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Aversion, defence, conflict, and repression

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One of the hallmarks of psychoanalysis that distinguishes it from virtually all other psychologies is its insistence on the existence of separate portions of the mind that are not at ease with one another. Most theories of mental structure start with a premise of the unity and coherence of the elements of the psyche and only invoke the notion of dislocation between elements where

69 mental ill health is found. In other words, discordance between different parts of the mind is viewed as pathological. In Freud’s view, discordance between different parts of the psyche is the norm - the issue is to determine where and to what extent the span of normal discordance becomes pathological.

How does Freud arrive at this theoretical standpoint and what is its relevance to our study of guilt?

We can see from the early work on hysteria that Freud and Breuer are already thinking, albeit differently, about splits in the psyche. Breuer is theorising in terms of hypnoid states and first and second conditions. Anna O’s psychopathology leads him to describe two divergent states of mind, in her case, apparently remarkably divorced from one another - she appears to be, at any one time, in one or another state with little spill over from one to the other.

Freud is less inclined to think in terms of two separate states and more in terms of different portions of the mental apparatus being at odds with one another. In the early work on hysteria and the subsequent early work on obsessional neurosis, this is manifest for Freud in the clinical phenomena he includes under the general term - aversion.

As noted earlier, Freud posits the existence of ideational content (linked to affects) in the psyche that will come to be at odds with later and newer ideational content. Freud is constructing his thesis from a retrospective point of view. A symptom emerges. On tracing back the origin of the

70 symptom Freud identifies some ideational content, contact with which, for the patient, has led the patient to produce a symptom. Freud, in seeking to understand why this ideational content has produced this response in the patient, proposes the prior existence of some earlier ideational content that is opposed to the new ideational content. In a sense this is a relatively simple process. We could liken it to a chemical process. The patient already contains (or has taken in) a highly active chemical agent which will lie dormant in their system until such time as the patient imbibes or tries to imbibe any of a highly specific group of chemicals which will react with the dormant chemical agent, bringing it to life and producing a huge chemical reaction. This is a situation of toxicity. In Freud’s version - the aversion produces an untenable situation - something has to give. Either the new content or the old content has to be refused - or some creative new means to try to accommodate the two has to be found - in any case, the creation of a symptom.

At a later stage in the thesis we will look precisely at examples of the content that is at odds, the chemicals that react badly. For the moment we will note that this aversion is about ideational content and that, for Freud, this aversion leads to various forms of defence. Among the range of possible defences, Freud develops the notion of repression. The theory of repression is one of the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory and develops in tandem with the division of mental functioning into primary and secondary processes, the development of the theories of consciouness, pre-consciousness and the unconscious and the huge edifice of psychoanalytic theory constructed around the unconscious, how to access it, how to work clinically with it and how to live with it.

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The Ego

Freud’s work on the ‘I ‘(Ich) emerged out of his earliest psychological explorations and continued throughout his entire career. The work is characterised by repeated returns to the problem but also by some key moments of theorisation when the work moves forward in a relative leap. Most noted of these are the foundational chapter VI of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the far-reaching On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914) and the two theoretical studies of the early nineteen-twenties Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and The Ego and the Id (1923).

In 1900, Freud identifies the ego as the source of defence (or aversion) in his theory of repression. As the agency of perception the ego has a relation to the external world and at this point it is equated with consciousness.

On Narcissism (1914) is Freud’s most sustained discussion of the ego since his early work. Freud argues here that the ego cannot exist at the beginning of an infant’s life but must be developed. This crucial point emphasises for us that the construction of the ego is a process and one that involves the infant’s early relations with his or her environment.

It is also in this paper that we have the elaboration of the ego as itself containing a complex of agencies - the ego ideal, the ideal ego and later the super-ego. These agencies are discussed in a separate section below. For the moment we need to acknowledge, first, that the ego becomes an elaborated system incorporating ideals but also remains as a location for the action of these ideals and the super-ego. It is also of importance that significant portions of the ego are now

72 known to be unconscious. Its complexity develops in tandem with Freud’s thinking throughout most of his further work.

A seeing/observing agency

As we have seen above, the idea of a ‘seeing/observing agency’ is present from the very beginning. But we must note in passing that the first reference to it comes from Breuer in his discussion of the Anna O case (1895, p. 46).

What is invoked and what is at stake in this ‘seeing/observing agency’?

In the first instance, the idea of a seeing/observing agency is profoundly familiar to anyone culturally infected by the central idea of the great patriarchal monotheistic religions of Judaism, Old Testament Christianity and Islam. The idea of an all-seeing God is a cornerstone, indeed the cornerstone, of these religions. We will need to bear this in mind when we come to consider the cultural significance of guilt. And this (to some extent) is certainly what Freud did in his great studies of civilisation and religion (1912-13, 1927, 1930 and 1938.)

For the purposes of this section, though, we will focus on the psychological issues that Freud deals with in his theorisation of a ‘seeing/observing agency’.

73 Freud comes at the idea of a seeing/observing agency from several angles. On the one hand he engages with it in his clinical discussions of paranoia. On the other he begins to construct a theory of it in his efforts to elaborate the structure and functioning of the ego, normal and neurotic. As we have seen, it also emerges in his attempts to deal with the clinical phenomena of shame and guilt.

The seeing/observing agency was also linked to the idea of censorship so fundamental to Freud’s thinking about dreaming and the unconscious.

We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissable wishful impulses proceed.

Freud, 1916-17, p. 429

It is in his study of narcissism that Freud takes the elementary ideas about a seeing/observing agency and begins to develop them into a thesis about a portion of the ego that stands in judgement of another portion of the ego (Freud, 1914). In section III of this paper, Freud is discussing the process of idealisation and the setting up in the ego of an ideal ego and an ego ideal. He goes on to say

It would not surprise us to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal.

74 Freud goes on to liken this agency to “what we call our ‘conscience’” (p. 95). He continues by linking this phenomenon to the delusions of being watched of paranoiacs and concludes by saying:

Patients of this sort [paranoiacs] complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking of that again’, ‘now he’s going out’).

Freud, 1914, p. 95

And crucially for our purposes here:

This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in normal life.’

Freud, 1914, p. 95

It is important to note the inclusion of ‘criticizing’ here. Up to now, the seeing/observing agency has been watching and discovering. At this point it becomes also an agency that ‘criticiz [es] all our intentions’. This move is extremely important for what comes after. This agency has gone from being a somewhat neutral observer to a relatively malignant presence and this move is

75 crucial for making the transition from a kindly parental benchmark to a persecutory and tyrannical authority.

It is from these formulations that Freud goes on, in the early nineteen-twenties, to elaborate the system of ideals and the super ego. During the intervening period Freud worked on his paper on Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and the examination of the ego in these conditions contributed to his thinking on the seeing/observing agency.

It is in a discussion of melancholia in 1921 that Freud next alludes to this watching agency. Freud describes a leading characteristic of melancholia as ‘cruel self-depreciation of the ego combined with relentless self-criticism and bitter self-reproaches’ (1921, p. 109). The cruelty and severity of the criticism levelled at the ego in melancholia distinguish it from normality but the same ego ideal is at work and responsible for ‘ . . . self-observation, the moral conscience, the censorship of dreams and the chief influence in repression.’ (p. 110).6

In this same 1921 study Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud develops ideas first dealt with in Mourning and Melancholia, on identification. This crucial concept plays an important part in his understanding of the development of the ideal system and the super ego.

6 _{Melancholia is also distinguished from normality or the neuroses by its incorporation of or} identification with the object. However, it is only its excessive severity that we are concerned about here in as much as it sheds light on the operation of the seeing/observing agency.

76 It is in The Ego and The Id (1923) that this seeing/observing (and now criticizing) agency comes to be called the super ego. In this study, this agency is characterised as critical and condemnatory in normal subjects and severe, cruel, raging, wrathful and harsh in neurotic and melancholic patients. What began as a watchful agency has emerged as an attacking agency. Freud’s theorisations of this agency and the sources of its attacking force are dealt with in the next section.

Ideal Ego, Ego Ideal and Super-Ego

In On Narcissism (1914) Freud is beginning to elaborate a theory of the ego that is able to accommodate a range of difficult theoretical and clinical issues. Freud is trying to grapple with self-regard in as much as it appears in problems as apparently diverse as physical illness, paranoia, schizophrenia, hypochondria, the magical mental life of children and ‘primitive people’, intellectual endeavour and love. In the course of this relatively short but highly condensed study, he tries to delineate divisions in the ego and to analyse the relations between the divided parts.

In sections I and II he examines a range of evidence and in section III begins to organise a metapsychological structure incorporating an ideal ego, an ego ideal and the seeing/observing agency,

He posits a primary narcissism that develops, with the ego, out of early auto-erotism. This libidinal cathexis of the ego can later be directed to objects but it can also be returned to the ego - or, rather, to an idealised version of the ego. Freud re-invokes his thesis that a satisfaction once

77 gained will not be given up without a struggle, to support the idea of a return to narcissistic satisfaction.

As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.

Freud, 1914, p.947

This ideal can be built out of a wide range of material - the image of what the child is/was (or imagined himself to be), the image of what he would like to be, the image of a chosen object. The specific trajectory of each individual will determine the make-up of their ideal/s. The important issue from the point of view of the psychical structure is that a new standard is set up for the beleaguered ego to aspire to. And the seeing/observing agency will have the job of assessing to what extent the ego is measuring up to the new standard.

It would not surprise us if we were to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal. If such an agency does exist, we cannot possibly come upon it as a discovery - we can only recognize it; for we may reflect that what we call our ‘conscience’ has the required characteristics.

Freud, 1914, p. 95

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The translation of Ich Ideal and Ideal Ich in this paper have been the source of much discussion. See Appendix X.

78 It is from these ideas that Freud goes on to elaborate the super ego in The Ego and The Id (1923). To do so he has to find his way through the difficult tangle involving the idealised ego, the seeing/observing agency which forms a point of judgement on the differential between the ego and the ideal, the intricacies of identification discussed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and the death drive that he had introduced in Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920).

Freud argues (1923) that the child’s journey through the Oedipus and castration complexes involves a complicated negotiation of his relations to the parents in which the child will opt first for an object love for the mother then under pressure from the father will institute an identification with the father. The full positive and negative Oedipus complex will encompass object love (and hostility) for both mother and father and identification with both. The dominant identification in a particular individual will determine their sexed identity.

These founding experiences and struggles through relationships and identifications are intimately bound up with the development of the ego, ideal ego, ego ideal and super ego. Indeed they ARE the development of the ego, ideal ego, ego ideal and super ego.

The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a pre-cipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super ego.

79 While the relation to the father plays the decisive role in the elementary formation of the super ego, the wider social and cultural environment builds on that foundation to consolidate the growing super ego:

As a child grows up, the role of the father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt.

Freud, 1923, p. 37

The Ego and The Id is a very theoretically dense and detailed study and the discussions of the ego ideal and super ego are full of complicated twists and turns.8 We propose here to give a schematic outline of the important features of them but to return in the analysis in chapter five to some of the finer points.

For the moment it will be important to provide some understanding of the character of the super ego in its relations to the ego. In section V of The Ego and The Id, entitled The Dependent Relationships of The Ego, Freud examines a range of clinical examples of conscious and

8 _{Freud himself acknowledges the complications of the text: ‘The complexity of our subject-matter} must be an excuse for the fact that none of the chapter-headings of this book quite correspond to their contents, and that in turning to new aspects of the topic we are constantly harking back to matters that have already been dealt with.’ 1923, p. 48

80 unconscious guilt. In particular, he compares the specific mechanisms and relative severity of guilt in Obsessional Neurosis, Melancholia and Hysteria and also considers normal psychology. We will consider these clinical differences later but need here to grasp the essentials of the super ego across all of these conditions. Freud asks the general question,

How is it that the super-ego manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt (or rather, as criticism - for the sense of guilt is the perception in the ego answering to this criticism) and moreover develops such extraordinary harshness and severity towards the ego?

Freud, 1923, p. 53

Freud’s answers this question for each of the different pathologies. In the case of melancholia it is ‘a pure culture of the death instinct’, in obsessional neurosis ‘an instinct of destruction’ ‘an actual substitution of hate for love’ in relation to the object. The hysteric‘s ego, by contrast, represses ideas that are in conflict with the harsh super-ego.

In the Oedipal journey, the child has identified with the father. This identification (and the attendant modification in object cathexes) has required a defusion of the drives in the form of a desexualisation or sublimation. Freud is working here to theorise the economic side of this