394

whole analytic situation is broken up. The patient now regards the
analyst simply as an alien personality who makes disagreeable demands
upon him and he behaves towards him exactly like a child who does
not like a stranger and has no confidence in him. If the analyst tries
to explain to the patient one of the distortions which his defence has
produced and to correct it, he meets with a complete lack of compre-
hension and an imperviousness to valid arguments. We see then that
there really is a resistance to the discovery of resistances and the
defence-mechanisms do deserve the name which we originally gave
them before they had been more closely examined ; there are resist-
ances not only to the bringing of id-contents into consciousness but
also to the whole process of analysis and so to cure.

The effect which the defensive activities produce within the ego
is rightly described as ‘modification of the ego’, if by this we under-
stand the deviation of the ego from an imaginary norm which would
ensure the patient’s unswerving loyalty to his undertaking when he
entered upon analysis. We can well believe what our daily experience
suggests, that the outcome of an analysis depends principally upon
the strength and depth of the roots of the resistances constituting
the ego-modification. Once more we realize the importance of the
quantitative factor and once more we are reminded that analysis has
only certain limited quantities of energy upon which to draw when
matching itself with the hostile forces. And it does seem as if victory
were really for the most part with the big battalions.

VI

Our next question will be whether all ego-modification (in the
sense in which we are using the term) is acquired during the defensive
conflicts of early childhood. There can be no doubt about the answer.
We have no reason to dispute the existence and importance of primal,
congenital ego-variations. The single fact is decisive that every
individual selects only certain of the possible defence-mechanisms
and invariably employs those which he has selected. This suggests
that each individual ego is endowed from the beginning with its own
peculiar dispositions and tendencies, though we cannot predicate their
nature and conditioning factors. Moreover, we know that we must
not exaggerate the difference between inherited and acquired charac-
teristics into an antithesis ; that which has been acquired by our
ancestors is certainly an important part of what we inherit. When
we speak of ‘archaic inheritance’ we are generally thinking only

395

SIGM. FREUD

of the id and apparently we assume that an ego was non-existent at
the beginning of the individual’s life. But we must not overlook the
fact that id and ego are originally one, and it does not imply a-
mystical over-estimation of heredity if we think it credible that, even before
the ego exists, its subsequent lines of development, tendencies and
reactions are already determined. The psychological peculiarities of
families, races and nations, even in their attitude towards analysis,
admit of no other explanation. Nay, more, analytic experience
convinces us that particular psychic contents, such as symbolism,
have no other source than that of hereditary transmission, and research
in various fields of folk-psychology seems to justify the assumption
that in archaic inheritance there are other, no less specialized, deposits
from primitive human development.

When we recognize that the peculiarities of the ego which we
detect in the form of resistances may be not only acquired in defensive
conflicts but transmitted by heredity, the topographical differentiation
between ego and id loses much of its value for our investigations.
When we advance a step further in analytic experience we come upon
resistances of another type, which we can no longer localize and which
seem to be conditioned by certain fundamental relations within the
psychic apparatus. I can give only a few examples of the type of
resistance to which I refer: this whole field of inquiry is still bewilder-
ingly strange and has not been sufficiently explored. We come across
people, for instance, of whom we should say that they display a peculiar
‘adhesiveness of the libido’. The processes to which their analysis
gives rise are so much slower than in other people because they appar-
ently cannot make up their minds to detach libidinal cathexes from
one object and displace them to another, although there is no particular
reason for such cathectic fidelity. Then we meet the opposite type in
which the libido seems specially mobile: it readily enters upon the
new cathexes suggested by the analysis, abandoning its former ones
for these. The difference between the two types is comparable to
that experienced by a sculptor according as he works in hard stone or
soft clay. Unfortunately in the latter type the results of analysis
often prove very evanescent; the new cathexes are soon abandoned
and one feels not as if one had worked in clay but as if one had written
in water. The old saw ‘Light come, light go’⁸ proves true here.
In another group of patients we are surprised by an attitude which

⁸ * Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen’

396

we can only put down to a loss of the plasticity we should expect, an
exhaustion of the capacity for change and development. We are indeed
prepared for a certain degree of psychic inertia in analysis; when
new paths are pointed out for the instinctual impulses, we almost
invariably see that there is an obvious hesitation in entering upon
them. We have described this attitude, though perhaps not quite
rightly, as ‘resistance from the id’. But in the cases which I have
in mind all the mental processes, relations and distributions of energy
are immutable, fixed and rigid. One finds the same state of affairs in
very old people, when it is explained by the so-called force of habit,
the exhaustion of receptivity through a kind of psychic entropy;
but I am thinking of people who are still young. Our theoretical
knowledge does not seem adequate to explain these types. Probably
some element of time is at work here, changes in some rhythm in the
development of psychic life which we have not yet apprehended.
In yet another group of cases the patients’ resistance to analysis
and the obstacles in the way of cure are probably due to variations
in the ego which spring from another and even deeper root. Here we
come to the ultimate phenomena to which psychological research
has penetrated—the behaviour of the two primal instincts, their
distribution, fusion and defusion, things which we cannot imagine
to be confined to a single province of the mental apparatus, whether
it be id, ego or super-ego. Nothing impresses us more strongly in
connection with the resistances encountered in analysis than the fact
that there is a force which defends itself by all possible means against
recovery and clings tenaciously to illness and suffering. We have
recognized that part of this force is the consciousness of guilt and the
need for punishment, and this is undoubtedly correct; we have
localized it in the ego’s relation to the super-ego. But this is only
one element in it, that which may be described as psychically bound
by the super-ego and which we perceive in this form. We may suppose
that other portions of the same force are at work, either bound or free,
in some unspecified region of the psyche. If we bear in mind the
whole picture made up of the phenomena of the masochism inherent
in so many people, of the negative therapeutic reaction and of the
neurotic’s consciousness of guilt, we shall have to abandon the belief
that psychic processes are governed exclusively by the striving after
pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the
existence of a power in psychic life which, according to its aim, we
call the instinct of aggression or destruction and which we derive from

397

the primal death-instinct of animate matter. It is not a ques-
tion of an optimistic as opposed to a pessimistic theory of life. Only by the
interaction and counteraction of the two primal instincts—Eros and
the death-instinct, never by one or the other alone, can the motley
variety of vital phenomena be explained.

How the elements of these two types of instinct combine to fulfil
the various vital functions, under what conditions such coalitions tend
to dissolve and finally break up, what disturbances correspond to
these changes and what sensations they evoke in the perceptual
gamut of the pleasure-principle—these are problems whose elucidation
would be the most valuable achievement of psychological research.
For the moment we must bow to those superior powers which foil our
attempts. Even to exert a psychic influence upon a simple case of
masochism is a severe tax on our skill.

In studying the phenomena which testify to the activity of the
instinct of destruction we are not confined to the observation of
pathological material. There are countless facts in normal mental
life which require this explanation, and the keener the power of our
discernment the greater the abundance in which they present them-
selves to our notice. The subject is too novel and too important to be
treated as a side-issue in this discussion ; I will content myself with
selecting a few specimens of these phenomena. Here is an example :
It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are,
human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either
sex and that the one orientation is no impediment to the other. We
call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without
wondering much at it. But we have come to know that all human
beings are bisexual in this sense and that their libido is distributed
between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form. But
the following point strikes us. While in the individuals I first mentioned
the libidinal impulses can take both directions without producing a clash,
in other and more frequent cases the result is an irreconcilable conflict.
A man’s heterosexuality will not tolerate homosexuality, and vice versâ.
If the former tendency is the stronger, it succeeds in keeping the
latter in a state of latency and preventing its attaining real gratifica-
tion. On the other hand there is no greater danger for a man’s hetero-
sexual function than that of disturbance by latent homosexuality.
We might explain these facts by saying that each individual has only
a given quantity of libido at his disposal and that the two rival orienta-
tions have to contend for it. But it is not clear why these rivals

398

should not regularly divide between them the available quantity of
libido, according to their relative strength, as does happen in some
cases. We are forced to conclude that there is something peculiar
in the tendency to conflict, something which introduces a new element
into the situation, independently of the quantity of libido. It is
difficult to account for this spontaneous tendency to conflict except
as the intervention of an element of free aggression.

If we recognize that the case which I have just described is a
manifestation of the instinct of destruction or aggression we are at
once confronted with the question whether this notion should not be
extended to apply to other instances of conflict, or, indeed, whether
we ought not to review all our knowledge of psychic conflict from
this new angle. We assume that, in the course of the development
of human beings from their primitive state to civilization a considerable
part of their aggression is internalized, turned inwards and, if this is
so, inner conflicts are certainly the correct equivalent of the external
conflicts which have now ceased. I am well aware that the dualistic
theory according to which an instinct of death, destruction or aggres-
sion claims equal partnership with Eros as manifested in libido, has
met with little general acceptance and has not really established itself
even among psycho-analysts. My delight was proportionately great
when I recently discovered that our theory was held by one of the
great thinkers of ancient Greece. So glad am I of this confirmation
that I willingly sacrifice the prestige of originality, especially as I
read so widely in earlier years that I can never be quite certain that
what I thought was a creation of my own mind may not really have
been an outcome of cryptomnesia.

Empedocles of Akragas (Girgenti),⁹⁾ born about 495 B.C., is one of
the grandest and most remarkable figures in the history of Greek
civilization. The interests of this many-sided personality took the
most varied directions. He was a scientist and thinker, a prophet and
worker of miracles, a politician, a philanthropist and a physician versed
in natural science. He was said to have freed the town of Selinus
from malaria, and his contemporaries worshipped him as a god. In
his mind the sharpest contrasts seem to have co-existed; exact and
sober in his investigations in physics and physiology, he did not
recoil from obscure mysticism and he indulged in cosmic speculations
of astonishingly fantastic boldness. Capelle compares him with

⁹⁾I have based what follows on a work by Wilhelm Capelle, Die
Vorsokratiker. Alfred Kröner, Leipzig, 1935.

399

Dr. Faustus, ‘to whom many a secret was revealed’. Born at a
time when the realm of science was not yet divided into so many
provinces, he held some theories which inevitably strike us as primitive.
He explained the variety of things by the fusion of the four elements,
earth, water, fire and air, and he held that all nature was animate
and believed in the transmigration of souls. At the same time, how-
ever, he had such modern ideas as that of the gradual evolution of
living beings, the survival of the fittest and the recognition of the rôle
of chance (τύχη) in this development.

The theory of Empedocles which specially claims our attention is
that which approximates so closely to the psycho-analytical theory
of instinct that we should be tempted to maintain that the two are
identical, were it not for this difference: the Greek’s theory is a
cosmic phantasy, while our own confines itself to its biological applica-
tion. At the same time, the fact that Empedocles ascribed to the
universe the same principle of animation as is manifested in each
individual living creature makes this difference considerably less
important.

The Greek philosopher taught that there were two principles of
natural process in the life of the universe as in that of the mind and
that these principles were eternally in conflict with one another. He
called them φιλία–love–and νεῖκος–strife. The one of these
powers, which he really conceived of as natural forces working as
instincts, and certainly not as intelligences with a conscious aim,¹⁰⁾
strives to unite the atoms of these four elements in one great sphere,
while the other seeks to dissolve these fusions and to separate the
atoms of the elements. Empedocles conceives of the world-process
as a continuous, never-ceasing alternation of periods in which the
one or the other of the two fundamental forces triumphs, so that at
one time love and, at another time, strife fulfils its purpose and governs
the universe, after which the other vanquished power asserts itself
and in its turn prevails.

The two fundamental principles of Empedocles—φιλία and νεῖκος—
are, both in name and in function, the same as our two primal instincts,
Eros and Destruction, the former of which strives to comprehend
existing phenomena in ever greater unities, while the latter seeks to
dissolve these combinations and destroy the forms to which they have
given rise. But we shall not be surprised to find that this theory has

¹⁰⁾Loc. cit. S. 186.

400

ANALYSIS TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE

changed in certain respects on its re-emergence after two and a half
thousand years. Apart from the limitations imposed upon us by the
biopsychical standpoint, we no longer take as our fundamental elements
the four elements of Empedocles; animate matter is now sharply
differentiated from inanimate and we no longer think of the mingling
and separation of particles of matter but of the fusion and defusion
of instinct-
components. Moreover, we now have a certain biological
basis for the principle of ‘strife’, since we trace the instinct of destruc-
tion to the death-
instinct, the urge of animate matter to return to
its inanimate state. We are of course not asserting that this instinct
first arose with the dawning of life or denying that it existed before.
And nobody can foresee in what guise the nucleus of truth contained
in the theory of Empedocles will present itself to the vision of a later
day.

VII

In 1927, S. Ferenczi read a paper, entitled Das Problem der
Beendigung der Analysen¹¹⁾, which contained an abundance of valuable
material. He concluded it with the comforting assurance that ‘analysis
is by no means an interminable process. On the contrary, if the
analyst has a thorough knowledge of his business and a sufficient
fund of patience the treatment can be carried to a natural conclusion’.
This paper as a whole does, however, seem to me to convey a warning
not to aim at the shortening but rather at the deepening of the analytic
process. Ferenczi makes the further important point that success
very largely depends upon the analyst’s having profited by the lesson
of his own ‘errors and mistakes, and got the better of ‘the weak
points in his own personality’. This is an important contribution to
our problem. Amongst the factors which influence the prospects of
an analysis and add to its difficulties in the same manner as the resist-
ances, we must reckon not only the structure of the patient’s own ego
but the personal characteristics of the analyst.

It cannot be disputed that analysts do not in their own personalities
wholly come up to the standard of psychic normality which they set
for their patients. Opponents of analysis are wont to point this out
derisively and use it as an argument to prove the uselessness of the
analytic method. We might seek to refute the criticism by asserting
that it makes an unjustifiable demand upon analysts, who are individ-
uals trained in the practice of a certain art and are presumably ordinary

¹¹⁾Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Bd. XIV, 1928.