
far more desirous to know what the symptoms
signify, what instinctual impulses lurk behind them
and are satisfied by them, and by what transitions
the mysterious path has led from those impulses to
these symptoms. But the technique which he is
obliged to follow soon constrains him to direct his
immediate curiosity towards other objectives. He
observes that his investigation is threatened by
resistances set up against him by the patient, and
these resistances he may justly attribute to the latter’s
character, which now acquires the first claim on his
interest.

What opposes itself to the physician’s labours is not
always those traits of character which the patient
recognizes in himself and which are attributed to him
by those around him. Peculiarities in the patient
which he had seemed to possess only in a modest
degree are often displayed in surprising intensity, or
attitudes reveal themselves in him which in other
relations of life would not have been betrayed. The
following pages will be devoted to describing and
tracing back to their origin some of these astonishing
traits of character.

¹ I. iv, 317-
336; S.k.S.N. iv, 521-
552; G.S. x, 287-
314; C.P. iv, 318-
344. Trans. by E. Colburn Mayne, revised
by Joan Riviere.

III

1915

I. The ‘Exceptions’

The psycho-analytic worker is continually con-
fronted with the task of inducing the patient to
renounce an immediate and directly attainable
source of pleasure. … No, the patient need merely renounce
such gratifications as will inevitably be detrimental
to him; he need only temporarily abjure, only learn
to exchange an immediate source of pleasure for one
better assured though longer delayed. …

Thus, when one exacts from the patient a provi-
sional renunciation of any source of pleasure, a
sacrifice, a readiness to accept some temporary suf-
fering in view of a better end, or even only the resolve
to submit to a necessity which applies to all human
beings, one will come upon individuals who resist
such an appeal on special grounds. They say that
they have renounced enough and suffered enough,
and have a claim to be spared any further exactions;
they will submit no longer to disagreeable necessity,
for they are exceptions and intend to remain so too.
In one patient of the kind this claim had grown into
the conviction that a special providence watched
over him, which would protect him from any painful
sacrifices of the sort. …

Now it is surely indubitable that everyone would
fain consider himself an ‘exception’ and claim
privileges over others. But precisely because of this
there must be a particular reason, and one not
universally available, if any individual actually pro-
claims himself an exception and behaves as such.
This reason may be of more than one kind; in the
cases I investigated I succeeded in tracing it to a
common peculiarity in the earlier experiences of

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these patients’ lives. Their neuroses were connected
with an event or painful experience from which they
had suffered in their earliest childhood, one in respect
of which they knew themselves to be guiltless, and
which they could look upon as an unjust injury
inflicted upon them. The privileges that they claimed
as a result of this injustice, and the rebelliousness it
engendered, had contributed not a little to intensi-
fying the conflicts leading to the outbreak of neurosis.
… The young man who believed himself watched
over by a special providence had been in infancy the
victim of an accidental infection from his wet-nurse,
and had lived his whole later life on the ‘insurance-
dole’, as it were, of his claims to compensation,
without having any idea on what he based those
claims. In his case the analysis, which reconstructed
this event out of obscure glimmerings of memory and
interpretations of the symptoms, was confirmed
objectively by information from the family.
For reasons which will be easily understood I can
not communicate very much about these and other
case-histories. … [In place of giving case-histories
the author discusses Gloucester’s soliloquy in
Richard III.–Ed.]

We will not, however, dismiss the ‘exceptions’
without pointing out that the claim of women to
privileges and to exemption from so many of the
importunities of existence rests upon the same
foundation. As we learn from psycho-analytic work,
women regard themselves as wronged from infancy,
as undeservedly cut short and set back; and the
embitterment of so many daughters against their
mothers derives, in the last analysis, from the re-
proach against her of having brought them into the
world as women instead of as men.

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II. Those Wrecked by Success

Psycho-analytic work has furnished us with the
rule that people fall ill of a neurosis as a result of
frustration. The frustration meant is that of satisfac-
tion for their libidinal desires and a long circum-
locution is necessary before the law becomes
comprehensible. That is to say, for a neurosis to
break out there must be a conflict between the
libidinal desires of a person and that part of his being
which we call his ego, the expression of his instinct of
self-preservation, which also contains his ideals of
his own character. A pathogenic conflict of this kind
takes place only when the libido is desirous of pur-
suing paths and aims which the ego has long over-
come and despised, and has therefore henceforth
proscribed; and this the libido never does until it is
deprived of the possibility of an ideal satisfaction
consistent with the ego. Hence privation, frustration
of a real satisfaction, is the first condition for the
outbreak of a neurosis, although, indeed, it is far
from being the only one.

So much the more surprising, indeed bewildering,
must it appear when as a physician one makes the
discovery that people occasionally fall ill precisely
because a deeply rooted and long-cherished wish has
come to fulfilment. It seems then as though they
could not endure their bliss, for of the causative con-
nection between this fulfilment and the falling-ill
there can be no question. . . .

The contradiction between such experiences and
the rule that frustration induces illness is not insol-
uble. The distinction between an internal and an
external frustration dispels it. When in actuality the
object in which the libido can find its satisfaction is

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withheld, this is an external frustration. In itself it is
inoperative, not pathogenic, until an internal frustra-
tion has joined hands with it. This must proceed
from the ego, and must dispute the right of the libido
to the other objects that it then desires to possess.
Only then does a conflict arise, and the possibility of
neurotic illness, i.e. of a substitutive gratification
proceeding circuitously by way of the repressed
unconscious. The internal frustration is present,
therefore, in every case, only it does not come into
operation until the external, actual frustration
has prepared the ground for it. In those excep-
tional cases where illness ensues on success, the
internal frustration has operated alone—has indeed
only made its appearance when an external frustra-
tion has been replaced by fulfilment of the wish. At
first sight there remains something astonishing about
this; but on closer consideration we shall reflect that
it is not so very unusual for the ego to tolerate a wish
as harmless so long as this exists in phantasy alone
and seems remote from fulfilment, while it will defend
itself hotly against such a wish as soon as it approaches
fulfilment and threatens to become an actuality.
The distinction between this and familiar situations
in neurosis-formation is merely that usually it is
internal intensifications of the libidinal cathexis
which turn the phantasy, that has hitherto been
thought little of and tolerated, into a dreaded
opponent; while in these cases of ours the signal for
the outbreak of conflict is given by an actual external
alteration in circumstances.
Analytic work soon shows us that it is forces of
conscience which forbid the person to gain the long-
hoped-for enjoyment from the fortunate change in
reality. It is a difficult task, however, to discover the

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essence and origin of these censuring and punishing
tendencies, which so often surprise us by their
presence where we do not expect to find them. …
[The author again turns to literature for examples,
in this instance Lady Macbeth, and Rebecca in
Rosmersholm.—Ed.]

III. Criminality from a Sense of Guilt

In their narrations about their early years, par-
ticularly before puberty, people who have afterwards
become very upright have told me of forbidden
actions which they had formerly committed—such as
thefts, frauds, and even arson. I was wont to dismiss
these statements with the comment that we know the
weakness of moral inhibiting influences at that time
of life, and I made no attempt to give them an
important place in the connected story. But eventu-
ally I was constrained to make a more fundamental
study of such incidents, by reason of some glaring
and more accessible cases in which the transgressions
took place while the patients were under my treat-
ment, and were people of riper age. The analytic
work then afforded the surprising conclusion that
such deeds are done precisely because they are for-
bidden, and because by carrying them out the doer
enjoys a sense of mental relief. He suffered from an
oppressive feeling of guilt, of which he did not know
the origin, and after he had committed a misdeed the
oppression was mitigated. The sense of guilt was at
least in some way accounted for.

Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that
the sense of guilt was present prior to the transgres-
sion, that it did not arise from this, but contrariwise—
the transgression from the sense of guilt. These per-
sons we might justifiably describe as criminals from

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a sense of guilt. The pre-existence of the guilty
feeling had of course to be demonstrated by a whole
succession of other manifestations and effects.

But scientific work is not satisfied with establishing
a departure from the norm. There are two further
questions to answer: whence derives the obscure
sense of guilt before the deed, and whether it is
probable that this kind of causation plays a con-
siderable part in the transgressions of mankind. . . .

With children, it is easy to perceive that they are
often ‘naughty’ on purpose to provoke punishment,
and are quiet and contented after the chastisement.
Later analytic investigation can often find a trace of
the guilty feeling which bid them seek for punish-
ment. Among adult criminals one must probably
except those who transgress without any sense of
guilt, who either have developed no moral inhibitions
or consider themselves justified in their deed by their
conflict with society. But in the majority of other
criminals, those for whom punitive measures are
really designed, such a motivation towards crime
might very well be present, casting light on many
obscure points in the psychology of the criminal, and
furnishing punishment with a new psychological
basis. . . .