The Theory of Psychoanalysis

by C. G. Jung

The Etiological Significance of Failure of Adaptation

Probably this man knows very well that it would have been physically possible to overcome the difficulty, that he was only morally incapable of doing so. He rejects this idea on account of its painful nature. He is so conceited that he cannot admit to himself his cowardice. He brags of his courage and prefers to declare things impossible rather than his own courage inadequate. But through this behavior he comes into opposition with his own self: on the one hand he has a right view of the situation, on the other he hides this knowledge from himself, behind the illusion of his infallible courage. He represses the proper view, and forcibly tries to impress his subjective, illusive opinion upon reality. The result of this contradiction is that the libido is divided, and that the two parts are directed against one another. He opposes his wish to climb a mountain by his artificial self-created opinion, that its ascent is impossible. He does not turn to the real impossibility, but to an artificial one, to a self-given limitation; thus he is in disharmony with himself, and from this moment has an internal conflict. Now insight into his cowardice will get the upper hand; now obstinacy and pride. In either case the libido is engaged in a useless civil war. Thus the man becomes incapable of any enterprise. He will never realize his wish to climb a mountain, and he goes perfectly astray as to his moral qualities. He is therefore less capable of performing his work, he is not fully adapted, he can be compared to a neurotic patient. The libido which withdrew from before this difficulty has neither led to honest self-criticism, nor to a desperate struggle to overcome the obstacle; it has only been used to maintain his cheap pretence that the ascent was really impossible, even heroic courage could have availed nothing. Such a reaction is called an infantile reaction. It is very characteristic of children, and of naïve minds, not to find the fault in their own shortcomings, but in external circumstances, and to impute to these their own subjective judgment. This man solves his problem in an infantile way, that is, he replaces the suitable mode of adaptation of our former case by a mode of adaptation belonging to the infantile mind. This is regression. His libido withdraws from an obstacle which cannot be surmounted, and replaces a real action by an infantile illusion. These cases are very commonly met with in practice among neurotics. I will remind you here of those well-known cases in which young girls become hysterical with curious suddenness just when they are called upon to decide about their engagements. As an instance, I should like to describe to you the case of two sisters, separated only by one year in age. They were similar in capacities and characters; their education was the same; they grew up in the same surroundings, and under the influence of their parents. Both were healthy; neither the one nor the other showed any nervous symptoms. An attentive observer might have discovered that the elder daughter was the more beloved by the parents. This affection depended on a certain sensitiveness which this daughter showed. She asked for more affection than the younger one, was also somewhat precocious and more serious. Besides, she showed some charming childish traits, just those things which, through their slightly capricious and unbalanced character, make a personality especially charming. No wonder that father and mother had a great joy in their elder daughter. As both sisters became of marriageable age, almost at the same time they became intimately acquainted with two young men, and the possibility of their marriages soon approached. As is generally the case, certain difficulties existed. Both girls were young and had very little experience of the world. Both men were relatively young too, and in positions which might have been better; they were only at the beginning of a career, but nevertheless, both were capable young men. Both girls lived in a social atmosphere which gave them the right to certain social expectations. It was a situation in which a certain doubt as to the suitability of either marriage was permissible. Moreover, both girls were insufficiently acquainted with their prospective husbands, and were therefore not quite sure of their love. There were many hesitations and doubts. Here it was noticed that the elder girl always showed greater waverings in her decisions. From these hesitations some painful moments arose between the girls and the young men, who naturally longed for more certainty. At such moments the elder sister was much more excited than the younger one. Several times she went weeping to her mother, complaining of her own hesitation. The younger one was somewhat more decided, and put an end to the unsettled situation by accepting her suitor. She thus got over her difficulty and the further events ran smoothly. As soon as the admirer of the elder sister became aware that the younger one had put matters on a surer footing, he rushed to his lady and begged in a somewhat passionate way for her acceptance. His passion irritated and frightened her a little, although she was really inclined to follow her sister’s example. She answered in a somewhat haughty and offhand way. He replied with sharp reproaches, causing her to get still more excited. The end was a scene with tears, and he went away in an angry mood. At home, he told the story to his mother, who expressed the opinion that this girl was really unsuitable for him, and that it would be perhaps better to choose some one else. The girl, for her part, doubted very much if she really loved this man. It suddenly seemed to her impossible to follow him to an unknown destiny, and to be obliged to leave her beloved parents. From that moment, she was depressed; she showed unmistakable signs of the greatest jealousy towards her sister, but would neither see nor admit that she was jealous. The former affectionate relations with her parents changed also. Instead of her earlier childlike affection, she betrayed a lamentable state of mind, which increased sometimes to pronounced irritability; weeks of depression ensued. Whilst the younger sister celebrated her wedding, the elder went to a distant health-resort for a nervous intestinal trouble. I shall not continue the history of the disease; it ended in an ordinary hysteria.

In analyzing this case, great resistance to the sexual problem was found. The resistance depended on many perverse phantasies, the existence of which would not be admitted by the patient. The question, whence arose such perverse phantasies, so unexpected in a young girl, brought us to the discovery that once as a child, eight years old, she had found herself suddenly confronted in the street by an exhibitionist. She was rooted to the spot by fright, and even much later ugly images persecuted her in her dreams. Her younger sister was with her at the time. The night after the patient told me this, she dreamed of a man in a gray suit, who seemed about to do in front of her what the exhibitionist had done. She awoke with a cry of terror. The first association to the gray suit was a suit of her father’s, which he had been wearing on an excursion which she made with him when she was about six years old. This dream connects the father, without any doubt, with the exhibitionist. This must be done for some reason. Did something happen with the father, which could possibly call forth this association? This problem met with great resistance from the patient. But she could not get rid of it. At the next sitting she reproduced some early reminiscences, when she had noticed her father undressing himself. Again, she came one day excited and terribly shaken, and told me that she had had an abominable vision, absolutely distinct. In bed at night, she felt herself again a child of two or three years old, and she saw her father standing by her bed in an obscene attitude. The story was gasped out piece by piece, obviously with the greatest internal struggle. This was followed by violent reproaches, of how dreadful it is that a father should ever behave to his child in such a terrible manner.

Nothing is less probable than that the father really did this. It is only a phantasy, probably first constructed in the course of the analysis from that same need of discovering a cause which once induced the physician to form the theory that hysteria was only caused by such impressions. This case seemed to me suitable to demonstrate the meaning of the theory of regression, and to show at the same time the source of the theoretical mistakes so far. We saw that both sisters were originally only slightly different. From the moment of the engagement their ways were totally separated. They seemed now to have quite different characters. The one, vigorous in health, and enjoying life, was a good and courageous woman, willing to undertake the natural demands of life; the other was sad, ill-tempered, full of bitterness and malice, disinclined to make any effort towards a reasonable life, egotistical, quibbling, and a nuisance to all about her. This striking difference was only brought out when the one sister happily passed through the difficulties of her engagement, whilst the other did not. For both, it hung to a certain extent only on a hair, whether the affair would be broken off or not. The younger one, somewhat calmer, was therefore more deliberate, and able to find the right word at the right moment. The elder one was more spoiled and more sensitive, consequently more influenced by her emotions, and could not find the right word, nor had she the courage to sacrifice her pride to put things straight afterwards. This little circumstance had a very important effect. Originally the conditions were much the same for both sisters. The greater sensitiveness of the elder produced the difference. The question now is: Whence arose this sensitiveness with its unfortunate results? The analysis demonstrated the existence of an extraordinarily developed sexuality of infantile phantastic character; in addition, an incestuous phantasy towards the father. We have a quick and easy solution of the problem of this sensitiveness, if we admit that these phantasies had a lively, and therefore effective existence. We might thus readily understand why this girl was so sensitive. She was shut up in her own phantasies and strongly attached to her father. Under these circumstances, it would have been really a wonder had she been willing to love and marry another man. The more we pursue our need for a causation, and pursue the development of these phantasies back to their beginning, the greater grow the difficulties of the analysis, that is to say, the resistances as we call them. At the end we should find that impressive scene, that obscene act, whose improbability has already been established. This scene has exactly the character of a subsequent phantastic formation. Therefore, we have to conceive these difficulties, which we called “resistances,” at least in this part of the analysis, as an opposition of the patient against the formation of such phantasies, and not as a resistance against the conscious admittance of a painful remembrance.

You will ask with astonishment, to what aim the patient contrives such a phantasy? You will even be inclined to suggest that the physician forced the patient to invent it, otherwise she would probably never have produced such an absurd idea. I do not venture to doubt that there have been cases in which, by dint of the physician’s desire to find a cause, especially under the influence of the shock-theory, the patient has been brought to contrive such phantasies. But the physician would never have come to this theory, had he not followed the patient’s line of thought, thus taking part in this retrograde movement of the libido which we call regression. The physician, consequently, only carried right through to its consequence what the patient was afraid to carry out, namely, a regression, a falling back of the libido to its former desires. The analysis, in following the libido-regression, does not always follow the exact way marked by its historical development, but very often rather a later phantasy, which only partly depends on former realities. In our case, only some of the circumstances are real, and it is but much later that they get their great importance, namely, at the moment when the libido regresses. Wherever the libido takes hold of a reminiscence, we may expect that this reminiscence will be elaborated and altered, as everything that is touched by the libido revives, takes on dramatic form, and becomes systematized. We have to admit that, in our case, almost the greater part of these phantasies became significant subsequently, after the libido had made a regression, after it had taken hold of everything that could be suitable, and had made out of all this a phantasy. Then that phantasy, keeping pace with the retrograde movement of the libido, came back at last to the father and put upon him all the infantile sexual desires. Even so it was thought in ancient times that the golden age of Paradise lay in the past! In the case before us we know that all the phantasies brought out by analysis did become subsequently of importance. From this standpoint only, we are not able to explain the beginning of the neurosis; we should constantly move in a circle. The critical moment for this neurosis was that in which the girl and man were inclined to love one another, but in which an inopportune sensitiveness on the part of the patient caused the opportunity to slip by.

The Conception of Sensitiveness.—We might say, and the psychoanalytical conception inclines in this direction, that this critical sensitiveness arises from some peculiar psychological personal history, which determined this end. We know that such sensitiveness in a psychogenic neurosis is always a symptom of a discord within the subject’s self, a symptom of a struggle between two divergent tendencies. Both tendencies have their own previous psychological story. In this case, we are able to show that this special resistance, the content of that critical sensitiveness, is, as a matter of fact, connected in the patient’s previous history, with certain infantile sexual manifestations, and also with that so-called traumatic event—all things which are capable of casting a shadow on sexuality. This would be so far plausible if the sister of the patient had not lived more or less the same life, without experiencing all these consequences. I mean, she did not develop a neurosis. So we have to agree that the patient experienced these things in a special way, perhaps more intensely than the younger one. Perhaps also, the events of her earlier childhood were to her of a disproportionate importance. But if it had been the case to such a marked extent, something of it would surely have been noticed earlier. In later youth, the earlier events of childhood were as much forgotten by the patient as by her sister. Another supposition is therefore possible. This critical sensitiveness is not the consequence of the special previous past history, but springs from something that had existed all along. A careful observer of small children can notice, even in early infancy, any unusual sensitiveness. I once analyzed a hysterical patient who showed me a letter written by her mother when this patient was two and a half years old. Her mother wrote about her and her sister. The elder was always good-tempered and enterprising, but the other was always in difficulties with both people and things. The first one became in later life hysterical, the other one katatonic. These far-reaching differences, which go back into earliest childhood, cannot depend on the more or less accidental events of life, but have to be considered as being innate differences. From this point of view, we cannot any longer pretend that her special previous psychological history caused this sensitiveness at that critical moment; it would be more correct to say: This innate sensitiveness is manifested most distinctly in uncommon situations.

This surplus of sensitiveness is found very often as an enrichment of a personality contributing even more to the charm of the character than to its detriment. But in difficult and uncommon situations the advantage very often turns into a disadvantage, as the inopportunely excited emotion renders calm consideration impossible. Nothing could be more incorrect than to consider this sensitiveness as eo ipso a morbid constituent of a character. If it really were so, we should have to regard at least one third of humanity as pathological. Only if the consequences of this sensitiveness are destructive to the individual have we a right to consider this quality as abnormal.

Primary Sensitiveness and Regression.—We come to this difficulty when we crudely oppose the two conceptions as to the significance of the previous psychological history as we have done here; in reality, the two are not mutually exclusive. A certain innate sensitiveness leads to a special psychological history, to special reactions to infantile events, which are not without their own influence on the development of the childish conception of life. Events bound up with powerful impressions can never pass without leaving some trace on sensitive people. Some of these often remain effective throughout life, and such events can exert an apparently determining influence on the whole mental development. Dirty and disillusional experiences in the domain of sexuality are specially apt to frighten a sensitive person for years and years. Under these conditions, the mere thought of sexuality raises the greatest resistances. As the creation of the shock-theory proved, we are too much inclined, in consequence of our knowledge of such cases, to attribute the emotional development of a person more or less to accidents. The earlier shock-theory went too far in this respect. We must never forget that the world is, in the first place, a subjective phenomenon. The impressions we receive from these happenings are also our own doing. It is not the case that the impressions are forced on us unconditionally, but our disposition gives the value to the impressions. A man with stored-up libido will as a rule have quite different impressions, much more vivid impressions, than one who organizes his libido into a rich activity. Such a sensitive person will have a more profound impression from certain events which might harmlessly pass over a less sensitive subject. Therefore, in conjunction with the accidental impression, we have to consider seriously the subjective conditions. Our former considerations, and the observation of the concrete case especially, show us that the important subjective condition is the regression. It is shown by experience in practice, that the effect of regression is so enormous, so important and so impressive, that we might perhaps be inclined to attribute the effect of accidental events to the mechanism of regression only. Without any doubt, there are cases in which everything is dramatized, where even the traumatic events are artefacts of the imagination, and in which the few real events are subsequently entirely distorted through phantastic elaboration. We can simply say, that there is not a single case of neurosis, in which the emotional value of the preceding event is not considerably aggravated through the regression of libido, and even where great parts of the infantile development seem to be of extraordinary importance, they only gain this through regression.

As is always the case, truth is found in the middle. The previous history has certainly a determining historic value, which is reinforced by the regression. Sometimes the traumatic significance of the previous history comes more into the foreground; sometimes only the regressive meaning. These observations have naturally to be applied to the infantile sexual events too. Obviously there are cases in which brutal sexual accidents justify the shadow thrown on sexuality, and explain thoroughly the later resistance of the individual towards sexuality. Dreadful impressions other than sexual can also sometimes leave behind a permanent feeling of insecurity, which may determine the individual in a hesitating attitude towards reality. Where real events of undoubted traumatic potentiality are wanting—as is generally the case with neurosis—there the mechanism of regression prevails. Of course, you could object that we have no criterion for the potential effect of the trauma or shock, as this is a highly relative conception. It is not quite so; we have in the standard of the average normal a criterion for the potential effect of a shock. Whatever is capable of making a strong and persistent impression upon a normal person must be considered as having a determining influence for neurotics also. But we may not straightway attribute any importance, even in neurosis, to impressions which in a normal case would disappear and be forgotten. In most of the cases where any event has an unexpected traumatic influence, we shall find in all probability a regression, that is to say, a secondary phantastic dramatization. The earlier in childhood an impression is said to have arisen, the more suspicious is its reality. Animals and primitive people have not that readiness in reproducing memories from a single impression which we find among civilized people. Very young children have by no means that impressionability which we find in older children. A certain higher development of the mental faculties is a necessary condition for impressionability. Therefore we may agree that the earlier a patient places some significant event in his childhood, the more likely it will be a phantastic and regressive one. Important impressions are only to be expected from later youth. At any rate, we have generally to attribute to the events of earliest childhood, that is, from the fifth year backwards, but a regressive importance. Sometimes the regression does play an overwhelming part in later years, but even then one must not ascribe too little importance to accidental experiences. It is well known that, in the later course of a neurosis, the accidental events and the regression together form a vicious circle. The withdrawal from the experiences of life leads to regression, and the regression aggravates the resistances towards life.

In the conception of regression psychoanalysis has made one of the most important discoveries which have been made in this sphere. Not only has the earlier exposition of the genesis of neurosis been already subverted, or at least widely modified, but, at the same time, the actual conflict has received its proper valuation.