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SIGMUND FREUD

IX

What now remains is the treatment of the relations between symp-
tom formation and fear development. Two opinions on this point
seem widely diffused. The first calls the fear itself a symptom of
the neurosis, the other believes in a much more intimate relation-
between the two. According to this, all symptom formation is under-
taken in order to escape fear; the symptoms bind the psychic energy
that otherwise would be led off as fear, so that fear is the basic phe-
nomenon and chief problem of the neurosis.

The at least partial justification of this second view is shown by
striking examples. When one has accompanied an agoraphobe into
the street and then leaves him to himself he produces in him an
attack of fear. If one hinder a compulsive neurotic from washing
his hands after a contact, he becomes the prey of an almost unbear-
able fear. It is therefore clear that the conditions of being accom-
panied and of washing had the intention and also the result of
preventing fear.

In this sense every inhibition which the ego lays on itself may be
called a symptom. As we have referred the fear development to
the danger situation we would prefer to say that the symptoms have
been formed to withdraw the ego from the danger situation. If
symptom formation is prevented the danger actually appears, that
is, a situation results which is analogous to birth, in which the ego
finds itself helpless against the constantly growing claim of the
impulse—the earliest and most primitive of the fear conditions. For
our view the relationship between fear and symptom is less close
than has been assumed because we have interpolated between the
two elements the danger situation. We might add supplementarily
that fear development introduces symptom formation, yes, that it
is a necessary presupposition of the same; for if the ego would not
arouse the pleasure-pain factor by fear development, then it would
not obtain the power of holding back the danger threatening process
prepared in the It. Here the tendency is unmistakable of limiting
itself to the smallest mass of fear development, to use fear only to
give the signal; otherwise one would obtain the pain which is threat-
ened by the impulse process but would feel it only where there would
be no result according to the intention of the pleasure principle,
which, however, happens often enough in the neuroses.

The symptom formation, then, has the actual result of abolishing
the danger situation. It has two sides, one which is hidden from
us and prepares in the It that alteration by means of which the ego
is withdrawn from danger, while the other, turned toward us, shows

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what is created at the place of the influenced impulse process–the
formation of the substitute.

We should, however, express ourselves more correctly if we
ascribed to the defensive process what we have just said of the
symptom formation and apply the term symptom formation as a
synonym of substitute formation. It now seems clear that the
defensive process is analogous to flight, through which the ego with-
draws itself from danger which threatens from without, that it
represents an attempt at flight from an impulse danger. The criti-
cisms against this comparison will aid us in a further explanation.
First let it be objected that loss of the object (loss of love in con-
nection with the object) and the threat of castration are likewise
dangers which threaten from without, like a beast of prey, hence
not danger from impulses. But the case is not the same. The wolf
will probably attack us wherever we may happen to encounter him;
but the beloved person will not withdraw love and castration will not
menace us if we do not nourish within us definite feelings and inten-
tions. So if these instinct stimuli become conditions of external
danger and thereby themselves dangerous we can combat the
external danger by measures against internal dangers. In the
zoöphobias the danger seems to be felt as a purely external danger
and also in the symptom there is experienced a displacement exter-
nally. In the compulsive neurosis the danger is far more interior-
ized, the share of the fear of the super-ego, the social fear, is repre-
sented by an internal substitution for an external danger, while the
other share, the fear of conscience, is throughout endopsychic.

A second objection is that in attempt at flight from a threatened
external danger we do nothing more than increase the space between
us and the danger. We do not place ourselves in defense against
the danger, do not seek to change anything in the same, as in the
other cases, when we charge on the wolf with a cudgel or shoot at
him with a gun. The defense process, however, seems to do more
than what corresponds to flight. It attacks the threatening course
of the process, somehow represses it, diverts its aim and thereby
renders it powerless. This objection seems absolute, we must take
it into account. We think it would be as if there were defense
processes which one could with justice compare to an effort at flight,
because the ego defends itself much more actively in others and
undertakes energetic counter-efforts. If the comparison of the
defense with flight is not disturbed through the circumstance that
not detached instances like the wolf and the child, every kind of behavior
of the ego must influence the impulse process to change it.

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Through the study of fear conditions we must look at the behavior
of the ego in defense in a so-
to-
speak rational clarification. Every
danger situation corresponds to a certain period of life or phase of
development of the psychic apparatus and seems justified for it.
The early child nature is actually not equipped to master psychically
the large quantities of excitation which reach it from without. At
a certain period of life it is actually of the most importance that the
persons on which it depends do not withdraw their tender care.
When the boy feels the powerful father as his rival for the mother,
becomes aware of his aggressive inclinations against him and his
sexual intentions toward the mother, he has the right to fear him
and the fear of punishment can through phylogenetic strengthening
be expressed as castration fear. With his entry into social relations
fear of the super-
ego, conscience, necessity, the omission of these
factors, become the source of severe conflicts and dangers. But
just here a new problem is added. Suppose we attempt to replace
for a time the fear affect through another, the pain affect. We hold
it as normal throughout that the girl of four years cries painfully
when she breaks her doll, at six years when her teacher rebukes
her, at sixteen when her sweetheart loses interest in her, at twenty-
five when she buries her child. All of these pain conditions have
their time relationship and afterwards become void, except the last
which persist through life. It would startle us if the girl as wife and
mother would weep over damage to some trifle, although the neurotic
behaves in just this way. In their psychic apparatus all instances
for the mastery of irritation have long been completed within wide
limits; they are sufficiently grown up to be able to satisfy most of
their needs; they have long known that castration is no longer utilized
as a punishment, nevertheless they behave as if the old danger situa-
tions still persist, and hold fast to all former fear conditions.
The answer to this will turn out to be somewhat prolix. It will
above all have to sift the facts. In a large number of cases the old fear
conditions will actually fall out after they have caused neurotic reac-
tions. The phobias of little children-
of being alone, darkness and
strangers, which may be termed almost normal-
mostly pass off in
later years and are outgrown, as we say of many other disturbances
of childhood. The so numerous animal phobias have the same fate,
and many of the conversion hysterias of childhood years find no
later continuity. Ceremonial in the latent period is an uncommonly
frequent occurrence; only a very slight percentage of these cases
develop later into a full compulsion neurosis. The child neuroses-
as far as our experience extends among the city children of the white
race which is subjected to the high requirements of culture-
are

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regular episodes of development although there is still too little
attention granted them. One misses the signs of childhood neurosis
not at all in an adult neurotic, while by no means do all of the chil-
dren who show them become neurotics later. Hence in the course of
ripening, fear conditions must be given up and danger situations
have lost their significance. Moreover, it happens that some of these
danger situations preserve themselves in later times so that their
fear condition is modified with time. In this way castration fear is
preserved under the mask of syphiliphobia after one has experienced
that castration is no longer the punishment for allowing full play to
sexual lusts although freedom of impulse threatens severe affections.
Other fear conditions are not especially doomed to perish but accom-
pany man through life, as fear of the super-ego. The neurotic is
differentiated from the normal by the fact that he immoderately
heightens the reaction to these dangers. Again, no sufficient protec-
tion is offered even to adulthood that the original traumatic situations
may not return; there should be a limit for every man beyond which
his psychic apparatus fails to master the disposal of the importunate
amounts of excitation.

These small corrections cannot possibly have the determination to
shake the fact that is here discussed, the fact that so many individ-
uals remain infantile in their behavior to danger and do not overcome
ancient fear conditions. To dispute this would be to deny the fact
of neurosis, for such persons are called neurotics. But how is this
possible? Why are not all neuroses episodes of development which
are concluded with the attainment of the next phase? Whence the
element of permanence in these reactions to danger? Whence the
fear affect seems to enjoy over all other affects
that it alone calls forth reactions which separate themselves as abnor-
mal from the others and oppose themselves as unsuitable to the stream
of life? In other words we unexpectedly find ourselves once more
in the presence of the so often put vexed question, whence comes
the neurosis, what it its final, its special motif? After decades of
analytical investigation this problem looms before us, as unsolved
as in the beginning.

X

Fear is the reaction to danger. However, one can not reject the
idea that it is connected with the nature of danger if the fear affect
can force an exceptional situation in the psychic economy. But
dangers are in general human and the same for all individuals; what
we need and do not have at our disposal is a factor which makes
intelligible to us the selection of the individual who can subject the