Freud's fears and neuroses. Where does human energy come from?

Third (structural) theory of the mental apparatus, the main role in the occurrence of mental disorders and disorders is assigned to dysfunctions of the ego. Difficult task maintaining a balance between the conflicting requirements 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 ways of protection from it. It is in the ego 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 the uncontrolled growth of the power of unconscious desires. Unlike fear of reality(a term denoting the experience of a real danger, an external threat), this fear is often experienced as a feeling of anxiety that does not have a specific object, but is entirely associated with the Self:

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

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 attraction seeks 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 in more severe cases - fear ".

This kind of neurotic fear is quite common in dreams, it can accompany the analysis of the repressed and cause strong resistance to awareness of drives. In his work "Sinister" (1919), Freud lists among the most frightening, creepy experiences, 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 takes place when the repressed infantile complex is again enlivened by a certain impression, or if previously overcome primitive ideas are again confirmed" .

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

One of my clients once complained about intense fear before snakes. Judging by the story, it was a real phobia - at the sight of similar objects, or even just talking about the fact that they come across in the most unexpected places (in the country, outside the city), the girl began to scream, and chance meeting with a harmless snake ended in a terrifying tantrum. In a conversation about the causes 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, was completely absent.

It further transpired 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. The fear of snakes as a symptom has replaced the recognition of one's subordination to the desire of the Other. 21 . It is quite obvious that the phobic reaction prevented the client from coming into 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 assigned to fear in understanding how exactly the ego maintains balance in the psyche system is due to the affective dynamics of the psychoanalytic procedure. The fact is that the interpretation given by the therapist, no matter how timely, correct and accurate it may be, is by no means 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 as 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 an arbitrary, not a spontaneous act), and it can be recognized by the emotional shock that accompanies the transformation of affective experience in the course of therapy.

A specific form of such experience is fear of objectifying the results of therapy, which is very common. "Writing" psychotherapists and teachers often face the fear of clients that work with them will be presented as an example, a clinical illustration of the theory. Moreover, the appeal to the universally accepted forms of confidentiality does not change anything - "what if someone guesses and they all recognize me."

In one of the clients, this fear was expressed in an attempt to forbid me not only to publish, but even to describe the course of his therapy. At the same time, he always stared intently at my working 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 of privacy being violated, but rather a psychotic fear of "being seen". Since this latter is specific to the problems of gnX., the therapy of which has been sustained in line with structural psychoanalysis, a further description of it is placed in the appropriate chapter. What I wanted to emphasize here is that understanding the nature of the client's fear helped further the analysis.

In therapeutic practice, an open discussion of the 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 is not moving forward because of the rationalizing resistances with which the client encounters interpretations, it is always helpful to initiate a regression by talking about early childhood fears, fear of death, fear of novelty, and any other forms of fear that have been present in his life. Sometimes the client himself considers fear to be the basis of his problems, but more often the symptomatology of fear becomes the focus of therapy in the analysis of dreams.

Materials on psychology: In order to understand any object in this world, we must first of all ask ourselves what parts the object consists of and how it is composed of them, where does its energy come from and how was originally developed psychoanalysis mainly for the treatment of neuroses. Over time, it was found to be of benefit not only to obvious neurotics, but to many others. Of the most common types of neurosis considered by the self-sufficient nature of dream images, their autonomy, recognized not only by Hillman, but also by other post-Jungians, does not exclude, but suggests the widespread use of amplification (enrichment) procedures in working with them. This method, thought up 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

1. Natural;
2. pathological fear.

Psychoanalysis of fear

1. "It" - unconscious, unidentified, instinctive;
2. "I" - conscious and rational thoughts and feelings;
3. "Over I" - sociality, conscience.

Freud: children's fears

Video: “Children's fears. Causes of children's fears. What to do?"

Chapter 9

Anxiety 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 far from always a person knows the reason for his fear and is able to figure out what worries him and why he is afraid. And far from always normal fear develops into something more, pathological. But, as a rule, all neurotic disorders somehow connected with experiences based on unconscious fear.

In the process of working with patients, to one degree or another, the problem of fear comes into view, 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 his work “Studies in 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 compulsion neurosis are rare phenomena. As a rule, they are combined with anxiety 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. The usual manifestation of fear neurosis are various kinds of anxious expectations and phobias, that is, fears of a specific content. Freud observed such states 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, a combination of anxiety neurosis with hysteria.

From clinical practice

Working with patients confirms that real fact that behind the manifold symptoms of mental illness are all sorts of fears. Based on the experience of therapeutic activity, I can say that I have not had, perhaps, a single case where a patient who turned to me for help did not talk about his fears. One patient who successfully passed the entrance exams to the university, but in the first year of study became disillusioned with his chosen specialty and could not find common language with his fellow students, admitted that he was afraid of girls, as he was afraid of contracting AIDS. Another patient, who for four years periodically went to a psychiatric clinic for medical treatment and subsequently turned to me for advice, was terribly afraid, as she put it, of begging and that she would not be able to feed and educate her child. A university graduate and a successful woman admitted that with school years and is still afraid of memory lapses and the fact that in a responsible situation her brains can turn off. A successful businessman was afraid to fall asleep alone in his bed, as he was often visited by dreams in which he, little boy, something shapeless, huge, was approaching, ready to crush him at any moment. A woman who was a smart driver and capable of repairing her car was terrified that in the event of an accident she could end up in a hospital, where strangers can see her far from exquisite underwear. The teacher, who was fluent in oratory and distinguished by great erudition, was afraid of the rector of the institute. The student, who passed all the exam sessions with excellent marks, was so afraid of each upcoming test that, by her own admission, on the eve of each exam, she threw a real tantrum at home. A pretty and flirtatious woman was afraid that if she had to divorce her husband, then she would no longer be able to enter into a close relationship with anyone. An energetic woman who came from the provinces to Moscow and managed to start her own business, buy an apartment and amass capital that allowed her to attend privileged clubs during her three years in it, wanted to get married, but at the same time she felt such a fear of men who might deceive that she unconsciously did everything to ensure that her numerous acquaintances did not end marital relations. A woman who was not constrained in material means and a mother who loved her little child was constantly worried that her husband would not keep his word given to her, would get drunk in once more and this binge will continue for several days. Many women were afraid to get pregnant, they were afraid of the gynecologist.

As an illustration of dreams of fear, Freud cited his own dream, which he dreamed at the age of seven or eight years and was interpreted by him thirty years later. He dreamed of his beloved mother with a calm, frozen expression on her face. She was carried into the room and laid on the bed by two or three creatures with bird beaks. Little Freud woke up with tears and screams, woke up his parents and calmed down only when he saw his mother's face.

In the process of interpreting his dream, Freud found out that the long creatures with bird beaks were borrowed from the illustrations of the Bible in the edition of Philippson, the book that he read as a child. He also remembered the memory of a boy, Philip, with whom he played on the lawn near the house and from whom he first heard a vulgar word for sexual intercourse and is characterized by the analogy with hawks' heads.

The interpretation of the secondary processing of the dream said that in a dream little Freud was afraid that his mother was dying. Waking up in fear, he then saw his mother's face, realized that she was not dead, and calmed down. However, this secondary interpretation of the dream took place under the influence of fear. From Freud's point of view, he was not afraid because he dreamed that his mother had died. The secondary interpretation arose because he was already under the influence of fear. In fact, the fear referred to a vague sexual feeling that found expression in the visual content of the dream. Thus, using the example of his own childhood dream, Freud showed the connection between fear and sexuality, which he discovered when working with patients.

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

In his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud paid little attention to the problem of fear. Nevertheless, he could not ignore this problem and expressed the idea that the doctrine of dreams of fear refers to the psychology of neuroses. At the same time, he emphasized that a phobia is, as it were, a boundary obstacle of 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 the Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy," the founder of psychoanalysis examined in detail the question of the origin and development of little Hans's phobia, expressed in the fear of being bitten by a white horse. On the basis of an appropriate 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 him, sometimes imitating him. These ambivalent (dual) feelings for the animal were nothing more than unconscious substitutions in the psyche of those hidden feelings that the child experienced in relation to the 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 real reasons children's fear, caused not so much by the attitude of the father to the son, as by the unconscious and contradictory attitude of the child himself to the 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 education. Partial resolution of this internal conflict that broke out in the soul of the child was carried out by an unconscious shift of drives from one object to another. Those drives that Hans was ashamed of were forced out of consciousness by him into the unconscious and directed to an allegorical object - a white horse, in relation to which one could openly show one's feelings. A five-year-old boy, who once saw a horse fall while walking, identified his father with this object, as a result of which he began to hold himself freely in relation to his father, without fear, but began to feel fear of the horse. Behind his expressed fear of being bitten by a horse was a deep-seated unconscious feeling that he might be punished for bad 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, on the basis of his analysis, Freud came to the conclusion that fear corresponds to repressed erotic attraction and that the causes of the neuroses of adult patients can be found in the infantile complexes that lay behind the phobia of little Hans.

Similar views on the problem of infantile fear found their further reflection in Freud's work "From the history of one childhood neurosis» (1918). The founder of psychoanalysis appealed to the case of the psychoanalytic treatment of a Russian patient by Sergei Pankeev (the case of the "Wolf Man"). In early childhood, the patient experienced severe neurotic suffering in the form of fear hysteria (animal phobia), which later developed into a compulsion neurosis. When he came across a book of fairy tales, in which there was an image of a wolf, he was afraid and began to scream frantically. Fear and disgust were also caused by beetles, caterpillars, horses. There was also a nightmare when the boy saw in a dream 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 Kids", and also emphasized that the impression from these fairy tales was expressed in the child in the form of animal phobia. The analysis of the dream led him to the conclusion that the wolf was the father's substitute and, therefore, the boy's nightmare manifested a fear of his father, a fear which from that time on dominated his whole life. The form of manifestation of fear, the fear of being eaten by a wolf, was nothing more than a regressive transformation of the desire for such communication with the father, in which, like a mother, he could receive appropriate satisfaction, as he perceived in the scene of intimacy between parents, which he once witnessed . Moreover, for understanding 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, connected with the sexual goal, was repressed, and its place was taken by the fear of the father as castrating in the form of wolf phobia.

In Freud's works "Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy" and "From the History of a Childhood Neurosis", a general trend was reflected - an attempt at a psychoanalytic consideration of 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 schemes that make up 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 an inherited, phylogenetically acquired moment in 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 the Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy" and "From the History of a Childhood Neurosis". These developments were carried out by him in the work "Totem and Taboo" (1913), where the founder of psychoanalysis showed why early stages development of mankind, savages showed unusually a high degree fear of incest associated with the replacement of real blood relationship with totemistic relationship.

Based on historical material, Freud showed that the fear of incest among savages is a typical infantile trait and has a surprising 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, the boy leaves maternal house and moves to the "club house". For others, the father cannot be alone with his daughter in the house. For the third - if a brother and sister accidentally met each other, then she hides in the bushes, and he passes by without turning his head. For the fourth, death by hanging is supposed to be a punishment for incest with a sister.

Consideration of the psychology of primitive religion and culture allowed Freud to draw parallels between the emergence of totemism in ancient world and the manifestation of childhood phobias within the framework of modern civilization; between the 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, there is nothing surprising in the fact 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 nervous patients experience fear to a much greater extent than other people who are 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 those mental states that are associated with the manifestation of neurotic fear. This approach to discussing the problem of fear required clarification conceptual apparatus and consideration of mental mechanisms leading to the emergence of various forms of manifestation of fear in humans.

Sayings

Z. Freud: “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 converge, a mystery whose solution should shed light on our entire spiritual life.”

Z. Freud: "Any hysterical phobia goes back to childhood fear and continues it, even if it has a different content and, therefore, should be called differently."

Z. Freud: "Children's phobias and the expectation of fear in anxiety neurosis give us two examples of one way in which neurotic fear arises through a direct transformation of the libido."

Real and neurotic fear

In his lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis (1916-1917), Freud paid special attention to the problem of fear. One of the lectures (twenty-fifth) was called “Fear”. In it, Freud distinguished between real and neurotic fear, examined the relationship between them, and discussed various forms fear observed in human life.

First of all, the founder of psychoanalysis observed that real fear it seems to a person quite rational and understandable, since it is a reaction to the perception of external danger. In this respect, real fear can be seen as an expression of the instinct for self-preservation. But if it acquires excessive strength beyond normal reaction to danger, consisting of the affect of fear and a protective action, then it cannot be called expedient. Readiness for danger is a common occurrence. On its basis, a state of fear arises. According to Freud, the readiness for fear is expedient, while the development of fear is inappropriate.

Unlike the real neurotic fear is a subjective state accompanied by affect. It can appear in various forms.

One such manifestation is that a person may experience a state of fear of expectation or fearful expectation, when fear is ready to attach itself to any suitable content of perception. Suffering from this kind of fear, a person foresees the worst possibility of all available, and he has a tendency to expect misfortune. Such a person is not sick in the strict sense of the word, but he becomes fearful and pessimistic. The extreme degree of expression of this kind of fear has to do with nervous disease named by Freud fear neurosis.

The second form of fear is psychically related to certain objects and situations. This is - phobias associated with fear of animals, free space, darkness, enclosed spaces, trips to public transport, flying on an airplane, etc. Some of the feared objects and situations are related to danger and therefore cause a corresponding negative reaction in a number of normal people, as it happens, for example, when meeting with a snake. But in neurotics of this kind, phobias are so intense that they cause a paralyzing horror. Freud referred to such phobias as hysteria of fear.

The third form of neurotic fear is characterized by the manifestation of spontaneous attacks, when the state of fear, as it were, splits into pieces. A person has separate pronounced symptoms in the form of dizziness, palpitations, shortness of breath, twitching of the fingers. At the same time, a person cannot correlate the so-called equivalents of fear with any obvious danger.

The identification of these three forms of fear confronted Freud with the need for a more specific answer to the question of what constitutes neurotic fear and how it should be understood. Answering this question and appealing to psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious activity of a person and clinical observations, he first of all correlated the fear of expectation and timidity with sexual desires, or, more precisely, with an unsatisfied discharge of libido. If, for one reason or another, sexual arousal stops without having received its full satisfaction, then fear appears in this case, which can be expressed in the form of fear of anticipation, various kinds of seizures or their equivalents. From Freud's point of view, fear is associated with sexual restriction, as is the case, for example, with coitus interruptus, sexual abstinence, menopause.

Freud's connection between sexuality and fear does indeed exist. In any case, in the process of analytic practice, I repeatedly had to deal with circumstances of this kind, when, on the basis of sexual relations patients had various kinds of fears associated with mental or physical impotence in men, fear of becoming pregnant in women. However, the unambiguous connections that Freud spoke about were far from always traced. So, isolated and episodic cases of interruption of sexual intercourse most often give rise to fear, especially among women.

One of my patients reported that his repeated coitus interruptus caused him not anxiety, but dissatisfaction, while his partner developed fear, as a result of which they both excluded such a method of protection from their intimate relationships. But constant marital relations, based precisely on this method of preventing pregnancy, sometimes become a kind of norm of intimate behavior, when mutual trust and confidence in each other contribute to sexual satisfaction without any signs of fear.

In my practice, there were at least two cases when, having become a sexual regimen, interruption of sexual intercourse by a man in order to prevent unwanted pregnancy did not lead not only to the emergence of a neurosis of fear in both partners, but was not accompanied by any negative emotions on their part. In one case, the marital experience of constant interruption of sexual intercourse was five years, in the other - seventeen years. So in this respect Freud's assertion that discreet interruption, having become a sexual regimen, often causes anxiety neurosis in men, but especially in women, does not seem indisputable. In any case, further study of this issue is necessary with the involvement of additional clinical material, which could be of interest to psychoanalysts and sexologists.

Based on consideration of anxiety neurosis, hysteria and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Freud concluded that the deviation of sexuality from its normal manifestation, leading to the generation of fear, is carried out on the basis of both somatic and mental processes. Strictly speaking, his discussion of the question of the origin of neurotic fear was limited to this, since by the time the lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis (1916–1917) were published, much remained unclear to him, requiring conceptual elaboration and clinical verification.

No less difficult was the second task set by Freud and connected with the identification of connections between real and neurotic fears. Trying to solve this problem, he turned to the consideration of the emergence of fear in the child. His original postulate was that timidity is common to all children, and it is difficult to distinguish between a child's fears that are real or neurotic. The child has a tendency to real fear. He is afraid when confronted with unfamiliar faces, new situations, just as primitive man is afraid of everything unknown to him. However, not all children are equally fearful. Those of them who show a strong fear of new objects, objects, situations, become nervous in the future.

It would seem that the emergence of fear in a child is associated with his helplessness and has nothing to do with his sexuality. It was this source of fear that some researchers and therapists paid attention to, believing, like A. Adler, that the basis of fear and neurosis is the inferiority of the child, due to his weakness and helplessness. But Freud did not share this view.

He believed that the child is afraid of a stranger not because of the danger emanating from him and his own helplessness in front of him, but because he is determined to see a familiar, beloved face, mainly the face of his mother, but instead he sees a strange face. The child's libido does not find its embodiment in the beloved person and, unable to maintain a free state, is translated into fear. It is no coincidence that the first phobias in children manifest themselves in the form of fear of the dark and loneliness when they are faced with the situation of the absence of a mother. It follows, as Freud believed, that neurotic fear is not secondary, that is, a special case of real fear. Rather, one has to admit that the manifestation of real fear in the child has something in common with his neurotic fear. This common fact is that both fears arise on the basis of an unused libido. Based on this idea, Freud concluded that the fear of children is very close to the neurotic fear of adults and replaces the object of love with some external object or situation.

According to the founder of psychoanalysis, the development of fear is closely connected with the system of the unconscious, with the fate of the libido. The transformation of libido into fear is carried out through the process of repression. The sexual impulses subjected to repression seem to find their discharge in the form of fear, moreover, neurotic fear. Thus, considering phobias, Freud identified two phases of the neurotic process. The first phase is characterized by the implementation of repression and the transformation of sexual desires into fear, correlated with external danger. In the second phase, the organization of a defense system is observed that helps to prevent a collision with this danger, when repression is nothing more than an attempt to escape the ego from sexual desires. In other neurotic diseases, other defense systems are used against the possible development of fear. But in any case, according to Freud, the problem of fear is central to the psychology of neuroses.

Sayings

Z. Freud: "There are timid people, but not at all nervous, and there are nervous people suffering from many symptoms who have no tendency to fear."

Z. Freud: “Just as an attempt to escape from external danger is replaced by steadfastness and appropriate measures of protection, so the development of neurotic fear gives way to the formation of symptoms that fetter fear.”

Fear, dread, fright

Consideration of this problem was complicated by the fact that the use of the term "fear" allowed for ambiguity and uncertainty. In the lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis, Freud drew attention to this circumstance. True, he did not dare to come closer to discussing the question of whether the words "fear", "fear", "fright" have the same or different meanings. Nevertheless, already in these lectures he attributed fear to a state that does not imply attention to the object, fear - to something that points to an object, and fright - to something that emphasizes the action of danger when there is no readiness for fear.

Later, Freud returned to clarifying the differences he had outlined. Thus, in his work “Beyond the pleasure principle” (1920), he resolutely stated that the concepts “fear”, “fear”, “fright” are incorrectly used as synonyms. Making a distinction between fear, dread and fright from the point of view of the attitude towards danger, Freud expressed the following considerations on this subject. In his opinion, fear means a certain state of expectation of danger and preparation for the latter, even if it is unknown; fear implies a certain object that is feared; fright reflects the moment of surprise and is a state that occurs in case of danger, when the subject is unprepared for it. If in the lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis Freud only expressed the idea that a person defends himself from fright by fear, then in his work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he emphasized that there is something in fear that protects against fright and, therefore, protects against neurosis. .

A few years later, Freud wrote a work specifically devoted to the problem of fear. Its title is Inhibition, Symptom and Fear (1926). For the first time this work was translated into Russian and published in Russia in 1927 under the title "Fear". This translation and this title were preserved in subsequent reprints that took place in Russia in the 90s.

It was in this work that Freud expressed such an understanding of the nature of fear, which testified to the refinement and revision of his earlier ideas about fear. The revision of the ideas about fear previously formulated by him in lectures on the introduction to psychoanalysis was associated with the structural approach to the analysis of the mental life of a person, which was carried out by the founder of psychoanalysis in the work "I and It". In it, the founder of psychoanalysis emphasized that the poor, unfortunate self is endangered from three sides and can be seized by a triple fear - a real fear of the outside world, a fear of conscience of the Superego and a neurotic fear of the It. Indeed, the structuring of the psyche led Freud to a psychoanalytic understanding that the unconscious It does not experience fear, since it cannot judge situations of danger, and it is the Self, and not the It, that is the place of concentration of fear. It is no coincidence that in the work "I and It" he emphasized that the "I" is a "genuine focus of fear" and, in view of the threat of three dangers, develops an "escape reflex", resulting in the formation of neurotic symptoms and defense mechanisms leading to phobias.

Sayings

Z. Freud: “For the most part, fear is understood as a subjective state in which one gets due to the feeling of “development of fear”, and they call it an affect.”

Z. Freud: “We welcomed as desirable the correspondence that the three main types of fear: real fear, neurotic and fear of conscience, without any exaggeration, are consistent with the three dependences of the I - from the external world, from the It and from the Super-I.”

Fear and repression

The structural approach to the analysis of the mental life of a person, as a result of which Freud recognized that the I is the real place of manifestation of fear, confronted him with the need to answer a number of questions. Firstly, if the place of manifestation of fear is the ego, and neurotic diseases are associated with the repression of unconscious drives, which do not disappear without a trace, but gradually and yet powerfully make themselves felt in the form of the formation of various kinds of neurotic symptoms, then, on this basis, should not to conclude that fear arises under the influence of the mechanisms of repression or, perhaps, the opposite process takes place, when repression is carried out precisely because a person experiences fear? Secondly, as soon as fear in the I arises under the influence of three dangers (before the real world, the libidinal It and the strict Super-I), then what is the primary source of fear - the sexual desires of a person or the moral and social restrictions imposed by on him? These were difficult questions, the answers to which put Freud in front of the need to rethink the previous psychoanalytic positions put forward by him on the basis of a descriptive and dynamic approach to the analysis of human unconscious activity.

In answering the first question, Freud radically changed his original views on the relationship between repression and fear. In a lecture on fear he gave at the University of Vienna in the period 1916-1917, he was of the opinion that it was the energy of the repression of unconscious drives that automatically leads to the emergence of fear, that is, the repression itself turns into fear. However, the structural approach to the analysis of mental processes prompted him to revise this point of view, and Freud abandoned his earlier assumption about the role of repression as the cause of the formation of fear. The work Inhibition, Symptom and Fear (1926) gave not so much a phenomenological (based on a topical model of the psyche) description of fear as a metapsychological (taking into account the structuring of the psyche, the energy potential of the libido and the economic point of view on it) understanding of it. In it, Freud came to the conclusion that what happens during repression is not something new, leading to fear. mental education, but the reproduction of some previous fear as a certain affective state of the soul.

This conclusion was made by the founder of psychoanalysis on the basis of a meaningful consideration of the previous clinical material, which he had previously presented in his works “Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy” and “From the History of a Childhood Neurosis”. In Inhibition, Symptom and Fear, he returned again to the cases of little Hans and the Wolf Man. Freud showed that, despite the differences between the two cases, the result of the formation of the phobia was the same in both patients. In both little Hans and the Russian patient (the "Wolf Man"), the repression of infantile desires occurred, according to Freud, on the basis of their fear of the threat of castration. Because of this fear, little Hans gave up his aggressiveness against his father. The infantile fear that the horse will bite him may be supplemented by the idea that the horse will bite off his genitals, that is, castrate him. Because of the fear of castration, the Russian patient, as a child, also gave up the desire to be loved by his father. Terrible ideas about being bitten by a horse (little Hans) and being devoured by a wolf (a Russian patient) were a distorted replacement for children's ideas about castration by the father. In both cases, the affect of fear of the phobia did not originate from the process of repression of the libidinal instincts, but from the repressing instance.

In his work “I and It”, the founder of psychoanalysis already wrote that behind the fear of the I before the Super-I lies something that threatened the child with castration. This castration was considered by him as the core on the basis of which the fear of conscience arises. In the work “Inhibition, symptom and fear”, he emphasized that animal phobias are “castration fear of the Self”. Starting from this idea, Freud came to the conclusion that fear does not arise from the repressed libido, but the fear-prone I serves as the primary moment for repression. In other words, the founder of psychoanalysis abandoned the idea he had previously put forward about the direct transformation of libido into fear.

Revising previous ideas about the relationship between fear and repression, Freud at the same time noted that it may still be true that fear is formed from the libidinal energy of drives through the corresponding processes of repression. At the same time, he admitted that this position is not easy to reconcile with the conclusion that the fear of phobias arises in the ego, does not come from repression, but, on the contrary, itself causes it. However, in Lecture 32, "Fear and the Life of Instincts," which, along with other lectures written by Freud in 1932-1933, served as a supplement to his earlier lecture course on introduction to psychoanalysis, he explicitly emphasized that it is not repression that creates fear, and fear comes first, fear produces repression. At the same time, the founder of psychoanalysis explained that such fear is the fear of a threatening external danger. That is, the real fear of the child, experienced by him in front of his sexual desires, but perceived by him as an internal danger. We are talking about the fear of castration, which, according to Freud, is the most powerful engine of repression and the source of the formation of neuroses. Such was the psychoanalytic vision of the problem of fear, connected with the answer to the first question about the relationship between repression and fear.

Freud's earlier distinction between real and neurotic fears was further clarified in Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear. Thus, he emphasized that the danger underlying real fear comes from an external object, while the neurotic danger comes from the demand of the drive. But the requirement of attraction does not seem to be something far-fetched, it is real, and, therefore, we can assume that neurotic fear has no less real grounds than real fear. This means that the relationship between fear and neurosis is explained by the defense of the ego in the form of a reaction of fear to the danger emanating from the drive. The subtlety of such a psychoanalytic understanding of the reality of neurotic fear lies in the fact that, from Freud's point of view, the demand of the drive often becomes an internal danger, precisely because its satisfaction can lead to an external danger. At the same time, in order to become significant for the Self, an external, real danger must turn into an internal experience of a person.

Sayings

Z. Freud: “The fear of animal phobia is an invariable castration fear, that is, real fear, fear of a real danger, threatening or understood as real. Here fear will create repression, and not, as I used to think, repression - fear.

Z. Freud: "The fear of castration is one of the most common and most powerful engines of repression and thus the formation of neuroses."

Birth trauma and fear of death

In classical psychoanalysis, the fear of castration is associated with both sexual desires and moral restrictions. Therefore, the answer to the second question, what is the primary source of fear, required clarification. As a matter of fact, already in the lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis (1916-1917), the idea was expressed that the first state of fear arose as a result of the separation of the child from the mother. The founder of psychoanalysis proceeded from the fact that in the course of phylogenetic development, due to the change of generations, there is a stable predisposition to the repetition of the first state of fear. The individual cannot escape the affect of fear. Therefore, the act of birth is the source and prototype of the affect of fear.

Concerning this question, Freud recounted an incident that occurred while he was a young doctor. Together with other young doctors, he sat at a dinner table in a restaurant and listened to an obstetrical clinic assistant talk about a story that happened at the midwife exam. One of the candidates was asked why, during childbirth, excrement is sometimes found in the waste fluid. Without thinking, she replied that this was due to the child's fear. She was ridiculed and seems to have failed her exam. The young doctors also laughed at this episode. Freud did not find this episode funny. Deep down, he sided with the candidate for midwife, because at that time he began to guess that by some instinct she had discovered an important connection between the act of birth and the fear of a newborn child.

Later, Freud did not leave the idea that the painful experience of birth, associated with the suffocation of the infant and, accordingly, with a mortal danger for him, is the prototype of subsequent manifestations of human fear. Most likely, he expressed this idea to his students and colleagues in psychoanalysis. It was briefly formulated in the lectures on introduction to psychoanalysis. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that his students could develop further the idea expressed by Freud about the connection between the birth of a baby and the primary fear of a person. This is exactly what happened in 1923, when the closest associate of the founder of psychoanalysis, the secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and a member of the "Secret Committee" O. Rank wrote the work "Birth Trauma". In it, he argued that the act of birth is so traumatic for the child that in the course of his subsequent life a person makes various attempts to overcome his initial fear, and failures in the implementation of these attempts lead to the emergence of neuroses. In Rank's understanding, the initial fear is associated with the fact of the birth of a child, with the extraction of him into the world from the mother's womb, from that intrauterine state, where he was one with the mother. All subsequent fears are, from his point of view, nothing more than a reproduction birth trauma.

Freud was ambivalent about Rank's The Trauma of Birth. On the one hand, he assessed this book as quite important, providing food for his own further reflections on various provisions of psychoanalysis, including those related to understanding the nature of fear. On the other hand, the ideas put forward by Rank about the trauma of birth and about the fear opposed to incest as a simple repetition of the fear of birth caused him doubt and disapproval. However, after Rank, having left for America, began to actively develop his teaching on the trauma of birth, believing that it replaces the "outdated" psychoanalysis, Freud was critical of Rank's ideas about the direct and far-reaching connection between the act of birth and human fear.

In Inhibition, Symptom and Fear, the founder of psychoanalysis paid special attention to the connection between birth and fear. He made no secret of the fact that he was inclined to see in the state of fear a reproduction of the trauma of birth. But there was, in his opinion, nothing new in this, since other affects are reproductions of old events. Fear fulfills the necessary biological function associated with a response to a hazard. At the act of birth, there is an objective danger to the preservation of life. However, this danger does not have a psychic content, since the newborn has no knowledge that the outcome of birth can be accompanied by the destruction of life. Therefore, the subsequent reproduction of situations that remind the child of the event of birth still does not say anything about the fact that the various phobias of the child are connected precisely with his impressions that took place in the process of birth. Freud did not consider Rank's attempt to prove the relation of the child's phobias to events at birth a success. In any case, he concluded that the infant's apparent readiness to experience fear "does not manifest itself with the greatest force immediately after birth - in order to slowly subside, but arises later along with progress. mental development and persists through a certain period of childhood.

From Freud's point of view, fear is a product of the infant's mental helplessness and its reaction to the absence of an object (mother). Here an analogy arises with castration fear, which is also based on the possible separation from a valuable object (the penis). During the subsequent evolution - from the loss of the mother object to castration, and then to the emergence and power of the Super-I - fear of castration develops into "social fear," fear of conscience. The punishment in the form of loss of love from the Superego is regarded by the Ego as a danger, to which it reacts with a signal of fear. The last manifestation of the fear of the Superego is seen by Freud in the form of the fear of projection outward in the form of the force of fate, which can be called the fear of death.

The problem of the fear of death interested Freud in connection with the idea put forward by him in the 1920s of the death instinct. So, on the last pages of the work "I and It" (1923), he paid special attention to this problem. In particular, the founder of psychoanalysis believed that the statement that every fear is a fear of death does not make any sense. In contrast to such a statement, he emphasized the need to separate the fear of death from the fear of the object (fear of reality) and from the neurotic fear of the libido (fear of the id).

It is known from psychoanalytic practice that the fear of death manifests itself under two conditions that are also characteristic of the normal development of fear. We are talking about a person's reaction to external danger and the manifestation of fear as internal process which occurs in melancholia. Freud paid special attention to the problem of melancholia in his work Sorrow and Melancholia (1917). In it, he suggested that in a sick person prone to melancholy, one part of the I opposes itself to another. Freud called this critical instance detached from the I conscience, thereby predetermining the ideas about the Super-I that he later put forward in his work “I and It”. In Sorrow and Melancholy, the question of the mystery of suicide was raised, which makes melancholy dangerous for a person. It has been noted that the Self can only kill itself when it directs hostility towards itself, which is related to the object and which is the initial reaction of the Self to the objects of the external world.

In I and It, Freud noted that the fear of death in melancholy allows the ego to abandon itself because it feels that the superego hates and persecutes it. As a result, according to the founder of psychoanalysis, with melancholy, the poor I feel abandoned by all the guarding forces and can decide to die. This situation is reminiscent of the situation that underlies the fear of birth and the infantile fear of separation from a protective mother. Proceeding from this, the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, is interpreted from a psychoanalytic point of view as "the processing of the fear of castration."

Dissatisfied with Rank's attempt to reduce the single cause of anxiety neurosis to birth trauma, Freud singled out three factors that he believed to be the main causes of neurosis, namely, biological, phylogenetic, and psychological.

biological factor is associated with the helplessness of the born child and its long-term dependence on other people, unlike most animals, which increases the importance of the danger of the outside world and creates a need to be loved and receive appropriate protection.

Phylogenetic factor due to the specifics of the development of human sexual life. It manifests itself in the fact that, unlike animals related to man, in which sexuality develops continuously, he has a first, early flowering in the period up to the age of five, then there is a break in development and with the onset of maturity, sexuality is activated again. The pathogenic significance of such sexual development makes itself felt in the form of the ego's rejection of childhood sexuality as a kind of danger and in the repression of sexual drives in the period of maturity with their subsequent subordination to infantile prototypes.