Jerome of Stridon works in Latin. Works of Blessed Jerome of Stridon. Troparion to Blessed Jerome of Stridon

Within the third (structural) theories of the mental apparatus the main role in the occurrence of mental disorders and disorders is attributed to dysfunctions of the ego. Difficult task maintaining a balance between the contradictory demands of the id, the superego and the external world leads to the development of specific mechanisms, among which fear occupies a central place, as well as various methods of defense against it. It is in the Self that the ability to react with fear not only to a situation of real danger, but also to threatening circumstances in which injury can be avoided, develops.

A specific form of fear is a feeling of helplessness associated with an uncontrollable increase in the strength of unconscious desires. Unlike fear of reality(a term denoting the experience of real danger, an external threat), this fear is often experienced as a feeling of anxiety that does not have a specific object, but is associated with the entire Self:

“If a person has not learned to sufficiently control instinctive impulses, or the instinctive impulse is not limited by situational circumstances, or, due to a neurotic developmental disorder, cannot be responded to at all, then the accumulated energy of this desire can overcome the person. This is the feeling of the superiority of the impulse, before which a person feels

feeling helpless, creates the ground for the emergence of fear. Instinctive impulses can threaten in different ways. For example, fear may be due to the fact that the drive strives for unlimited satisfaction and thereby creates problems. But the very fact that a person can lose control over himself causes a very unpleasant feeling, helplessness, and even more severe cases- fear" .

This type of neurotic fear is quite common in dreams; it can accompany the analysis of the repressed and cause strong resistance to the awareness of drives. In his work "The Sinister" (1919), Freud ranks among the most frightening, creepy experiences of the return of the repressed, indicating that the symbolic analogue of what should have remained hidden, but suddenly appeared, are nightmares associated with the living dead, ghosts, spirits, etc. The founder of psychoanalysis believed that “an eerie experience occurs when a repressed infantile complex is again revived by a certain impression, or if previously overcome primitive ideas are again confirmed.”

Fears look and are experienced completely differently, irrational, so to speak, in form and not in essence. This is fear of very specific objects or situations that can pose a real danger ( angry dogs, snakes, high rocks and abysses), but in most cases are relatively harmless (toads, spiders, old gypsy women, etc.).

One of my clients once complained of a strong fear of snakes. Judging by the story, it was a real phobia - at the sight of similar objects or even just talking about how they come across in the most unexpected places (at the dacha, outside the city), the girl began to scream, and a chance encounter with a harmless snake ended in terrifying hysteria. In a conversation about the reasons for the emergence of this fear, a large associative field associated with it became clear. For the client, the snake symbolized only negative aspects, and the general cultural semantics associated with eternal youth

wisdom, healing properties and other positive characteristics were completely absent.

It further emerged that what was truly repressed were the ambivalent, dual aspects of the serpentine nature associated with powerful, insightful and therefore dangerous female figures. The snake itself was perceived as a latent, hidden (in the grass) phallus, symbolizing the basis of unconscious desire. Fear of snakes as a symptom has replaced the recognition of one's subjection to the desire of the Other 21 . It is quite obvious that the phobic reaction protected the client from contact with the repressed aspects of her own sexuality associated with the hypostasis of the phallic woman. The fear of this demonic figure was transformed into a phobia of snakes.

The leading role that fear plays in understanding how exactly the Self maintains balance in the mental system is determined by the affective dynamics of the psychoanalytic procedure. The fact is that the interpretation given by the therapist, no matter how timely, correct and accurate, is not always accepted by the client. As the methodology and techniques of psychoanalytic work develop, the main point of the latter becomes not so much the content of interpretations, but their acceptability the patient's willingness to share and support the therapist's point of view. In its meaning, acceptance is different from awareness (primarily in that it is a voluntary, not a spontaneous act), and it can be recognized by the emotional shock that accompanies the transformation of affective experience in the process of therapy.

A specific form of such an experience is fear of objectification of therapy results, which occurs quite often. “Writing” psychotherapists and teachers often encounter clients’ fears that working with them will be presented as an example, a clinical illustration of a theory. Moreover, appealing to universally accepted forms of confidentiality does not change anything - “what if someone guesses and they still recognize me.”

For one of the clients, this fear was expressed in an attempt to forbid me not only to publish, but even to describe the progress of his therapy. At the same time, every time he intensely looked at my work diary, which lay on the table during the sessions, and somehow admitted that he would give a lot for the opportunity to read it. When in response I showed him the pages relating to his own case, Mr. X. could not even understand what was written there. He agreed with the interpretation that the nature of his fear was not a neurotic fear that confidentiality would be violated, but rather a psychotic fear of "being seen." Since this latter is specific in relation to the problems of gonorrhea, the therapy of which was maintained in line with structural psychoanalysis, its further description is placed in the corresponding chapter. Here I wanted to emphasize that understanding the nature of the client’s fear helped further advance the analysis.

In therapeutic practice, an open discussion of fear associated with the course of therapy indicates overcoming the resistance of the ego and helps to unblock psychological defenses. In cases where the therapeutic analysis does not move forward due to rationalizing resistances with which the client encounters interpretations, it is always useful to initiate regression by making the subject of conversation early childhood fears, fear of death, fear of novelty and any other forms of fear present in his life. Sometimes the client himself considers fear to be the basis of his problems, but more often the symptoms of fear become the focus of therapy during dream analysis.

Materials on Psychology: To understand any object in this world, we must first ask ourselves what parts the object consists of and how it is composed of them, where its energy comes from and how Psychoanalysis was originally developed mainly for the treatment of neuroses. Over time, it was discovered that it benefits not only the obvious neurotics, but also many others. Of the most common types of neurosis considered, the self-sufficient nature of dream images and their autonomy, recognized not only by Hillman, but also by other post-Jungians, do not exclude, but presuppose the widespread use of amplification (enrichment) procedures in working with them. This method, invented Probably the very first stage of personal development, is the separation of the child from the mother, the birth and mental birth (M. Mahler's term) of a person. Birth itself, according to most psychoanalysts, is a strong physiological and psychological

I remind you that I came to Freud from sexology. Therefore, it is not surprising that I accepted his theory with much more sympathy "actual neuroses" which he called "neuroses of stagnant sexuality" than “interpretation of the meaning” of symptoms in “psychoneuroses”. This theory seemed to me more natural science than the “interpretation of meaning.” Freud called actual neuroses diseases caused by direct disturbances in sexual life. Anxiety neurosis And neurasthenia were, in his opinion, diseases that lacked “mental etiology.” They, Freud believed, were direct an expression of stagnant accumulated sexuality. They acted in the same way as toxic disorders. Freud assumed the presence "chemical sexual substances" which, when incorrectly “decomposed,” cause nervous palpitations, cardiac arrhythmias, acute attacks of fear, profuse sweating and other disorders in the functioning of the autonomic apparatus. Freud was far from directly linking anxiety neurosis with the autonomic system. He argued, based on clinical experience, that anxiety neurosis arises from sexual abstinence or coitus interruptus. It was to be distinguished from neurasthenia, which, contrary to what has been said, arises from “sexual abuse,” that is, disordered sexuality, for example, due to too frequent masturbation. Its symptoms were pain in the back and sacrum, headaches, general excitability, memory and attention disorders, etc. Thus, Freud divided painful conditions that could not be understood by official neurology and psychiatry, depending on the existing disharmony of sexual origin. This led to attacks on him by the psychiatrist Levenfeld, who, like hundreds of his other colleagues, generally denied the sexual etiology of neuroses. Freud relied on official clinical terminology. He believed that terms such as psychoneuroses, especially hysteria And obsessive-compulsive disorder neurosis, did not reveal the mental content. He believed that the symptoms of these diseases always showed a specifically captured content, including always sexual, but this concept should be interpreted more broadly and reasonably.

At the center of each psychoneurosis were incestuous fantasies, as well as fear of damage to the genitals. notice, that we're talking about O children's And unconscious sexual ideas expressed in a psychoneurotic symptom. Freud very sharply distinguished between actual neuroses and psychoneuroses. Psychoneuroses were, of course, at the forefront of clinical psychoanalytic work. According to Freud, actual neuroses should be treated by eliminating harmful sexual manipulations. When applied to fear neurosis, this meant, for example, refusal to abstain or interrupt sexual intercourse; when applied to neurasthenia, it meant from excessive masturbation. On the contrary, Freud demanded that psychoneuroses be treated with the help of psychoanalysis. Despite this strict distinction, he admitted the existence of a connection between the two groups of neuroses, believing that each psychoneurosis is grouped “around an actual neurotic core.” In my studies of stagnant fear, I relied on the last, very convincing, position. Freud subsequently published nothing more on this topic.

Freudian actual neurosis means biologically misdirected sexual energy. She is denied access to consciousness and motor skills. Actual fear and nervous symptoms, due directly to biological causes, are, so to speak, malignant growths fed by sexual excitement that has not found an outlet. But the strange formations in the soul, which are obsessive-compulsive neuroses and hysteria, also looked like meaningless malignant growths from a biological point of view. Where do they get their energy from? Undoubtedly, from the “actual-neurotic core” of accumulated stagnant sexuality. She, therefore, had to be source of energy for psychoneuroses.

Freud's instructions could not be interpreted differently. Only these data could be correct. The objection that most psychoanalysts raised against the doctrine of actual neurosis acted as a hindrance. They claimed that There are no actual neuroses at all. It was necessary to prove the presence of mental content in the so-called “free-floating fear.” Steckel put forward this argument. In his opinion, all types of fear and nervous disorders were caused by sincere, but not somatic causes, as they say, when it comes to actual neuroses. Steckel, like others, did not see a fundamental difference between psychosomatic arousal and the mental content of the symptom. Freud did not clarify the contradiction, but he stuck to the distinction. On the contrary, in the psychoanalytic outpatient clinic I observed many organic symptoms. True, it could not be denied that the symptoms of actual neurosis also had a mental superstructure Clean actual neuroses were rare. Border between different types neuroses was not as clear-cut as Freud believed. Let them be so special scientific questions may seem unimportant to amateurs, but in reality it turns out that they conceal the most important problems of human health. Consequently, in psychoneurosis there is definitely a core of congestive neurosis, and congestive neurosis has a psychoneurotic superstructure. So did the difference make any sense at all? Wasn't it just about quantitative issues?

While most analysts attributed everything to the mental content of neurotic symptoms, leading psychopathologists, such as Jaspers in his "Psychopathology" they generally denied the natural-scientific character of the psychological interpretation of meaning, and thereby psychoanalysis. The “meaning” of a mental position or action could, in their opinion, be comprehended only with the help of the “humanities” and not the natural sciences. They argued that the natural sciences deal only with mental quantities and energies, and humanitarian sciences- with sincere qualities. There was no bridge between quantitative and qualitative parameters, as these people argued. It was about the decisive issue, about the natural scientific nature of psychoanalysis and its methods. In other words, Can natural scientific psychology even exist in the strict sense of the word? Can psychoanalysis claim to be a natural science psychology, or is it only one of many branches of humanities?

Freud did not care about these methodological issues, and he blithely published the results of his clinical observations. He did not like philosophical discussions, but I, on the contrary, had to fight against this kind of argument. They wanted to classify us as spirit seers and thereby do away with us, but we knew that for the first time in the history of psychology we were studying natural science, and wanted to be taken seriously. It was only in the hard struggle to clarify these questions through discussion that the sharp weapons with which I later contributed to the defense of Freud's cause were sharpened. I thought that if only experimental psychology, represented by Wundt’s direction and dealing with quantitative measurement reactions, then psychoanalysis, since it does not use quantitative research methods, but only describes and constructs semantic connections between mental phenomena isolated from each other, cannot be classified as natural scientific methods. But rather so-called natural science is false. After all, Wundt and his students knew nothing about man in his living reality, assessing a person only on the basis of the time he needs to spend to respond to the stimulus word “dog.” They still do this today, and we assessed a person depending on how he manages to resolve conflicts that arise in life, in accordance with what motives he acts. Our argument implied the need for a concrete understanding of Freud's term "psychic energy" or even including it in the general concept of energy.

It is difficult to present facts against abstract philosophical arguments. The Viennese philosopher and physiologist Adler refused to deal with the question of unconscious mental life, since the supposed assumption of the “unconscious” was “in a philosophical sense, incorrect from the very beginning.” I still hear similar objections today. When I assert that substances can live even after a high degree of sterilization, they tell me that the slide was dirty and that “Brownian motion” was observed there. The fact that dirt on a glass slide is very easily distinguished from bions, and Brownian motion from vegetative motion, is not taken into account. In short, “objective science” is itself a problem.

Some clinical observations of cases unexpectedly helped me get out of this confusion. similar topics two patients discussed above. Gradually it became clear that the strength of the mental representation depends on the momentary bodily excitement with which it is associated. Affect arises from instincts, and therefore in the bodily sphere. On the contrary, representation is a highly “psychic”, non-corporeal formation. So how does “non-bodily” representation relate to “bodily” arousal? With complete sexual arousal, the idea of ​​sexual intercourse is vivid and urgent. On the contrary, for some time after satisfaction it is not reproduced, being “cloudy”, colorless and, as it were, blurry. Here must be the mystery of the relationship psychogenic fear neurosis psychogenic psychoneurosis.

My patient, after sexual satisfaction, instantly lost all mental symptoms of obsessive-compulsive neurosis. With the onset of new excitement, the symptoms returned until re-satisfaction. On the contrary, the second patient definitely worked through everything in the mental sphere, which was what was required of him, but sexual arousal did not occur. The treatment had no effect on the unconscious beliefs that were causing his inability to get an erection. The business was filled with life.

I now understand that a mental idea, which is characterized by only a very small degree of excitement, can provoke an increase in excitement. This provoked excitement, for its part, makes the performance lively and urgent. In the absence of excitement, the performance also fades away. In the absence of a conscious idea of ​​the sexual act, which occurs, for example, in the case of congestive neurosis due to moral inhibition, arousal is associated with other ideas that can be comprehended more freely. From this I drew the conclusion: congestive neurosis is physical a disorder that is caused by unsatisfied and therefore misdirected sexual arousal. Without mental inhibition, sexual arousal could never be misdirected. I was surprised that Freud did not pay attention to this circumstance. If an obstacle once gave rise to stagnation of sexuality, then it may well happen that this stagnation will increase inhibition and reactivate children's ideas instead of normal ones. Children's ideas, not painful in themselves, can, so to speak, as a result relevant inhibitions contain too much sexual energy.

If this happens, then such ideas become persistent, come into conflict with the mental organization of the adult and must be suppressed through repression. Thus, on the basis of an initially “harmless” sexual inhibition caused by the current situation, a chronic psychoneurosis arises with its inherent infantile content of sexual experiences. This is the essence of the “regression to childhood mechanisms” described by Freud. The described mechanism manifested itself in all the cases with which I dealt. If the neurosis did not exist from childhood, but manifested itself later, then the “normal” inhibition of sexuality or difficulties in sexual life regularly gave rise to absent-mindedness, and this stagnation activated incestuous desires and sexual fears.

The next question was: are sexual inhibition and the usual denial of sexuality that is at the beginning of a chronic disease “neurotic” or “normal”? Nobody talked about it. The sexual inhibition of a well-bred girl from a bourgeois family seemed to be something taken for granted. I thought exactly the same thing. This meant that at first I did not think about this fact at all. If a young, cheerful woman living in an unsatisfying marriage fell ill with congestive neurosis, if she developed fear of the heart, then no one questioned the inhibition that prevented her from achieving sexual satisfaction. Over time, real hysteria or obsessive-compulsive neurosis could develop. First reason there was a moral reason for their emergence braking, driving force- unsatisfied sexuality.

At this point, numerous possibilities for solving the problem arose, branching out, but it was difficult to take up their rapid and energetic implementation. For seven years I believed that I was working in full accordance with the principles of the Freudian school. No one foresaw that with the posing of these questions, a disastrous interweaving of fundamentally incompatible scientific views began.

Fear neurosis and childhood phobias

Human life is woven from various fears. To one degree or another, each of us has repeatedly experienced fear in the depths of our souls. Another thing is that a person does not always know the reason for his fear and is able to figure out what worries him and why he is afraid. And it is not always normal fear that develops into something more, pathological. But, as a rule, all neurotic disorders are in one way or another associated with experiences based on unconscious fear.

In the process of working with patients, the problem of fear comes into view to one degree or another, regardless of what specific problem the person initially comes to the analyst with. Presumably, the founder of psychoanalysis faced exactly the same situation when he first opened his private practice.

The history of the emergence of psychoanalysis indicates that Freud had to face the problem of fear at the initial stage of therapeutic activity. Thus, in the work “Studies on Hysteria” (1895), jointly written with Breuer, he came to the conclusion that the neuroses encountered should in most cases be considered as mixed. Pure cases of hysteria and obsessional neurosis are rare phenomena. As a rule, they are combined with fear neurosis. At the same time, Freud believed that fear neurosis arises as a result of the accumulation of physical tension, which has an independent sexual origin. A common manifestation of anxiety neurosis are various kinds of anxious expectations and phobias, that is, fears of specific content. Freud observed such conditions in his patients: in particular, in the patient Frau Emmy von N., he noted a neurosis of fear with anxious expectations combined with hysteria. In Katarina's case, it was a combination of fear neurosis and hysteria.

Considering mixed neuroses, Freud tried to identify their components and, for this purpose, identified “anxiety neurosis” as a special category. In 1895, he published three articles in which he examined the specifics of fear neurosis and phobias. The first of these articles was entitled “On the basis for separating a certain symptom complex from neurasthenia as a “neurosis of fear”.” The second is “Obsessions and phobias. Their mental mechanisms and etiology." The third is “Critique of the “neurosis of fear””. Even from the title of these articles one can judge that the problem of fear interested Freud during the formation of psychoanalysis, and its solution seemed to him quite difficult, since, having put forward ideas about the neurosis of fear, he immediately expressed his critical thoughts on this matter.

In his fundamental work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud paid little attention to the problem of fear. However, he could not ignore this problem and expressed the idea that the doctrine of fear dreams relates to the psychology of neuroses. At the same time, he emphasized that phobia is, as it were, a borderline obstacle to fear; the symptom of hysterical phobia arises in the patient in order to prevent the appearance of fear, and neurotic fear stems from sexual sources.

In 1909, in his work “Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy,” the founder of psychoanalysis examined in detail the issue of the emergence and development of little Hans’s phobia, expressed in the fear of being bitten by a white horse. Based on the corresponding analysis, he came to the conclusion that the child had a dual attitude: on the one hand, he was afraid of the animal, and on the other, he showed every interest in it, sometimes imitating it. These ambivalent (dual) feelings towards the animal were nothing more than unconscious substitutions in the psyche of those hidden feelings that the child experienced towards his parents. Thanks to this substitution, a partial resolution of the intrapersonal conflict occurred, or rather, the appearance of its resolution was created. This unconscious substitution was intended to hide the real reasons for children's fear, which was caused not so much by the father's attitude towards his son, but rather by the unconscious and contradictory attitude of the child himself towards his father.

According to Freud, little Hans simultaneously loved and hated his father, wanted to become as strong as his father, and at the same time eliminate him in order to take a place in his relationship with his mother. Such unconscious inclinations of the child contradicted the moral principles acquired by him in the process of upbringing. Partial resolution of this internal conflict playing out in the child’s soul was carried out through an unconscious shift of drives from one object to another. Those drives that Hans was ashamed of were repressed by him from consciousness into the unconscious and directed towards an allegorical object - white horse, towards whom one could openly show one’s feelings. A five-year-old boy, who once saw a horse fall during a walk, identified his father with this object, as a result of which he began to behave freely towards his father, without fear, but began to experience fear of the horse. Behind his expressed fear of being bitten by a horse lay a deep-lying unconscious feeling that he might be punished for evil desires. This is a normally motivated fear of the father due to jealous and hostile desires towards him; the fear of “little Oedipus,” who would like to eliminate his father in order to remain with his beloved mother. Ultimately, based on his analysis, Freud came to the conclusion that fear corresponds to repressed erotic desire and that the causes of the neuroses of adult patients can be sought in the infantile complexes that stood behind little Hans’s phobia.

Similar views on the problem of infantile fear were further reflected in Freud’s work “From the History of a Childhood Neurosis” (1918). The founder of psychoanalysis appealed to the case of psychoanalytic treatment of a Russian patient Sergei Pankeev (the case of the “Wolf Man”). In early childhood, the patient experienced severe neurotic suffering in the form of hysteria of fear (phobia of animals), which later turned into obsessional neurosis. When he came across a book of fairy tales in which there was an image of a wolf, he felt fear and began to scream frantically. He was also afraid and disgusted by beetles, caterpillars, and horses. There was also a nightmare when the boy saw several white wolves sitting on a large walnut tree in front of the window and was afraid that they would eat him. After waking up, he had a strong feeling of fear.

Describing the history of childhood neurosis, Freud drew attention to the relationship of this dream to the fairy tales “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats,” and also emphasized that the impression from these fairy tales was expressed in the child in the form of a phobia of animals. Analysis of the dream led him to the conclusion that the wolf was a substitute for the father and, therefore, in the boy’s nightmare, fear of his father manifested itself - a fear that from that time on dominated his entire life. The form of fear, the fear of being eaten by a wolf, was nothing more than a regressive transformation of the desire for such communication with his father, in which he, like his mother, could receive corresponding satisfaction, as he perceived during the scene of intimacy between his parents, which he once witnessed . Moreover, to understand the emergence of fear, it does not matter whether such a scene correlated with the child’s fantasy or with his real experience. It is important that the passive attitude towards the father, associated with a sexual goal, was repressed, and its place was taken by the fear of the father as a castrator in the form of wolf phobia.

Freud’s works “Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy” and “From the History of a Childhood Neurosis” reflected a general trend - an attempt to psychoanalytically examine the origins and nature of infantile fear. However, if in the first work attention was focused entirely on the ontogenetic, individual development of infantile fear, then in the second work the importance of phylogenetically inherited patterns that constitute the sediments of the history of human culture and influence the child was noted, as was the case in the case of “The Wolf Man.” .

Freud's recognition of the inherited phylogenetically acquired element of mental life was a logical consequence of those previous developments that he carried out between 1909 and 1918. That is, between the publications of “Analysis of a five-year-old boy’s phobia” and “From the history of a childhood neurosis.” These developments were carried out by him in his work “Totem and Taboo” (1913), where the founder of psychoanalysis showed why, at the initial stages of human development, savages showed an unusually high degree of fear of incest associated with the replacement of real blood kinship with totemistic kinship.

Based on historical material, Freud showed that the fear of incest in savages is a typical infantile trait and has a striking resemblance to the mental life of neurotics. Savage peoples felt threatened by incestuous desires, which later became unconscious, and therefore resorted to extremely strict measures to prevent them. For example, among some tribes, upon reaching a certain age, a boy leaves his mother’s house and moves to a “club house.” For others, the father cannot be alone with his daughter in the house. For others, if a brother and sister accidentally meet each other, then she hides in the bushes, and he passes by without turning his head. For others, the punishment for incest with a sister is death by hanging.

Consideration of the psychology of primitive religion and culture allowed Freud to draw parallels between the emergence of totemism in the Ancient world and the manifestation of childhood phobias within modern civilization; between fear of incest and various kinds of fears leading to neurotic diseases. The psychoanalytic approach to the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of man inevitably led to the need for a deeper, in comparison with previous ideas, study of the problem of fear both at the conceptual and therapeutic levels. Therefore, it is not surprising that in his subsequent works Freud repeatedly returned to understanding the problem of fear.

Focusing on the psychological understanding of fear, the founder of psychoanalysis raised the question of why neurotic patients experience fear to a much greater extent than other people considered healthy. In this regard, he attempted to consider from the standpoint of psychoanalysis not only and not so much fear as such, regardless of its carriers, but rather those mental states that are associated with the manifestation of neurotic fear. This approach to discussing the problem of fear required clarification of the conceptual apparatus and consideration of the mental mechanisms leading to the emergence of various forms of manifestation of fear in humans.

Neuroses of neurotics, or how normal people engage in self-deception

Neuroses appear when we are faced with destructive, contradictory or simply very unusual experiences that our mind is not able to cope with. These experiences go into the unconscious. Neurosis is the way in which “material” suppressed into the unconscious makes itself felt when it breaks through the protective mechanisms of our psyche. In everyday life, neuroses are ordinary negative experiences that manifest themselves in an intensified and obsessive form. A neurotic is a typical soap opera character who, instead of healthy relationships- love hysteria, instead of real achievements - self-affirmation, and instead of sanity - infantile selfishness. In general, neurosis is a normal state of a modern person.

Pictured are the fathers of psychoanalysis: Abraham Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud, Stanley Hall, Carl Jung

Freud's neuroses

There is an opinion that Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis was born thanks to an insight that overtook him during a hypnosis session. This session was conducted by Freud's teacher, Jean Martin Charcot. Freud observed how a hypnotized person was given the command - after awakening from hypnosis - to open an umbrella. The action with the umbrella took place indoors and therefore seemed especially pointless. Being sane after completing hypnosis, the person would open the umbrella, and when asked about the reason for this action, there was always a “rational” answer. A person, for example, could say that “there is a leak from the ceiling,” or that he is checking the functionality of his umbrella. Freud realized that people periodically perform actions without realizing the true motives for their performance. At the same time, we all find a “rational” explanation for such actions, in which we ourselves can be sincerely confident. Freud called this psychological defense mechanism “rationalization.”

A priori, a person is not able to understand life with his mind, because our mind is only a small grain of life. But the mind itself can firmly believe that “everything is clear” and “no miracles happen.” This shows the mechanical nature of the mind. All “incomprehensible” processes are repressed into the unconscious. The task of the mind in this case is only to find a suitable rational explanation - a self-deception that we buy into. It’s like: “everything is clear - you can calm down and move on.” A person is not able to perceive a miracle because he is not ready to digest it, because a miracle can traumatize his psyche. Everything too unusual and unusual in our lives is replaced by a rationalizing explanation of the mind. That’s why our life is so normal, so gray and familiar. We simply don't notice life. We are not aware of what is happening. We sleep in the dreams of a mind that “knows” and which, with its knowledge, deprives us of the truth.

Another psychological defense mechanism that I talk about in almost every article is projection. Its essence lies in the fact that a person is inclined to attribute to other people or external phenomena what is happening in his own mind. For example, if a person is in a bad mood, he sees the world in gloomy colors, and if he is in a good mood, then in rosy colors. The world itself does not change; it remains outside the mind. The projections through which we look at the world change.

Freud and his followers believed that a person “rationalizes” and “projects” only sometimes while in a state of neurosis. However, in my subjective opinion, a “normal” person does this almost continuously. We live without noticing life. All we know is our projection and rationalization of life. We do our best to protect ourselves from the awareness of our own existence here and now. And “rationalization” and “projection” according to Freud are cases when self-deception is so obvious that it is simply difficult not to notice it. When, seeing white, a person says “black”, and looking at “black” begins to explain this by the fall in the dollar, the self-deception mechanisms of the psychological self-defense of the mind reveal themselves clearly.

Neuroses of “healthy” people

Freud believed that unconscious “material” remains unconscious because we continuously expend our psychic energy to protect ourselves from this “stuff.” We spend our energy blocking and suppressing painful impressions, displacing them into the unconscious. This is where the corresponding psychological defense mechanisms take their names: “suppression” and “repression.” When, according to Freud, repressed material becomes available to consciousness, psychic energy is freed and can be used by the ego to achieve "healthy" goals. In other words, by getting rid of neuroses, we, among other things, can replenish the reserves of vital energy that were hitherto wasted on suppressing these neuroses in the subconscious. Plus, eliminating “blocks” of consciousness and releasing neuroses expands consciousness and increases our intellectual abilities. However, everything is not so simple here.

“Blocks” of consciousness, or in other words, psychological defense mechanisms, are not some kind of mistake of nature that clearly needs to be gotten rid of. They help us adapt to life as it happens. Blocks protect our helpless ego from unconditional reality, and help us “get along” with suppressed experiences. Their global destruction is fraught with a rapid collapse of the roof and a split in the psyche. However, as noted above, the “payment” for such a “roof” is a stop in development. Psychological “problems” are part of our growing up. Psychological defense mechanisms, suppressing experiences that are uncomfortable for the ego, block our development. Blocks narrow consciousness and limit perception. Instead of our guardians, mental defense mechanisms become our overseers. What should I do?

It makes sense to work with those “blocks” whose manifestation is disturbing at the current moment in life. That is, we should not rush headlong into the abyss of the subconscious, conquering all possible mental territories from it, according to Napoleon’s principle: “the main thing is to get involved in a fight, and then we will see...” In such a “fight” it is too easy to lose your head. Something similar happens to people when they use psychotropic drugs. Consciousness under psychedelics emerges chaotically into worlds beyond the boundaries of the ordinary mind. This can be interesting and exciting, or it can confront such layers of the unconscious that a person will then shy away from for the rest of his life. It is worth mastering “dissolution” techniques, using which we do not randomly reveal the subconscious, but work with what is already manifesting itself in our life. What has already been manifested is the stage that we are working on. And in front of the steam locomotive it is simply unsafe to run. On this path we gain patience, maintaining the understanding: “this is not reality, but a temporary experience.”

Psychoanalysis proposes to make material repressed into the unconscious accessible to consciousness. Through exacerbation, we experience suppressed experiences and free ourselves from neurosis, freeing up mental energy for further growth. And here, I dare to say, spiritual-esoteric teachings offer us the same thing. For example, in tantric teachings, an advanced sect adept is asked to contemplate pain, which begins to dissolve during one-pointed contemplation. A completely rational equation can be put between the burning of karma in Hinduism and liberation from neuroses in psychology. Our worldview is just a way to rationalize absolute reality. And the more familiar, correct and normal knowledge seems to us, the more clearly our rationalizing self-deception is manifested in it.

This is one of the reasons why I still don’t want to call myself a psychologist. It is too obvious that psychology, as well as various spiritual-esoteric teachings and other sciences, is simply a way of the mind to once again commit this greatest self-deception - to make the unconditional transcendental reality familiar and understandable. And progressman.ru in this sense is no exception.

Neuroses of Adler and Horney

Freud's student, psychologist Alfred Adler, viewed neuroses as “a self-defense strategy of the ego.” In everyday life, neurosis acts as an excuse, or a kind of “alibi” that protects the “prestige of the individual.” So, for example, instinctive animal drives are overgrown with glamorous effects and all sorts of “rational” explanations. In this regard, neurosis becomes a way of “growing up” and “developing” a neurotic. Pay attention to the quotation marks. Instead of real development, the neurotic is satisfied with ostentatious development, when success is not so much achieved as depicted. And if life disturbs his illusions about his own “greatness,” the neurotic experiences neurosis. A neurotic lifestyle is characterized by: self-doubt, low self-esteem, selfish goals, increased vulnerability, anxiety, communication problems, etc. Adler identified three main life “tasks” in which a neurotic conflict is highlighted: work, friendship and love are the most important and often the most problematic areas of life. The main causes of neurosis according to Adler come from our childhood. Among them: physical suffering, spoiling, excessive care, or vice versa – ignoring and rejection.

Psychologist Karen Horney believed that, unlike healthy people, a neurotic depends on other people’s opinions, on a partner, on his “modesty”, pride, power, prestige, fame, ambitions, etc. Dependence on other people’s opinions leads to the fact that a neurotic needs in positive assessments and approval of others. A neurotic person overestimates the importance of relationships and is extremely afraid of being abandoned, so sometimes he tends to avoid relationships altogether. A neurotic often needs protection and patronage. A neurotic person exhibits excessive modesty and uncertainty, and therefore is afraid to openly express his thoughts. At the same time, the neurotic needs power and prestige in order to become an object of admiration. A neurotic person is afraid of criticism, so he avoids making mistakes and suffering failures, as a result of which he tends to shy away from new endeavors, getting stuck in his comfort zone. As we can see, based on these signs, there are practically no healthy people in our society. As psychologists like to say: “we all come from childhood.”

About phobia according to Freud. Psychoanalysis.

In 1915, Freud wrote the work “The Unconscious,” which includes part of a previously written but unpublished work “Fear.” Freud explores phobia - hysteria of fear.

The process of symptom formation in hysteria of fear begins with the fact that the feeling does not meet the activity necessary for its implementation: “the activity, as it were, takes flight, is again taken away, and the unconscious libido of the rejected idea manifests itself in the form of fear.” During repetition, “the withdrawn activity is connected to a replacement idea, which, on the one hand, is associatively connected with the rejected idea, and on the other hand, due to the distance from it, remains not repressed (replacement through a shift) and allows for the rationalization of fear that is not yet amenable to delay.”

Thanks to the replacement representation, there is no need to return the repressed representation in the usual way, that is, through memory. The idea is both a “transmission link” and a starting point for the manifestation of the emotion of fear.

The second phase of the phobia is repetition: the formation of new replacement ideas, which, in an attempt to “restrain the development of the fear emanating from this (first) replacement idea,” constitute a chain of associations that isolates the first replacement idea.

“These precautions protect, of course, only against such excitations that penetrate to the substitute representation from the outside through perception, but they can never protect the substitute representation from excitations emanating from drives that penetrate to the substitute representation through its connection with the repressed representation.” . Thus, the object of fear in a phobia is doubled.

Repetition takes place not only in the repetition of the initial repression, but also in the fact that a certain symbol is formed, a sign in which the idea of ​​fear is written through associations. For example, the chain of “scary” associations of little Hans: father’s mustache → black on the horse’s face → black on the locomotive.

With the help of this mechanism, which is so clearly shown in phobia, the most important goal of the psyche is realized - the need to associate anxiety with an idea. The idea arises from anxiety.

In the 14th lecture, Freud writes that a terrible dream is the fulfillment of a “rejected wish,” speaking of censorship: “If it happens that for a moment she feels powerless before some dream desire that threatens to take her by surprise , then instead of distortion, she resorts to the last remedy left to her - to abandon the state of sleep under the influence of growing fear."

Freud explores the question of anxious awakening in the context of the question of desire and the prohibition associated with this desire.

When rejecting a terrible idea as an object, an obstacle arises - the work of grief, refusal of integration, inhibition: “with most obsessive ideas, the actual verbal formulation of the aggressive drive remains generally unknown to the ego.” The original source uses the word “Wortlaut” - “text”: “In den meisten ist der eigentliche Wortlaut der aggressiven Triebregung dem Ich überhaupt nicht bekannt.” The meaning of any act is destroyed, the meaning of assigning a symbol to autoerotic content, and anxiety remains on the plane of neurosis.

The rejected idea is replaced by affect: “affect appears, however, in a different place. The super-ego behaves as if there had been no repression, as if it knows the aggressive drive in its real verbal formula and in all its affective character, and relates to the ego as if proceeding from this assumption. I, not knowing any sin behind me, am forced, on the other hand, to feel a sense of guilt.”

The obsessive idea is blurred, scattered, undefined, and causes anxious anticipation: “Fear means a certain state of anticipation of danger and preparation for the latter, even if it is unknown.”

Symptoms of obsessional neurosis are push-pull and opposite (external) to each other: prohibitions, precautions, repentance, or, conversely, a symbolic replacement of satisfaction.

The triumph of symptom formation is the situation in which prohibition and satisfaction appear as a single motive. This is due to those early deprivations and denial of satisfaction that occurred during the period when the child passively watched the mother leave. He compensated for this departure by imagining with the help of objects how his mother came and went again.

From the thesis “Psychoanalytic study of castration anxiety in the description literary image the main character of Garin-Mikhailovsky’s tetralogy.”

Phobic neurosis

Poor attitude towards a child - best condition for the formation of neurosis

In the process of upbringing, a child, according to Freud, learns about prohibition Freud all these cravings, and they are suppressed. Even the very thought of their existence becomes unacceptable, unacceptable due to its incompatibility with the highest concepts of decency. It is not allowed into consciousness, is repressed into the “unconscious” and is subject to amnesia. The forces leading to the suppression of these drives, preventing their reflection in consciousness, Freud designated the term “censorship”, and the process of suppression itself - “repression”. Experiences that were repressed into the “unconscious” were called “complexes.” If subsequent experiences strengthen these complexes, then, according to Freud, diseases such as neuroses may arise.

Normally, the energy of repressed sexual desire, according to Freud, is translated (sublimated) into activities permitted by “censorship,” for example, charity, art, science, and religion. If this process turns out to be disrupted, then affectively charged complexes can break away from the experiences that originally gave rise to them and join some previously neutral ideas or mental acts, finding their symbolic expression in them.

- repressed “autoerotic complex” and associated increased self-love. This can lead, if you find yourself in a war situation, to the emergence of “war neurosis” with a feeling of fear for your life;
- hidden “homosexual complexes” leading to severe chronic alcoholism.

As a result, phenomena of obsession, some kind of hysterical symptom or pathological attraction may arise. Cases when “a repressed complex is attached to a somatic symptom” are designated by Freud with the term “conversion” (“conversion hysteria”). Thus, the cause of the disease, according to Freud, lies in complex experiences that arose in early childhood. It can remain hidden for a long time. For example, the feeling of disgust that arose in connection with sexual attraction to the father may not be detected for many years.

During an unsuccessful marriage, repressed feelings of disgust towards the husband can increase attraction to the father and lead to hysterical vomiting, symbolically reflecting disgust. Based on this theory, Freud proposed his own method of treating neuroses - psychoanalysis, based on neurosis recollection (“recovery”) of sexual experiences childhood(infantile-sexual complexes), allegedly the cause of neuroses. To identify these complexes, the patient’s statements (free associations, memories, dreams) are subject to special interpretation using the code of sexual symbolism developed by Freud. In his works, Freud showed the influence of the “unconscious” on mental activity in normal and pathological conditions, and revealed the mechanism of this influence:

Sublimation;
- crowding out;
- conversion;
- formation of “complexes”;
- psychological protection;
- flight into illness.

He put forward the principle of analytical, causal therapy. One of Freud's closest students, the Viennese psychiatrist Adler, denying the role of sexual desire in the etiology of neuroses, believed that they were based on a conflict between desires

to power and a feeling of inferiority (conflict of drives of the “I” according to Freud). According to Adler, it is typical for a child to have one neurosis on the one hand, the desire for power, on the other hand, a feeling of inferiority that he is trying to overcome different ways: either by direct protest, rudeness, stubbornness, or by obedience, diligence - and thus win the recognition of others. The desire for “overcompensation” is also characteristic: the stuttering Demosthenes becomes a great orator in need of self-affirmation of masculinity - a Don Juan, striving for more and more victories over women. Neurosis, according to Adler, is not a disease, but only a certain way of overcoming the feeling of one’s own inferiority and gaining a position in society.

Neurosis is a way of solving a person’s internal problems

H.Sul.Ivan (1953), like S.Noteu (1950), sees the origins of the conflicts underlying neuroses in interpersonal relationships mother and child, but at the same time emphasizes that these relationships can give rise to such neurotic manifestations as, for example:

Increased fearfulness;
- fears;
- aggressiveness;

By changing the attitude from “hot” to “cold” towards the traumatic factor, a permanent elimination of the painful symptom is achieved.

Sigmund Freud on neurosis

The Great Depression remains classic example financial crisis of a market economy. Studying the methods of getting out of it that were applied different countries, may be useful for testing crisis models against reality. The model of a financial crisis in the form of a growing money bubble should be tested based on an analysis of available historical materials showing how previous crises developed and what measures were successful in overcoming them. The most interesting.

The news was added: 04/07/2015. 11:16

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What does Sigmund Freud say about neurosis?

Yunatskevich P. I., Kulganov V. A.

A bad attitude towards a child is the best condition for the formation of neurosis

Sigmund Freud argued that in early childhood - usually in the first three years of life and no later than the fifth year - a child develops a number of drives that do not seem illicit or forbidden to him. These attractions are sexual in nature. For example:

Sexual attraction of a girl to her father, a boy to his mother (Oedipus complex);

Autoerotic desires (masturbation, narcissism, etc.);

Homosexual attractions, etc.

In the process of upbringing, the child, according to Freud, learns that all these drives are forbidden, and they are suppressed. Even the very thought of their existence becomes unacceptable, unacceptable due to its incompatibility with the highest concepts of decency. It is not allowed into consciousness, is repressed into the “unconscious” and is subject to amnesia. The forces leading to the suppression of these drives, preventing their reflection in consciousness, Freud designated the term “censorship,” and the process of suppression itself as “repression.” Experiences that were repressed into the “unconscious” were called “complexes”. If subsequent experiences strengthen these complexes, then, according to Freud, diseases such as neuroses may arise.

Normally, according to Freud, the energy of repressed sexual desire is translated (sublimated) into activities permitted by “censorship,” for example, charity, art, science, and religion. If this process turns out to be disrupted, then affectively charged complexes can break away from the experiences that originally gave rise to them and join some previously neutral ideas or mental acts, finding their symbolic expression in them.

Complex ideas associated with the male genital organ can be found in the mind in the form of:

Fear of the snake, which has become a symbol of the idea of ​​this organ;

The repressed “autoerotic complex” and the increased self-love associated with it. This can lead, if you find yourself in a war situation, to the emergence of “war neurosis” with a feeling of fear for your life;

Hidden “homosexual complexes” leading to severe chronic alcoholism.

As a result, phenomena of obsession, some kind of hysterical symptom or pathological attraction may arise. Cases when a “repressed complex is attached to a somatic symptom” are designated by Freud with the term “conversion” (“conversion hysteria”). Thus, the cause of the disease, according to Freud, lies in complex experiences that arose in early childhood. It can remain hidden for a long time. For example, the feeling of disgust that arose in connection with sexual attraction to the father may not be detected for many years.

During an unsuccessful marriage, repressed feelings of disgust towards the husband can increase attraction to the father and lead to hysterical vomiting, symbolically reflecting disgust. Based on this theory, Freud proposed his own method of treating neuroses - psychoanalysis, based on the restoration in memory (“autopsy”) of sexual experiences of childhood (infantile-sexual complexes), allegedly the cause of neuroses. To identify these complexes, the patient’s statements (free associations, memories, dreams) are subject to special interpretation using the code of sexual symbolism developed by Freud. In his works, Freud showed the influence of the “unconscious” on mental activity in normal and pathological conditions, and revealed the mechanism of this influence:

Flight into illness.

He put forward the principle of analytical, causal therapy. One of Freud's closest students, the Viennese psychiatrist Adler, denying the role of sexual desire in the etiology of neuroses, believed that they were based on the conflict between the desire for power and the feeling of one's own inferiority (the conflict of the “I” drives according to Freud). A child, according to Adler, is characterized, on the one hand, by a desire for power, and on the other, by a feeling of inferiority, which he tries to overcome in various ways: either by direct protest, rudeness, stubbornness, or by obedience, diligence - and thus win the recognition of others. At the same time, the desire for “overcompensation” is also characteristic: the stuttering Demosthenes becomes a great orator in need of self-affirmation of masculinity - a Don Juan, striving for more and more victories over women. Neurosis, according to Adler, is not a disease, but only a certain way of overcoming the feeling of one’s own inferiority and gaining a position in society.

Neurosis is a way of solving a person’s internal problems

Criticizing a number of positions of Freud and his followers, S. Homey (1966) sees the main role in the pathogenesis of neuroses not in sexual conflicts, but in a deficit of parental love.

Love for me is the main condition for the health of my nerves!

The latter, in her opinion, causes internal anxiety in the child and affects the subsequent formation of personality. It attaches great importance to the contradictions between the needs of an individual person and the possibilities for their satisfaction, as well as the relationship of the individual with others.

H. Sul.ivan (1953), like S. Noteu (1950), sees the origins of the conflicts underlying neuroses in the interpersonal relationships of mother and child, but at the same time emphasizes that these relationships can give rise to such neurotic manifestations as, For example:

Neuroses, according to V.N. Myasishchev, are based on unsuccessfully, irrationally and unproductively resolved contradictions between a person and the aspects of reality that are significant for him. The inability to find a rational and productive way out entails mental and physiological disorganization of the individual.

Hence, when constructing pathogenetic psychotherapy, Myasishchev recommends striving not only to help the patient understand the connection of psychotraumatic events with a system of relationships that are especially significant for him, but also to change this system as a whole - to rebuild the patient’s attitude towards the environment, to correct his life positions and attitudes.

If you can’t change your life, change your attitude towards it and maintain your health

By changing the attitude from “hot” to “cold” towards the traumatic factor, a permanent elimination of the painful symptom is achieved.

So, although as a result of the research carried out it was possible to reveal many aspects of the pathogenesis of neuroses, the intracellular, biochemical, and molecular changes underlying the disease have still remained undisclosed. This is the task of the future.

Sigmund Freud. Introduction to psychoanalysis. Lecture 25. General theory of neuroses. Fear

Ladies and gentlemen! What I told you in the last lecture about general nervousness, you probably considered the most incomplete and most insufficient of my messages. I know this and I think that nothing surprised you more than the fact that it said nothing about fear, which the majority of nervous patients complain about, considering it their most terrible suffering, and which can actually reach enormous intensity in them and lead to to the craziest actions. But, at least in this matter, I did not want to be brief; on the contrary, I decided to raise the problem of fear in nervous patients especially acutely and present it to you in detail.

I don’t need to introduce fear itself to you; Each of us has at one time or another experienced this feeling, or, more correctly, this affective state. But I believe that no one has ever asked himself seriously enough why neurotic patients experience fear to such a greater degree than others. Perhaps this was taken for granted; after all, the words “nervous” and “fearful”* are usually used instead of the other, as if they meant the same thing. But we have no right to this; There are fearful people who are not nervous at all, and there are nervous people who suffer from many symptoms and who have no tendency to fear.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the problem of fear is a key point at which the most diverse and most important questions, a mystery whose solution must shed light bright light for our entire spiritual life. I will not claim that I can give you a complete solution, but you, of course, expect that psychoanalysis approaches this topic completely differently than school medicine. There, it seems, they are primarily interested in the anatomical pathways through which the state of fear is realized. This means that Medulla oblongata is irritated, and the patient learns that he suffers from vagus nerve neurosis. Medulla oblongata is a very serious and beautiful object. I remember well how much time and labor I devoted to studying it many years ago. But today I must tell you that I do not know anything that would be further from the psychological understanding of fear than knowledge of the neural path along which its impulses go.

You can talk a lot about fear without mentioning nervousness at all. You will immediately understand me if I call such fear real as opposed to neurotic. Real fear is something completely rational and understandable for us. We will say about it that it represents a reaction to the perception of external danger, i.e., expected, perceived damage, is associated with the flight reflex, and it can be considered as an expression of the instinct of self-preservation. For what reason, that is, in front of what objects and in what situations fear appears, to a large extent, of course, depends on the state of our knowledge and on the feeling of our own strength in front of the outside world. We find it quite understandable that a savage is afraid of a cannon and is frightened by a solar eclipse, while a white man who knows how to handle this weapon and predict this event is under these conditions free from fear. At other times, it is greater knowledge that will cause fear, since it allows one to know in advance about the danger. Thus, a savage will be frightened by tracks in the forest, which say nothing to the ignorant, but indicate to the savage the proximity of a predatory animal, and an experienced navigator will look with horror at a cloud in the sky, which seems insignificant to a passenger, but foretells the sailor the approach of a hurricane.

Upon further reflection, it should be recognized that the opinion of real fear, that it is reasonable and appropriate, needs to be thoroughly verified. The only appropriate behavior in the face of threatening danger would be a calm assessment of one's own strengths in comparison with the magnitude of the threat and then a decision that promises the best hope for a successful outcome: flight or defense, and perhaps even an attack. But in this case there is no room for fear at all; everything that happens would have happened just as well and probably even better if it had not come to the development of fear. You also see that if fear is excessively strong, then it is extremely inappropriate; it then paralyzes any action, including flight. Typically, the reaction to danger consists of a mixture of the affect of fear and defensive action. A frightened animal is afraid and runs, but it is advisable to flee, not to be afraid.

So, it is tempting to argue that expressing fear is never a good thing. Perhaps a more thorough analysis of the situation of fear will help to better understand it. The first in it is readiness for danger, expressed in increased sensory attention and motor tension. This readiness to wait should, without hesitation, be recognized as a great advantage; its absence can lead to serious consequences. From it comes, on the one hand, motor action, first flight, at a higher level active defense, on the other hand, what we experience as a state of fear. The more the development of fear is limited only by preparation, only by a signal, the more unimpeded the transition of readiness for fear into action occurs, the more expediently the whole process proceeds. Therefore, in what we call fear, readiness for fear (Angstbereitschaft) seems to me expedient, but the development of fear is inexpedient.

I avoid going closer to the question of whether in our language the words “fear”, “afraid”, “fright” have the same or different meaning. I only believe that "fear" (Angst) refers to a state and does not express attention to the object, while "fear" (Furcht) indicates precisely the object. On the contrary, “fright” (Schreck) seems to have a special meaning, namely, it emphasizes the effect of danger when there was no readiness for fear. So one could say that a person protects himself from fear with fear.

The well-known polysemy and uncertainty of the use of the word “fear” cannot escape you. Fear is mostly understood as a subjective state that one enters due to the feeling of “developing fear” and is called affect. What is affect in a dynamic sense? In any case, something very complex. Affect, firstly, includes certain motor innervations or outflows of energy, and secondly, certain sensations, and of two kinds: perceptions of completed motor actions and direct sensations of pleasure and displeasure, which give affect, as they say, the main tone. But I don’t think that this enumeration would somehow affect the essence of affect. With some affects, apparently, one can look deeper and find out that the core uniting the named ensemble is the repetition of some specific significant experience. This experience could only be a very early impression of a very general, which must be attributed to the prehistoric period not of the individual, but of the species. In other words, the affective state is constructed in the same way as a hysterical attack, and, like it, is a residue of memory. A hysterical attack, therefore, can be compared with a newly formed individual affect, a normal affect - with the expression of a general hysteria that has become hereditary.

Do not think that what has been said here about affects is the recognized property of ordinary psychology. On the contrary, these are views that arose on the basis of psychoanalysis and are recognized only by it. What you can learn about affects in psychology, for example, the James-Lange theory, is incomprehensible and not discussed for us, psychoanalysts. But we also do not consider our knowledge of affects to be very reliable; This is only the first attempt to navigate this dark area. But I will continue: it seems to us that we know what early impression is repeated during the affect of fear. We believe that this impression from the act of birth, in which such a combination of unpleasant impressions and desires to discharge the state of fear occurs, has entered the body so thoroughly through an endless series of generations that separate individual cannot avoid the affect of fear, even if he, like the legendary Macduff, “was cut out of his mother’s body,” that is, he did not know the very act of birth. We cannot say what is the prototype of fear in other mammals. We also do not know what complex of sensations in these creatures is equivalent to our fear.

Perhaps you will be interested to hear how one can come to the idea that the act of birth is the source and prototype of the affect of fear. Speculation took the most insignificant part in this: rather, I borrowed it from the naive thinking of the people. Many years ago, when we young hospital doctors were sitting at the dinner table in a restaurant, an assistant in the obstetric clinic told us what a funny story happened at the last midwifery exam. One candidate was asked what it means when Mekonium (original feces, excrement) is found in the waste fluid during childbirth, and she answered without hesitation that the child was afraid. She was ridiculed and cut off. But in the depths of my soul I took her side and began to guess that the unfortunate woman from the people had discovered an important connection with the right instinct.

Now let's move on to neurotic fear: what forms of manifestation and relationship does fear have in neurotic patients? There is a lot to describe here. First, we find a general timidity, so to speak, a free fear, ready to attach itself to any more or less suitable content of the idea, influencing judgment, choosing expectations, lying in wait for any opportunity in order to find justification for itself. We call this state "fear of anticipation" or "fearful anticipation." Persons suffering from this fear always foresee the most terrible of all possibilities, consider any accident a harbinger of misfortune, and use any uncertainty in a bad sense. The tendency towards such an expectation of misfortune as a character trait is found in many people who cannot be called sick, they are considered too fearful or pessimistic; but an unusual degree of fear of expectation is always related to a nervous disease, which I called “anxiety neurosis” and ranks among the actual neuroses.

The second form of fear, in contrast to the one just described, is mentally more connected and connected to certain objects or situations. This is fear in the form of extremely diverse and often very strange “phobias”. Stanley Hall, a prominent American psychologist, took the trouble to present to us the whole series of these phobias under magnificent Greek names. This sounds like a list of the ten plagues of Egypt, but the number is significantly more than ten. Listen to what cannot become the object or content of a phobia: darkness, free space, open areas, cats, spiders, caterpillars, snakes, mice, thunderstorms, sharp objects, blood, closed spaces, human crowds, loneliness, crossing bridges, traveling by sea, by rail, etc. When you first try to navigate this In the confusion, three groups can be distinguished. Some of the objects and situations that inspire fear, and for us, normal people, are something creepy, related to danger, and therefore these phobias seem understandable to us, although exaggerated in their strength. So, most of us experience a feeling of disgust when meeting a snake. The phobia of snakes can be said to be universal, and C. Darwin very vividly described how he could not overcome the fear of an approaching snake, although he knew that he was protected from it by thick glass. To the second group we include cases related to danger, in which, however, we are accustomed not to attach importance to it and not to highlight it. This includes most situational phobias. We know that when traveling by rail there are more opportunities for accidents than at home, namely the possibility of a railway accident; We also know that a ship can sink and, as a rule, people drown, but we do not think about these dangers and travel by rail and sea without fear. It is also impossible to deny the possibility of falling into the river if the bridge collapses while you are crossing it, but this happens so rarely that it is not taken into account as a danger. And loneliness has its dangers, and we avoid it under certain circumstances; but there is no question that we cannot endure it under some conditions and only for a while. The same applies to a human crowd, an enclosed space, a thunderstorm, etc. What strikes us in these phobias of neurotics is not so much their content as their intensity. The fear of phobias is simply indescribable! And sometimes we get the impression that neurotics are afraid not of those things and situations that, under certain circumstances, can cause fear in us, but of those that they call by the same names.

There remains a third group of phobias that we cannot understand at all. If a strong adult man cannot, out of fear, cross the street or square of his hometown that he knows well, if a healthy, well-developed woman falls into unconscious fear because a cat touched the hem of her dress or a mouse slipped across the room, then what kind of connection can we make here? with the danger that obviously still exists for those suffering from phobias? In the cases of animal phobia related here, there can be no question of universal human antipathies, because, as if to demonstrate the opposite, there are many people who cannot pass by a cat without beckoning and petting it. The mouse, which women are so afraid of, at the same time serves as the best pet name; another girl, listening with pleasure to her beloved calling her that name, screams in horror when she sees a cute little creature with that name. In relation to a man suffering from fear of streets or squares, the only explanation we can give is that he behaves like Small child. Through upbringing, the child is directly taught to avoid such dangerous situations, and our agoraphobic is actually freed from fear if someone accompanies him when crossing the square.

Both forms of fear described here, free fear of anticipation and fear associated with phobias, are independent of each other.

One is not a higher stage of development of the other; they are found together only as an exception, and then as if by chance. The most severe general fearfulness does not necessarily manifest itself in phobias; persons whose whole life is limited by agoraphobia can be completely free from the pessimistic fear of expectation. Some phobias, for example, fear of squares, fear of the railway, are undoubtedly acquired only in adulthood, others, such as fear of the dark, thunderstorms, animals, apparently existed from the very beginning. Fears of the first kind are similar to serious illnesses; the latter seem more like oddities, whims. In someone who discovers these latter, as a rule, one can assume others that are similar. I must add that we attribute all these phobias to hysteria of fear, that is, we consider them as a disease akin to the well-known conversion hysteria.

The third form of neurotic fear confronts us with the riddle that we completely lose sight of the connection between fear and the threatening danger. This fear appears, for example, during hysteria, accompanying hysterical symptoms, or in any conditions of excitement, when we, however, could expect affective manifestations, but not the affect of fear, or in the form of an attack of free fear, independent of any conditions and equally incomprehensible both for us and for the patient. There can be no talk of any danger or any reason that could be inflated by exaggeration. During these spontaneous attacks we learn that the complex we call the state of fear is capable of breaking apart. The entire attack may be represented by a single, intense symptom - trembling, dizziness, palpitations, shortness of breath - and the usual feeling by which we recognize fear is absent or unclear, and yet these states, which we describe as "equivalents of fear", in all clinical and etiological respects can be equated to fear.

Now two questions arise. Can neurotic fear, in which danger plays no role or plays such an insignificant role, be brought into connection with real fear, which is always a reaction to danger? And how should we understand neurotic fear? For now we will stick to the assumption that where there is fear, there must also be something that people are afraid of.
To understand neurotic fear, clinical observation gives us some indications, the meaning of which I would like to explain to you.

a) It is not difficult to establish that fear of expectation, or general timidity, is closely dependent on certain processes in sex life, say, from a certain use of libido. The simplest and most instructive example of this kind is given to us by persons who are subject to so-called incomplete arousal, that is, in whom strong sexual arousals do not find a sufficient outlet and do not reach a satisfying end. This happens, for example, among men during marriage and among women whose husbands are not potent enough or, out of caution, reduce or interrupt sexual intercourse. Under these conditions, libidinal excitement disappears, and fear appears in its place, both in the form of fear of anticipation and in the form of seizures and their equivalents. Interruption of sexual intercourse out of caution, having become a sexual regime, so often becomes the cause of fear neurosis in men, but especially in women, that in medical practice it is recommended in such cases to first investigate this etiology. At the same time, one can be convinced countless times that when sexual deviations cease, the fear neurosis disappears.

The fact of a causal connection between sexual abstinence and a state of fear, as far as I know, is no longer disputed even by doctors who are far from psychoanalysis. However, I can well imagine that an attempt will be made to reverse the attitude and defend the opinion that we are talking about persons who are initially inclined to fear and are therefore restrained in sexually. But this is strongly opposed by the behavior of women, whose sexual manifestations are essentially passive in nature, that is, determined by treatment from a man. The more temperamental a woman is, the more prone she is to sexual intercourse and the more capable of satisfaction, the more likely she will react with fear to a man’s impotence or to coitus interruptus, while the same thing plays a much lesser role in sexually cold and low-libid women.

Sexual abstinence, which is currently so hotly recommended by doctors, has the same significance for the emergence of states of fear, of course, only in those cases when the libido, which is denied a satisfying outlet, is to an appropriate degree strong and has not been processed for the most part by sublimation. The decisive moment for I told you not all the observations confirming genetic connection between libido and fear. This also includes, for example, the influence on the occurrence of fear of certain periods of life, which can be attributed to a significant increase in libido production, such as puberty and menopause. In certain states of excitement one can directly observe the confusion of libido and fear and, ultimately, the replacement of libido with fear. The impression from all these facts is twofold: firstly, that it is a matter of accumulation of libido, which is deprived of its normal use, and secondly, that in this case one is located exclusively in the field of somatic processes. How fear arises from libido is not clear at first; one can only state that libido disappears, and fear appears in its place.

b) We take the second indication from the analysis of psychoneuroses, in particular hysteria. We have heard that with this disease there is often fear accompanied by symptoms, but also unrelated fear that manifests itself in the form of a seizure or a long-term condition. Patients cannot say what they are afraid of, and connect it through obvious secondary processing with suitable phobias, such as phobias of death, madness, and impact. If we analyze the situation that was the source of fear, or the symptoms accompanied by fear, then, as a rule, we can indicate which normal mental process did not take place and was replaced by the phenomenon of fear. Let us express it differently: we construct the unconscious process as if it had not been repressed and continued unhindered in consciousness. This process would also be accompanied by a certain affect, and here we learn, to our surprise, that this affect, which accompanies the normal process, after repression, is in any case replaced by fear, regardless of its quality. Consequently, if we have a hysterical state of fear, then its unconscious correlate may be a manifestation of a similar feeling, i.e., fear, shame, embarrassment, but also positive libidinal excitement or hostile-aggressive such as rage and annoyance. Thus, fear is a marketable coin for which all affects are or can be exchanged if the corresponding content of the representation is subject to repression.

c) The third fact we observe in patients with obsessive actions, whom fear miraculously seemed to spare. But if we try to prevent them from performing their compulsion, their washing, their ceremony, or if they themselves decide to try to give up any of their obsessions, then terrible fear forces them to submit to this obsession. We understand that the fear was covered up by a compulsive action and it was performed only to avoid fear. In obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the fear that should have arisen is replaced by the formation of symptoms, and if we turn to hysteria, then in this neurosis we will find a similar relationship: the result of the repression process will be either the development of pure fear, or fear with the formation of symptoms, or a more perfect formation symptoms without fear. So, in an abstract sense, it seems more correct to say that symptoms in general are formed only in order to circumvent the otherwise inevitable development of fear. Thanks to this understanding, fear seems to be at the center of our interest in the problems of neuroses.

From observations of fear neurosis, we concluded that the diversion of libido from its normal use, which gives rise to fear, occurs on the basis of somatic processes. From the analyzes of hysteria and obsessive-compulsive neurosis, it follows that the same distraction with the same result can also cause a failure of mental authorities. That's all we know about the emergence of neurotic fear; this still sounds rather vague. But so far I don’t see a path that would lead us further. The second task set before us - to establish the connection between neurotic fear, which is an abnormally used libido, and real fear, which corresponds to a reaction to danger, seems even more difficult to solve. I would like to think that we are talking about completely different things, but we have no way to distinguish real and neurotic fear from each other by sensation.

The sought-for connection is finally established if we assume the existence of the often asserted opposition between the ego and libido. As we know, the development of fear is the ego’s reaction to danger and a signal to take flight; Therefore, it is natural for us to assume that in neurotic fear the ego makes such an attempt to escape from the demands of its libido, treating this internal danger as if it were external. This justifies the assumption that where fear appears, there is also something that people are afraid of. But the analogy could be taken further. Just as an attempt to escape from external danger is replaced by perseverance and expedient measures of defense, so the development of neurotic fear gives way to the formation of symptoms, which fetters fear.

Now in the process of understanding another difficulty arises. Fear, which signifies the flight of the ego from its libido, however, itself arises from this libido. This is unclear and reminds us that, in essence, the libido of a person belongs to him and cannot be opposed as something external. This is still a dark area for us in the topical dynamics of the development of fear; it is unknown what mental energies are spent in this process and from what mental systems. I cannot promise you an answer to these questions either, but let us not miss the opportunity to follow the other two paths and again use direct observation and analytical research to help our speculative views. Let us turn to the emergence of fear in a child and to the origin of neurotic fear associated with phobias.

Fearfulness in children is something very common, and it seems quite difficult to distinguish whether it is a neurotic fear or a real one. Furthermore, the value of this distinction is called into question by the children's behavior. Because, on the one hand, we are not surprised if a child is afraid of all strangers, new situations and objects, and we very easily explain this reaction to ourselves by his weakness and ignorance. Thus, we attribute to the child a strong tendency towards real fear and would consider it quite appropriate if he inherited this timidity. In this regard, the child would only repeat the behavior primitive man and the modern savage, who, due to his ignorance and helplessness, is afraid of everything new and much that is currently familiar to us and no longer inspires fear. And it would be entirely consistent with our expectations if the child’s phobias were at least partly the same as we can assume in those primitive times of human development.

On the other hand, one cannot help but notice that not all children are equally fearful and that it is precisely those children who show particular fearfulness in front of all kinds of objects and situations who subsequently turn out to be nervous. Neurotic predisposition thus manifests itself in a clear tendency towards real fear; timidity seems to be something primary, and one comes to the conclusion that the child, and later the teenager, is afraid of the intensity of his libido precisely because he is afraid of everything. The emergence of fear from the libido is thus, as it were, denied, and if we trace the conditions for the emergence of real fear, then we can consistently come to the conclusion that the consciousness of one’s own weakness and helplessness - inferiority, in A. Adler’s terminology - is the final cause of neurosis, if this consciousness passes from childhood to adulthood.

It sounds so simple and captivating that it deserves our attention. True, this would take the solution to the riddle of nervousness to another plane. Preservation of feelings of inferiority - and with it. The first situational phobias in children are fear of darkness and loneliness; the first often persists for life, in both cases the beloved person who cares for him, i.e. the mother, is missing. I heard a child who was afraid of the dark scream in next room: “Auntie, talk to me, I’m scared.” - “But what’s in it for you? You don’t see me.” To which the child replies: “When someone speaks, it becomes lighter.” Longing for the dark is thus transformed into fear of the dark. We are far from considering neurotic fear only a secondary and special case of real fear; rather, we are convinced that in a small child, in the form of real fear, something manifests itself that has an essential common feature with neurotic fear - it arises from unused libido. The child seems to experience little real fear. He will run along the edge of the water, climb onto the window ledge, play with sharp objects and fire, in short, do everything that can harm him and cause concern to the nannies. And if in the end real fear awakens in him, then this is undoubtedly a matter of education, since he cannot be allowed to learn everything from his own experience.

If there are children who go further along the path of this education of fear and then themselves find dangers about which they were not warned, then in relation to them it is quite sufficient to explain that in their constitution there was a greater amount of libidinal need or that they were prematurely spoiled by libidinal satisfaction. It is not surprising that among these children there are also future neurotic patients: after all, we know that the emergence of neurosis is most of all determined by the inability long time tolerate significant accumulation of libido. You notice that the constitutional moment also receives its rights, although, however, we have never denied them them. We object only to the fact that because of this claim all others are neglected and a constitutional factor is introduced even where, according to it, overall results observation and analysis, there is no place or it occupies the very last place in importance.

Let us summarize the information from observations about the fearfulness of children: infantile fear has very little in common with real fear and, on the contrary, is very close to the neurotic fear of adults. Like the latter, it arises from unused libido and replaces the missing love object with an external object or situation.

Now you will be pleased to hear that the analysis of phobias cannot reveal much new. With them, in fact, the same thing happens as with childhood fear: unused libido continuously turns into seemingly real fear, and thus the slightest external danger replaces the demands of libido. There is nothing strange in this correspondence, because children's phobias are not only a prototype of later ones, which we classify as hysteria of fear, but also their immediate prerequisite and prelude. Any hysterical phobia goes back to childhood fear and continues it, even if it has a different content and, therefore, should be called differently. The difference between both diseases lies whether it is conscious or unconscious; we can indicate what corresponds to the unconscious idea. But about affect, which is a process of discharge, I said that transformation into fear, or, better, discharge (Abfuhr) in the form of fear, is the immediate fate of the repressed libido. I must add: not the only or final one. In neuroses, processes develop that strive to link this development of fear, and they succeed in this in various ways. With phobias, for example, two phases of the neurotic process can be clearly distinguished. The first represses and transforms libido into fear associated with external danger. The second is to put forward all those precautions and warnings, thereby preventing a collision with this danger, which is considered external. Repression corresponds to an attempt by the ego to escape from libido, which is perceived as a danger. The phobia can be compared to a trench against the external danger that the feared libido now represents. The weakness of the defense system for phobias lies, of course, in the fact that the fortress, so fortified with outside, remains open to attack from the inside. The projection of libidinal danger to the outside can never be completely successful. Therefore, with other neuroses, other defense systems are used against the possible development of fear. This is a very interesting area of ​​the psychology of neuroses, unfortunately, it will take us too far and requires more thorough specialized knowledge. I want to add just one more thing. I have already told you about the “reaction” that the I resorts to during repression and must constantly support it in order for the repression to take place. This counteraction is entrusted with the mission to bring into reality various shapes protection against the development of fear after repression.

A thorough development of the theory of fear,1 or at least its final formulation, appeared quite late in Freud's works, since his book Repression, Symptoms and Anxiety was published in 1920.

It is not that he had not dealt with this problem before, but he always remained within the framework of a relatively simple concept, which he himself later rejected. This first concept, sometimes called the first theory of fear, is nevertheless not without interest for the understanding of psychoanalytic theory and deserves to be presented here.

■ It can be stated quite simply. In his 1905 work, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” Freud gives it the following formulation: in an adult, as in a child, libido turns into fear from the moment when the drive cannot achieve satisfaction. In a remark added in 1920, he figuratively clarifies: “Neurotic fear is a product of libido, just as vinegar is a product of wine.” Considering the case of a child, he notices that fear, when it arises, is nothing more than a feeling of absence of a loved one. But he did not further develop this approach and, on the other hand, postulated that it was children with early or excessive sexual desire who were predisposed to fear.

Twelve years later, in his Introduction to Psychoanalysis, in the chapter devoted to this problem, he tries to clearly distinguish between real fear and neurotic fear. Real fear is triggered by the perception of external danger and is associated with the self-preservation reflex. Thus, it appears as something completely normal and understandable. In any case, he says, the defensive reaction can occur without being accompanied by a feeling of fear, which, if too intense, can interfere, paralyzing the subject. Flight is reasonable, he adds, but fear serves no purpose.

He returns to the ontogenetic concept outlined in 1905, clarifying it. The child reacts to the loss of the mother, which, he says, reproduces the fear that accompanies the act of birth, which is separation from the mother. He clarifies that this separation from the mother leaves the libido unclaimed, without an object to which it can turn. In this, the child’s fear anticipates the neurotic fear of an adult. In fact, a child almost never experiences real fear. The child is quite indifferent to really dangerous

1 In the original: “angoissc” is a term that has a semantic connotation of not just fear (pcur - fear, apprehension, apprehension (French)), but melancholy, horror, anxiety, tightness in the chest (approx.)

ny (situations, which is simply due to his inability to assess this danger.

Taking the state of things even more into account, he notes that this first loss of a beloved object can be replaced by a situation that has the same meaning. Thus, a child who does not see his mother in the dark thinks that he has lost her and reacts with fear every time he finds himself in the dark.

However, there is a big difference between a child and a non-child: last speech it is not about a libido that is not in short-term demand, but about a libido separated from a repressed representation. In speaking of repression1, Freud up to this point represented only a certain type of representation. Now he says that the affective charge, the quantum of energy associated with this idea, is transformed into fear, regardless of its quality under conditions of normal expression. He even talks about détente in the form of fear. Naturally, he notes that neurotic processes are not reduced to this reproduction of fear, and for phobia, for example, he further introduces projection: i.e. fear is associated with external danger. On the other hand, the formation of symptoms is aimed at complicating contacts with an external phobic object (a process that is interesting to note, since we will find it in the second theory of fear).

Let us note that at this time Freud returned to the theory of Otto Rank, although without mentioning his name, and clarified that neurotic fear is formed around a core that forms a repetition of some significant and important event belonging to the subject’s past, and that, on the other hand, , this initial event can only be birth.

From a descriptive point of view, he distinguishes between what are called anticipation fears (anticipation anxiety), which are not triggered by a specific situation, and phobias, where there is an object identified as the cause that triggers this fear.

Both from a nosogoraphic point of view and from an etiopathological point of view, he appeals, on the one hand, to his theory of actual neurosis, the source of which he considers the lack of sexual release. He will clarify that sexual abstinence contributes to the reproduction of fears only in cases where the libido does not find a satisfying distraction or is largely not sublimated.

On the other hand, he notices that the category of neurotic or obsessive patients is replenished by those suffering from pathological fears. When these patients are limited in the performance of their rituals and ceremonies, it can be stated that they are experiencing an intense S"m mechanism of repression in Chapter 3.

fear, which is thus only dissimulated by the symptom. In obsessive neurosis, fear is replaced by a symptom, which suggests that symptoms are formed only to prevent the development of fear, which without them would become inevitable.

Concluding what has been said and moving on to the future topic of repression, we can cite one phrase from Freud: “Fear is a bargaining chip into which any affective excitations are or can be converted when their content is removed from representation or subjected to repression.” This is what is sometimes summarized in the formula: fear is generated by the repressed.

■ But it is clear that in Repression, Symptoms and Fears, Freud gives a more elaborate and more satisfying formulation of the theory of fear (often called the second theory of fear). Fear appears in it as a real function of the I. It is something like a signal of displeasure, allowing the mobilization of all types of energy necessary to combat the need of attraction emanating from the Id, which, however, remains isolated in the face of this mobilization of the I. In fact, only the I is organized It is not organized and cannot direct all its necessary forces to support the repressed need. Thus, from the very beginning it is affirmed that the Self (instance) is the real seat of fear, and the previous concept, which assumed that the energy of the repressed need automatically turns into fear, is rejected.

In addition, the economic, energy problem no longer occupies first place: fear is not caused every time as a new manifestation, it reproduces in the form emotional state an already existing mnestic trace. More than before, Freud seeks to ground his conceptualization in clear clinical considerations.

Noting that fear does not manifest itself at all in conversion hysteria and that in obsessive neurosis it is largely covered, masked, by symptoms, Freud is based on studies of phobia." As an example, he uses the childhood phobia of animals, the phobia of little Hans2. The object of this phobia what is known for sure is the fear of being bitten by a horse. So, analysis reveals ambivalence and aggressiveness directed towards the father. Freud postulates that the compulsive desire subjected to repression is aggression directed against the father, and that the only neurotic manifestation is.

"Or hysteria of fear, different from neurosis of fear (see Chapter 8).

For a more detailed clinical presentation we refer to Five Cases of Psychoanalysis.

replacing the image of the father with a horse. Along the way, he notices that it is this substitution that forms the symptom. The fear of being bitten can (“not a stretch,” he says) be explained as the fear that the horse will bite off his genitals, castrating him. Fear, therefore, is the fear of castration and in the case of phobias (and in a broader sense, neuroses) within the framework of the Oedipus complex must be replaced. He notes that another Oedipal component - tenderness towards the father - also triggers the fear of castration, placing the father in the place of the mother in accordance with the feminine position (which is even more obvious in the case of The Man with the Wolves1).

This concept led to significant changes. Fear is no longer automatically a product associated with repression; rather, it is this fear of castration that carries out repression. Neurotic fear, thus, approaches the fear of real danger or assessed as such by the subject.

It seems that this concept can be extended to all types of phobias, especially the agoraphobic type, where the fear of castration can directly form the “fear of temptation.” This connection seems obvious in syphilophobia.

Comparing obsessive neurosis with phobia, it can be stated that the only difference is that in obsessive neurosis the situation of danger is formed due to the hostility of the superego, i.e. danger is not projected outward, but, on the contrary, internalized. This leads to an understanding of the punishment of the superego as a derivative form of castration.

Expanding the problem even further, Freud turns to traumatic neuroses. But in this case, the mere fact of being exposed to real danger is not enough for the formation of neurosis. In fact, fear reactivates mnestic traces. However, something like death can never leave clearly identifiable traces. Therefore, the fear of death should be understood as an analogue of the fear of castration.

As for the fear of a small child, the reaction to the absence of the mother, to the “loss of an object,” it can be comparable with the fear of birth - separation from the mother, as well as with the fear of castration, equally triggered by the threat of loss of a highly loaded object. More precisely, between birth and by the later absence of the mother there is closeness from an economic point of view. In both cases the tension increases either due to the sudden introduction of external stimulation at the time of birth, or due to hunger in the case of separation from the mother. Later this separation triggers fear, even if there is no feeling. hunger, which leads to the transition of involuntary automatic fear associated with a threatening situation to premeditated fear, see footnote 1 on p. 88.

produced as a danger signal. This is the concept of signal fear

(essentially a fear signal) is an important contribution to this theoretical elaboration. Fear, thus, becomes an element of the defense function of the Self. So, in any case, it is the loss of an object or the threat of this loss that is the determining condition of fear. Freud notes that in this perspective, the fear of castration can also be understood as the fact that the possession of a penis guarantees the possibility of a new union with the mother (in reality, her substitute - a woman). Thus, his loss is tantamount to losing his mother again.

It is even more difficult to understand how the fear of castration turns into moral fear, i.e. fear of the superego. It can be assumed that the threat may be the loss of love of the super-ego, which, as is known, is the heir of the Oedipus complex, i.e. parental authorities. Freud adds: “The extreme form which this fear of the superego takes is, it seems to me, the fear of death, i.e. fear of the Super-Ego, projected onto the omnipotence of fate"1.

Note that, as is his habit, he does not dwell at all on the case of girls and women in general, who, in his opinion, “nevertheless, are more predisposed to neurosis.” For her, he says, it is not about the threat of losing an object, but, on the contrary, from the very beginning about the threat of loss of love on the part of this object, which, by the way, brings the girl’s fear closer to the fear of the super-ego, although in “Introduction to Narcissism” he insisted that the superego in a girl is a later development than in a boy. In the appendices to his work, which are, in fact, the final edition and generalization, Freud, however, clarifies that there are grounds to distinguish between real fear (a threat from an external object) and neurotic fear (born from the need of attraction). Fear in any case is associated with our confusion in the face of danger. He calls a situation of actually experienced confusion traumatic and dangerous - a situation reminiscent of a traumatic situation, i.e. allowing an individual to anticipate danger and prepare for it. At this level, two modalities of fear can be distinguished. In the first case, we are talking about involuntary fear, explained economically, when a situation of danger arises, similar to a situation of confusion. This is automatic fear. As for signal fear, it arises when a situation of this kind only threatens. It appears

The ego is exposed to fear both for the purpose of “vaccination” and for the purpose of mobilizing its defenses.

1 For the significant contribution of M. Klein and her school to the study of psychotic types of fear (paranoid fear, fear of dismemberment of the Self and the ideal introspective object), see Chapter. 9 and 10.

Once again, we note that the second development reproduces some fundamental aspects of the first. But the second theory of fear introduces, as we have seen, an important concept: the economic point of view as a whole cannot give a complete overview of mental activity. Some functions must be considered from an information point of view. Doesn't this, however, resurrect the “small amounts of energy” about which Freud postulated that they connect the processes of thinking, processes in which, importantly, there is a transformation of transmitted information, and not transmitted energy (minimal).