VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 3. Theory of the Self

XIV. Loss of ego-functions: I. Repression; critique of Freud’s theory of repression

1: The Figure/Background of Neurosis

Neurotic behavior is also a learned habit, the result of creative adjustment; and like other assimilated habits is no longer contacted, because it presents no novel problem. What differentiates this kind of habit from others, and what is the nature of neurotic unawareness (repression) as distinct from simple forgetting and available memory?

In the process of creative adjustment we have traced the following sequence of grounds and figures: (1) Fore-contact: in which the body is the ground and its urge or some environmental stimulus is the figure; this is the “given” or id of the experience. (2) Contacting: accepting the given and drawing on its powers, the self goes on to approach, estimate, manipulate, etc. a set of objective possibilities: it is active and deliberate with regard to both the body and the environment; these are the ego-functions. (3) Final contact: a spontaneous, disinterested, middle mode of concern for the achieved figure. (4) Post-contact: diminishing self.

We saw also (12, 7) that at any stage the process could be interrupted, because of danger or inevitable frustration, and the excitement throttled, resulting in anxiety. The particular stage of interruption is important for the particular neurotic habit that is learned, and we shall discuss this aspect in the next chapter. Bur now let us consider how any interruption and anxiety leads also to an attempt to inhibit the original drive or response to the stimulus, for these are most available to control. There is thus set up a reverse sequence that we must explore.

(1) The deliberate effort to control is the ground. The figure is the inhibited excitation or response to stimulus; this is a painful feeling of the body. It is painful because the excitation seeks discharge in out-going and the control is a contraction of the expansion (gritting the teeth, clenching the fists, etc.)

This figure-ground does not as such, of course, lead further. One relaxes the control and tries again. But supposing now the danger and frustration are chronic and one cannot relax the control; meantime there are other matters to attend to. Then,

(2) A new situation arises and the old situation is still unfinished. The new situation may be either a new stimulus or a distraction sought to lessen the pain, disappointment, etc. In meeting the new situation, the old unfinished situation is necessarily suppressed: one swallows one’s anger, hardens oneself, pushes the urge out of mind. Yet in the new situation, the painful suppressed excitation persists as part of the ground. The self turns to cope with the new figure, but it cannot draw on the powers engaged in keeping down the suppressed excitation. Thus the ground of contacting the new figure is disturbed by the existence of the painful suppression, which is immobilizing certain of the ego-functions.

Beyond this, the sequence cannot develop. This is because the body cannot be annihilated. The suppressed urge belongs to the physiological self-regulation and conservatively persists, recurs acutely whenever sufficient tension accumulates or there is a stimulus, and always remains as a coloration of whatever looms in the foreground of interest. The excitation cannot be repressed but only kept out of attention. All further developments are again in the other direction, of confronting the new problem, except that the process is now hampered by the disturbed ground of the unfinished situation. This persisting disturbance prevents final contact in the new adjustment, for all concern is not given to the figure. It prevents the new problem from being addressed on its merits, for every new solution must also “irrelevantly” solve the unfinished situation. And perceptual and muscular powers are bound in maintaining the deliberate suppression.

The excitation cannot be forgotten; but the deliberate control can be forgotten and remain unaware. This is simply because, being a motoric pattern, after a while the situation is learned; if the inhibition is chronic, the means of effecting it are no longer novel and contacted; they are a kind of useless knowledge that would occupy the attention apparently without function. So long as nothing is to be changed in the ground inhibition, the self forgets how it is being deliberate, as it turns to new problems. The motor and perceptual powers involved in the inhibition cease to be ego-functions and become simply strained bodily states. In this first step, thus, there is nothing remarkable about the transition from aware suppression to repression; it is ordinary loaming and forgetting how one learned it; there is no need to postulate a “forgetting of the unpleasant.”

(Further, in every important case of repression, one quickly attends to quite different matters and therefore quickly forgets.)

But let us follow the process further, for as yet the means of inhibiting is an available memory. We have seen that any uncontacted habit is “second nature”; it is part of the body, not of the self. So our posture, whether correct or incorrect, seems “natural,” and the attempt to change it rouses discomfort; it is an attack on the body. But unaware inhibiting has this peculiar property, that if the attempt is made to relax it, there is immediate anxiety, for the situation of excitement is revived, and promptly must be throttled. Suppose, for instance, the inhibited excitation is surprised by an unusual stimulus, or vice versa that the control is temporarily loosed by a therapeutic exercise: then the sight habitually dulled is threatened, it seems, with blindness, the cars ring, the muscle is threatened with a fatal cramp, the heart pounds, etc. The self, unaware that these are the effects of a simple contraction, and that all that is called for is to bear a slight discomfort, to locate the contraction and loosen it deliberately—the self imagines that the body itself is in danger, and it responds with fright, throttling, and a secondary aware deliberateness to protect the body. It avoids the temptation, resists the therapy; being unaware close-mouthed against something savory but once dangerous, it reacts now with vomiting, as if the thing were poison. Further, since the nascent excitement is painful in any case, it easily lends itself to the extreme interpretation. The attitude and interpretation of defending the one-time ego-functions as if they were vital organs rather than learned habits, is reaction-formation. (Throughout this process there is evident the aggressive attempt to annihilate the more basic physiology.)

We are thus elaborating the following theory of repression: Repression is the forgetting of deliberate inhibiting that has become habitual. The forgotten habit becomes unavailable because of further aggressive reaction-formations turned against the self. What is not, and cannot be, forgotten, is the urge or appetite itself; but this persists as a ground of pain because undischarged and obstructed. (This is the “reversal of affect.”) To the extent that the drive maintains its original quality and can enliven objects in the foreground, there are “sublimations,” direct but imperfect gratifications.

2: Neurosis as Loss of Ego-Functions

Neurosis is the loss of ego-functions to the secondary physiology as unavailable habits. The therapy of neurosis, conversely, is the deliberate contacting of these habits through exercises graded so as to make anxiety tolerable. Some of these were set forth in the first part of this book.

As a disturbance of the self-function, neurosis lies midway between the disturbance of the spontaneous self, which is misery, and the disturbance of the id-functions, which is psychosis. Let us contrast the three classes.

The one who gives himself spontaneously may not achieve final contact: the figure is disrupted in frustration, rage, exhaustion. In this case he is miserable rather than happy. The harm his body suffers is starvation. His disposition is soured and he turns against the world; but he does not as yet turn against himself, nor have much sense of himself except that he is suffering, until he becomes desperate. The therapy for him must be to learn more practical techniques, and there must also be a change in social relations so that his efforts can bear fruit, and biding that, a little philosophy. This is the culture of the Personality. (This is a description of many small children who, however, are hard to make philosophical.)

At the other extreme is psychosis, the annihilation of some of the given-ness of experience, e.g., the perceptive or proprioceptive excitations. To the extent that there is integration at all, the self fills the experience: it is utterly debased, or immeasurably grand, the object of a total conspiracy, etc. The primary physiology begins to be affected.

Midway, neurosis is the avoidance of spontaneous excitement and the limitation of the excitations. It is the persistence of sensory and motor attitudes when the situation does not warrant them or indeed when no contact-situation exists at all, as a bad posture is maintained in sleep. These habits intervene in the physiological self-regulation and cause pain, exhaustion, susceptibility, and disease. No total discharge, no final satisfaction; disturbed by unfulfilled needs and unaware maintaining an inflexible grip on himself, the neurotic cannot become absorbed in his outgoing concerns nor successfully carry them through, but his own personality looms in awareness: embarrassed, alternately resentful and guilty, vain and inferior, brazen and self-conscious, etc.

Through the assimilation of experience under conditions of chronic emergency, the neurotic self has lost part of its ego-functions; the process of therapy is to change the conditions and provide other grounds of experience, till the self discovers-and-invents the figure, “I am deliberately avoiding this excitement and wielding this aggression.” It may then go on again to a spontaneous creative adjustment. (But, to repeat it again, to the extent that the conditions of life inevitably involve chronic emergency and frustration, the chronic control will prove to be functional after all; the release during the session of therapy will provide nothing but an abreaction of rage and grief, or worse, vomiting up of situations which one “can’t stomach.”)

3: Critique of Freud’s Theory: I. Repressed Wishes

Our explanation, especially of repression, is so at variance with Freud’s that we must account for the discrepancy, that is, account for his view as well as give evidence for our own. For repression was the process that he studied most intensively, and it would be possible to construct the entire system of Freudian psychoanalysis using “repression” as the primitive term.

To Freud it seemed that the “wish,” the excitation, was repressed, whereas we hold it to be irrepressible, though any particular thought or behavior associated with the wish may be forgotten. He is then led into an uncharacteristically complicated and admittedly difficult attempt to explain how the conservative organism can inhibit itself. The entire system of “unconscious thinking” and the Id that can never be experienced are part of this attempted explanation— though like any ad hoc entity it raises a host of new problems. Again, Freud held that the contents repressed are both driven away by the ego and attracted by the “unconscious,” and he required also an unconscious censorship; whereas we hold that the attraction or censorship of the contents is at variance with the facts, and that repression is sufficiently explicable by deliberate suppression and simple forgetting and the spontaneous figure/background activity of the self confronting new problems in the previous conditions.

It is evident that the inhibited excitations are not repressed but on the contrary express themselves in such a way that one must say they want to express themselves, to develop. Under conditions of relaxation, such as frce-association or dozing, or again under conditions of spontaneous concentration, such as art-working or lively conversation, at once all kinds of strange images, ideas, abortive impulses and gestures, restless aches and twinges, come to awareness and claim attention: the suppressed excitations that want to develop; and if by disinterested but directed concentration they are given language and muscular means, they immediately reveal themselves with full significance. Such tendencies are, of course, the bread-and-butter of any analytic session: how is it possible that Freud did not assign them weight as evidence for the irrepressibility of the id?

Consider a typical passage of Freud:

“Among the wish-impulses originating in the infantile life, indestructible and incapable of inhibition, there are some the fulfillment of which have come to be in contradiction with the purposive ideas of our secondary thinking. The fulfillment of these wishes would no longer produce an affect of pleasure, but one of pain: and it is just this reversal of affect that constitutes the essence of what we call ‘repression.’ ”³⁷

That is, regarded as “infantile.” the impulses are incapable of inhibition, as we are claiming; later, they “contradict” other purposes, are therefore painful, and therefore repressed. Bur pleasure and pain are not ideas, they are the feelings of release or tension. What organic transformation is Freud envisaging by which the “contradiction” produces the change of affect? We are claiming, on the contrary, simply that the wish is painful because of the effort to inhibit it—an undischarged tension and a muscular restriction: this transformation is a matter of common experience.

Yet if what we are claiming is the ease, then the entire aware experience continues to be colored by the unrepressed pain. Obviously to Freud this did not seem to be so. Yet it is so. It does not seem to be so because we do not allow it to seem so when we are intent on going about our business with a stoic resignation and trying to make the best of the impulses that we do accept. The pain is there but suppressed: concentrate on your feelings and it at once colors everything. Freud is notoriously gloomy about the prospect of happiness in the human condition; yet he is not nearly so gloomy as necessary about the actuality of the human condition.

The disagreement here is also a verbal one, depending, like all important semantical differences, on a difference in the standard of what is desired: what shall we call “pain” and “pleasure”? To Freud, the dulled perception, deliberate motion, and controlled feeling of ordinary adult life is not “painful” but neutral. Yet compared with a standard of spontaneous behavior, it must be called at least “unpleasure”: it is not neutral, for it is positively marked by restlessness, fatigue, dissatisfaction, resignation, a sense of incompletion, etc.

Note too in the above passage the implication that there is no physiological self-regulation, for the “infantile” impulses are random, incapable of inhibition, and purposiveness belongs to secondary thinking. This brings us to another reason why Freud thought the excitations were repressed. He persistently regarded certain excitations as infantile, as specifically bound to infantile situations and therefore to infantile thoughts and scenes; and indeed such situations and thoughts are recoverable, if at all, with extreme difficulty; they are not in the background of awareness. But as we have tried to show above (Chapter 5), all excitations are much more general in application; it is the changing objects and situations that define and specify them. The apparent essential connection with specific forgotten thoughts, evident when the repression of the thoughts is lifted, is due, we have argued, to the fact that it was in a certain situation that one deliberately restricted the excitation and suppressed it—and this attitude soon became habitual and forgotten; therefore, the first free development of the excitation on release of the inhibition stimulates an old memory as its available technique. It is not the memory that essentially frees the impulse, but the development of the impulse that stimulates the memory. Or to put this conversely, the spontaneous life is persistently more “infantile” than allowed; the loss of the infantile is not an organic change but a deliberate suppression.

4: Critique of Freud: II. Dreams

Turning now to Freud’s theory of the “attraction” of certain contents by the unconscious, let us consider the familiar example of the “fleeing” of the tail-end of a dream; for it is true that this does not seem to be merely pushed out of mind, but rather to be attracted as by an invisible magnet. Yet we must notice first of all that, in practice, to hold the dream one does not pay attention to it, but one attends to it disinterestedly, letting it come if it will, and this would be senseless if the dream were really attracted away.

The dream does not vanish by deliberate suppression; it is mainly the spontaneous synthesizing of the self that annihilates the dream as far as possible in the act of forming the simplest figure/background in the waking state: this is why the dream vanishes so effortlessly (the annihilation is spontaneous), and why, from the point of view of effortful introspection, the dream seems to flee—for the grounds of making the usual kind of waking effort are incompatible with the grounds of experiencing a dream. The simplest possible contact in usual waking experience spontaneously excludes the dream. Thus, to allow the dream, or any drive, to express itself, the only recourse finally is to alter the usual figure/background formation itself—to change the circumstances in which contact is possible, so that the dream also is a possible part of the contact. This is done by assuming the attitude of disinterest. The method is neither to try deliberately to remember nor to try to activate what is “unconscious," but to alter the grounds of the self’s reality so that the dream too looms as real. Our dreams are “pushed away” by us and they “flee” from us because we ourselves are making a mistake about the nature of things; we cannot hold the dream because we refuse to take it as real.

The incompatibility of dream and usual waking-up is familiar Waking up, a person begins to feel he is active, up and doing, about to move. But the dream belongs to the class of wishes that can be gratified just in immobile hallucinating of them; the beginning of muscular motion puts the dream to flight (this is interpreted as “censoring the wish before it can attain motor discharge”). More importantly, as in hallucination, the dream is excluded from what is conceived to be the real world. Hallucinations are not accepted as functions of oneself. (Yet children, of course, take their hallucinatory play as part of the real world; and among adults, vast expenditures of time and attention are devoted to art-works, other people’s hallucinations. Only one’s own dreams are disesteemed. Or consider the common attitude toward willful day-dreaming: it is taken as an escape, a flight from reality and obligation; but it is not so much an escape as an abuse: the wish in the daydream is, in the end, left vague and not used; it is not allowed to become concrete in active play nor is it used as an interpretation of one’s intentions, as an intimation of real interest and vocation.) Still another property of the usual waking that excludes dreams is that it is verbal and abstractive—on awaking we at once verbalize our abstract purposes: “Where am I?” “What do I intend to do this morning?’’ “What time is it?” “What did I dream?”; our experience is organized by these abstractions. But the dream is concrete, non-verbal, sensory—“eidetic.” In general, that is, the dream is not a possible experience not so much for its content but for its form.³⁸

All of these factors operate especially strongly—so that the dream flees rapidly and is irrecoverable, rather than merely fading and losing dominance because irrelevant—when the self is neurotic and there is already a strain in the usual relations of figure and ground because of unaware habits of inhibition. This strain is the system of reaction-formations defending the usual concept of the ego and of its body. Since the ground is habitually not empty but disturbed, to achieve any figure at all it is necessary to keep the background as empty and usual as possible; considerable energy of annihilation is given to this work. Confronted with the spontaneity of dreaming, the sanity of the self and the safety of its organism seem to be in acute danger. From this point of view we could regard the need to be up and doing, to orient oneself in time and place and purpose, to be alert, as so many spontaneous reaction-formations to meet the emergency of the dangerous dream-attitude. With so much artillery mobilized against it, the dream-thoughts are at once annihilated, and the dream-wish is strongly suppressed.

The dream flees and is pushed away, in sum, both because of the spontaneous figure/background formation possible in the conditions, and because of a deliberate decision as to what we will take reality to be. Otto Rank says that the Iroquois used to make the opposite decision; the dream was the real, therefore the task was to interpret the waking in terms of the dream rather than the dream in terms of the waking. To Freud, it would seem, it was childhood that was psychologically most real, for finally he interprets the dream not in terms of the waking (the day’s remnants) but in terms of childhood situations. Let us consider this further.

5: Critique of Freud: III. Reality

To be clear about Freud’s theory of repression, we must again consider his discussion of the real (see 3, 13 f.)

Freud distinguishes the “primary process” and the “secondary process” of thinking. A few passages will show the underlying similarity between what he is saying and our propositions, and also the important differences.

“The primary process strives for discharge of the excitation in order to establish with the quantity of excitation thus collected an identity of perception; the secondary process has abandoned this intention and has adopted instead the aim of an identity of thought."³⁹

We should say, the primary process—a unity of perceptual, motor, and feelingful functions that is not well called “thinking”—creates a reality; the secondary process that abstracts from this unity is thinking that reflects the reality.

“The conversion of affect (the essence of repression’) occurs in the course of development. One need only think of the emergence of disgust, originally absent in infantile life. It is connected with the activity of the secondary system. The memories from which the unconscious wish evokes a liberation of affect have never been accessible to the preconscious, and for that reason liberation cannot be inhibited. . . .

“The primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while the secondary processes take shape only gradually through the course of life, inhibiting and overlaying the primary, gaining complete control over them probably only in the prime of life.”⁴⁰

“The ‘incorrect processes’ dream-displacements, etc. are the primary processes of the psychic apparatus; they occur whenever ideas abandoned by the pre-conscious cathexes are left to themselves and can become filled with the uninhibited energy that flows from the unconscious and strives for discharge . . .

“The processes described as ‘incorrect’ are not really falsifications of our normal procedure, or defective thinking, but the modes of operation of the psychic apparatus when freed from inhibition.” (Italics ours)⁴¹

The primary process (making an identity of perceptual reality) is spontaneous contacting; but it comes to be equated, by Freud, with only the dream-processes. Art, learning and memory, growing up, are radically disjoined from the primary-process, as if all learning, and the deliberate control that comes with learning, could never be simply used and then released as the self again spontaneously acts. Then, of course, growing up necessarily involves the “conversion of affect,” for learning, according to this concept, is nothing but inhibiting.

What led Freud to think of the secondary overlying the primary in this way, rather than of their healthy unity in a system of available memories? We may speak of reasons of theory, practice, and personality.

In theory, Freud had a misconception of reality springing from his acceptance of an erroneous psychology of consciousness. For if any orientation in reality is given in isolated sensa and percepts, and if any manipulation of reality is given by isolated motor-habits, then certainly in order to get a reality at all, there must be an abstract thinking process to add up the parts and reconstruct a whole. In this construction, all of the parts—the isolated percepts, propriocepts, habits, and abstract purposes—are grounded in inhibiting the unity of spontaneity. But apparently the only spontaneous wholes of contact that Freud could notice were the dream-processes, and these indeed give little orientation and no manipulation. But of course there are an indefinite number of non-hallucinatory spontaneous wholes; it is a question of correctly theorizing what occurs in experience, as the Gestalt psychologists and the pragmatists have done.

Practically, in therapy, Freud relied precisely on the dissociations of the patient; he forbade them to make sense or practice; so it was only the dreams that forcibly struck him as spontaneous wholes. (The transference, which was a spontaneous whole of practice, he persisted in regarding—as if embarrassed—as merely a remnant of childhood.) Then further, not only was Freud’s psychology of consciousness defective, but also his physiological psychology, for he conceived of random impulses, the isolated excitations of a mechanical organism. In our view the body is full of inherited wisdom—it is roughly adjusted to the environment from the beginning: it has the raw materials to make new wholes, and in its emotions it has a kind of knowledge of the environment as well as motivations of action; the body expresses itself in well-constructed purposive series and complexes of wishes. Leaving all this out of account, Freud was reduced to a purely verbal and not a psychosomatic therapy. The result of his practice, then, was that he could connect the dynamic spontaneous “thinking” that he noticed neither with the environment nor with the body; so he boldly staked out for it an independent realm, the “unconscious.”

Yet he is not at all satisfied with this, but he keeps trying to say, “The dream-processes are not incorrect after all; they are the way to reality; instead it is I, precisely in the prime of life, who have lost the reality.” And because he wants to say this, the whole system of Freudian psychoanalysis concerns itself with the “infantile.” It does so correctly, because in childhood there was importantly an uninhibited process, giving a reality, which was not at the same time only dream. What was incorrect was the notion that later a new healthy entity developed, the secondary process, for that was the epidemic neurosis.

The notion of the “secondary process” is the expression of the loss of awareness by the self that it is exercising the inhibition, and therefore could also release it. The constraint is projected rather as the “harsh reality.” And by a reaction-formation the spontaneous process is spitefully denigrated and becomes “merely” dreams and neurotic distortions, and all other spontaneous figure-formations are quite overlooked. And the dreams and symptoms, further, are again attacked, “interpreted,” and reduced, rather than also taken as parts of vital reality and, indeed, essential in any creative operation. (This is Jung’s critique.) And finally childhood is both denigrated and overestimated; it is overestimated when it is being considered as irrecoverably lost; it is denigrated in the therapy where the entire task of the analysis comes to be to recover this irrecoverable.

6: Examples of Repression: Insomnia and Boredom

Let us take up the thread of our own argument and give an example of repression.

In repression, we have said, the excitation persists in the background and colors all further formations with pain. The deliberateness of the inhibition is forgotten. In these conditions, the self turns to other creative adjustments and makes further efforts to keep the forgotten inhibiting forgotten. Acute insomnia illustrates this method of functioning at its simplest; for in the act of wooing sleep, the further creative adjustments are minimized, and the pain of the unfinished need is pervasively felt as distinct unpleasure, restlessness, and strain. But the meaning of the need is forgotten, for it is not allowed to develop and find orientation.

In insomnia, the self wants to relax and disintegrate, but an unfinished need keeps pulling it together. The very efforts to fall asleep then become means of keeping the need suppressed. First the insomniac closes his eyes, imagines boring scenes, etc. These deliberate imitations of sleep are of course irrelevant to the real need, which is not to sleep but to solve the unfinished problem; but they may be interpreted as a retroflection: he wants to bore that “other” who has the need and to put him to sleep. Then the insomniac starts on a process of dissociated fantasies and thoughts, all of which indeed bear on the suppressed problem, but he does not want to grasp the connection, and therefore the fantasies do not cohere into one wish but tormentingly succeed one another. It happens sometimes, indeed, that one such line of fantasy has the same affective meaning as the suppressed need, in which case the thoughts abreact part of the excitation and one falls into a light dream- haunted sleep; but soon awakes, if the tension again becomes very strong. A third stage is when the insomniac fixes and concentrates on some dummy cause for the sleeplessness, the howling dog, the noisy party downstairs; and he turns his aggression to annihilate this. The wish to annihilate an object is very close to the true underlying situation of trying to annihilate the problem, and so it spontaneously achieves great affect—it draws on the very energy that one is unaware powerfully exerting. So it happens that if this urge to annihilate is allowed to gain important dominance and lead to a violent action—throwing a shoe at the dog, pounding on the floor— there is a partial recovery of the ego-function. This can have alternative consequences: either one then has more control of the suppression and can make it stick sufficiently to fall asleep (in orthodox terms, the repression succeeds rather than fails); or vice versa, now that one has exhausted against the dummy some of the energy turned inward, one may suddenly accept the unfinished need as one’s own. One gives up the effort of trying to sleep, gets up, admits that the party downstairs is attractive rather than dis tractive, or that it is not the howling dog but some other sound that one wants or fears to hear. The correct orientation leads to further relevant activity: one dresses and goes downstairs, writes the letter, or whatever it is.

Ironically, when one is not trying to sleep, when it is not “time” to sleep, the repression of the problem and the persistence of the excitation appear as inattention, boredom, fatigue (and sometimes falling asleep!). The dominant need cannot reach the foreground, but the figures in the foreground are disturbed, and since they cannot draw on full energy and are not attractive, attention lapses; no figure becomes bright. Because there is a wish to be elsewhere and doing something else (but one cannot recognize the wish because it is not allowed to develop), one feels merely that one wishes to be not here, not doing this. This is boredom. But the bored son forces himself to pay attention—he exhausts himself in the effort to maintain the strained relation of the dull figure and the disturbed ground; soon he is overcome with fatigue and the eyelids droop. If the suppressed excitation is such as to lie importantly gratified in fantasy, he may daydream or fall asleep and dream. But often, unfortunately, as soon as one gives in to the desire to sleep and lies down, then precisely the insomnia sets in.

7: “Sublimation”

Contrasting with the distractions that cannot become attractive and win attention are those that successfully organize an interesting activity. These are interests that draw on an excitation which cannot simply express itself because the meaning is repressed, but which “indirectly” satisfy the need. They are the so-called “sublimations”—interests that satisfy the need in “ways socially acceptable or even esteemed.”

On the Freudian theory of the conversion of affect and, therefore, the repression of the excitation, the process of sublimation would be impenetrably mysterious, for if the organic wish is intrinsically changed, what is it that is satisfied by the substitute activity? On the theory we are presenting, there is no problem. Strictly speaking, there is no such special process as “sublimation” at all. What is called “sublimation” is a direct but imperfect satisfaction of the same need.

The satisfaction is imperfect because the loss of ego-functions in the unaware inhibiting prevents efficient creative adjustment; because the excitation itself is colored with pain, difficulty, masochism; and these color the satisfying interest; because the limitations operating make the interest always somewhat abstract and disconnected from the need; and because the inability to become spontaneous prevents a full discharge. Therefore, the sublimation is compulsively repetitious, the organism does not fully come to equilibrium, the need recurs too frequently. A good deal of masturbating illustrates these properties of sublimation.

Nevertheless, it is evident that the sublimation is not a substitute but at direct satisfaction. Consider, for instance, the well-known interpretation that the art of the novelist is partly a sublimation of repressed infantile peeping and exhibition. (So Bergler.) Certainly the novelist does peep and exhibit. The question is what is repressed here? He satisfies his curiosity about the deeds, sexual and other, of his personages, who are often his acquaintances and very often his remembered family; he exhibits his own feelings and forbidden knowledge. The proof that nothing of this part is repressed is that he in fact feels guilty about doing it. But it will be objected that it is not these things but witnessing the primal scene and exhibiting his childish genitals that are repressed and sublimated, and the guilt is inherited from that era. It seems to us that this is a faulty interpretation of what occurred at that time: the childhood interest in the primal scene consisted of desirous curiosity about the doings of the persons most important to the child, and what he wanted was to exhibit his own nature and desires, and to take part. These are the very needs that he now directly satisfies—but the satisfaction is imperfect, for he is only telling a story, and not also sensing and doing.

For it is just the novelist who manages not to suppress these drives, but to get some direct satisfaction of them. A moment’s reflection on the social effectiveness of many sublimations will show that they are really giving direct satisfaction; for it is the spontaneous and uninhibited that is powerful and effective and, in the end, esteemed. Let us give another, less usual, example. The power of a Gandhi to move millions by his famously childlike personality had as one of its important aspects his peculiar attitude toward food: when Gandhi refused to eat or agreed to cat, it was politically momentous. Now shall we interpret this as an infantile petulance? Then how was it so effective? But on the contrary, it was an extraordinarily direct keeping alive of the child’s true feeling that it makes all the difference in the world under what conditions of love and hate one cats. Gandhi probably fasted not primarily as a calculated threat, but because under certain conditions food was nauseating to him. This spontaneous physiological judgment and consequent considered act, in a context not of the nursery but of the adult world where it is equally relevant but universally disregarded, touched every heart. It was effective not because it was symbolic or a substitute, but because it was a spontaneous response to an actuality.

The Freudian theory of “sublimation,” however, was again the result of his too closely associating the persistent drives with their past situations and thoughts.

8: Reaction-Formation

Reaction-formation is the avoidance of the anxiety threatened by breakdown of the repression (through increase of the inhibited excitation or relaxation of the inhibition) by further attempts to annihilate the excitation or the temptations to it, and by strengthening the inhibition. The repression avoids the excitement; the reaction-formation avoids the anxiety of the throttled excitement— for this anxiety excitement seems even more dangerous than the original excitement was. Examples of annihilating the tempting stimulus or the excitation are avoidance, disgust, defiance, snobbery, moral condemnation; examples of strengthening the inhibition are righteousness, stubbornness, willful stupidity, pride.

If we leave behind the Freudian theory of the conversion of affect and the repression of the excitation, we no longer need to speak of “ambivalences,” contrary feelings toward the same object in the same situation, as if the contraries existed on the same level and were both out-going feelings. (Such contraries, if they existed, would be explicable as incomplete conversion of affect: the thing that childishly gave pleasure does not yet give merely pain.) But it is much more likely that the contraries are dynamically related: one contrary is a reaction-formation against the other: what exists is a dynamic hierarchy of drive, inhibition of the drive, and “defense” of the inhibition, that is, further aggression against the drive and identification with an introject aggressing against it. For instance, consider the appetizing and the disgusting. The appetizing (tempting) is disgusting because the appetite is inhibited by closing the mouth tight: the disgust is a response to the forced feeding of a tight-closed mouth—but one has lost awareness of the fact that one could open one’s mouth, the food would no longer be forced in, and there would be no need to vomit it out. At the stage of suppression, deliberate inhibition, the food is simply alienated from oneself, one does not identify with one’s appetite for it; but at the stage of reaction-formation, one is no longer in contact with the food at all—the choice has nothing to do with the food, but with the forgotten interpersonal relations. So- the recurrent appetite and the disgust do not form a true conflict; there is no real “ambivalence”: the contraries are “I like this food” and “I won’t eat something I don’t like”; these are of course not incompatible, but the adjustment between them is impossible because of the repression.

From a therapeutic point of view, our society has an unfortunate hostility also to its usual reaction-formations, and in turn tries to annihilate them. The reason for this is the state of unequal social development that we have described previously (8,3); a self-conquering society that also esteems the out-going and sexual. The reaction-formations are obviously annihilating and negative; and no one wants to own to them. Righteousness, obsessive cleanliness, thrift, stubborn pride, moral censure are ridiculed and disapproved; they seem small instead of grand. Just so, spite and envy —the aggressiveness of the powerless and the eros of the frustrated—are disapproved. It is only in crises, emergencies, that they are allowed to become foreground. Instead, all these attitudes are themselves replaced by an annihilating of the annihilating, and we get an empty politeness, good-will, loneliness, affect lessness. tolerance, and so forth. The result is that in therapy the relations of patient and therapist are at first too sensible; and it is necessary painfully to mobilize these reactive-traits and petty triumphs. The therapist would prefer the patient to come in like a good neurotic with strong moral convictions.