Reading Freud’s “Obsessions and Phobias: Their Psychical Mechanism and their Aetiology” (1895)
An essay that ends surprisingly with a revelation of possible ordinary psychosis and its link to obsessions and phobias.
Freud begins by challenging certain classifications of obsessions and phobias. First, he doesn’t want to include them entirely beneath the category of neurasthenia (a vague condition characterized by fatigue, headaches, irritability, and so on, and typically understood as an emotional disturbance). The first reason is because those who have obsessions and phobias are not always suffering from the same conditions as those grouped under neurasthenia, and the second reason is because obsessions and phobias exist also among those who do not have any sort of mental degeneracy, and, moreover, these obsessions and phobias can often be eradicated. Thus, Freud is really trying to make a point that the prevailing classification system is problematic and that obsessions and phobias are symptoms shared more generally among a large group of people.
Freud claims that obsessions and phobias are better understood in their relationship to what he refers to as neuroses. They must be studied independently of their prevailing classificatory criteria so as to recognize in them a special mechanism and aetiology. And then Freud begins to carefully define his criteria for understanding obsessions and phobias. First, he wants to exclude “intense obsessions” related to “memories and unaltered images of important events.” He removes these sorts of obsessions because they seem “traumatic” and are closer to symptoms of hysterical neurosis. Thus, intense obsessions seem to be defined by an inability to dislodge their fixations which exist in the imaginary dimension. They must exist here in the imaginary dimension because they are “unaltered images” such as the example that Freud gave of Pascal “always [thinking that] he saw an abyss on his left hand.”
Then he makes a further distinction: on the one hand, there are “true obsessions” and on the other hand there are “phobias.” And he constructs a difference in the following way: obsession includes an “idea that forces itself upon the [subject],” and an “associated emotional state.” It is the emotional state that seems to be the criteria by which Freud makes the distinction. Phobia includes an emotional state of “anxiety,” and obsession includes an emotional state of “doubt, remorse, or anger.” Except that in obsession it can also include “anxiety,” thus Freud writes: “just as well as anxiety.”
All of this constitutes his introduction to the discussion. What we have so far, it seems to me, is the following:
First, obsessions and Phobias must be understood on their own terms and in relation to the neuroses.
Second, obsessions and phobias in the neuroses are not traumatic, and their imaginary content is not impressed upon the psyche in such a way that it cannot be dislodged — it is not a matter of intense fixation. This sort of ‘obsession’ is not doubt characteristic of a different structure, and perhaps one that is not a neurosis.
Third, obsessions encompass a wide variety of cases which include subjects who feel an idea forced upon them with the associated emotional state of doubt, remorse, anger, but also, possibly, anxiety.
Fourth, phobias encompass a narrower variety of cases which include not doubt, remorse, and anger, but more purely anxiety as its consequent emotional state.
Section one of the text describes “true obsessions” as being associated with an emotional state: the emotional state is what remains the same while the idea changes. This gives further clarity to something that was hitherto unclear in the first section: why is it that obsession and phobia and traumatic obsessions are different? Freud’s answer now seems very clear and forceful: it is because a true obsession has the same repeated emotional state while the ideational content is capable of changing, whereas, the traumatic obsessions have the same ideational content. And Freud locates “doubt” as a key mechanism or emotional state: whereas the content changes, as in a case of a woman who made counterfeit money, who treated her sisters poorly, and so on, yet the doubt remains the same. Freud writes that “[p]eople who doubt have many doubts at the same time or in succession. It is the emotional state which remains constant in them; the idea changes.” Yet, nonetheless, there are times when the idea “seems fixated.” Thus, it seems that Freud is trying to allow for enough nuance so as to ensure that the analyst properly interrogate the subject’s discourse.
Freud goes on to claim that in “true obsessions” the emotional state — for example, of doubt — is always justified. In other words, it is reasoned and rational from the perspective of the subject’s discourse. Thus, when one gets down to it, and the ideational content as well as the emotional state are properly revealed through analysis, one can see why the subject feels the way he or she does. It is perfectly justified by the discourse. Yet, there are mechanisms by which this can be concealed, of which Freud outlines two: first, “if the emotional state persists indefinitely, without any interruption (such as a provocation of being ‘caught’ or something else equally dramatic),” and second if there is a substitute lie to replace the second lie, where the lies begin to stack up. In both cases the justification of the discourse can become concealed even though it may still exist somewhere within the latent content. This, at least, is how I read Freud’s statements.
Freud claims that “[t]he proof of this [aforementioned] fact is that we can always find in the previous history of the patient, at the beginning of the obsession, the original idea that has been replaced.” And at the root of the idea which forms the obsession is a sexual or distressing experience which the subject is “striving to forget,” or, in other words, repress. And one of the strategies — no doubt it is similar to the strategies of the dream-work — is to replace “the incompatible idea by another ill-adapted […] one.” Freud here uses a french word to describe this process: mesalliance, which means “false connection.” The mesalliance is what accounts for the absurdity that is “so characteristic of obsessions.”
The rest of the paper introduces cases to demonstrate this basic theory.
Case #1 seems to juxtapose two contents, manifest and latent. The manifest content, if I may use this expression, is that “she reproached herself for things which she knew were absurd: for having stolen, for having made counterfeit money, for being involved in a conspiracy, etc,…” In other words, she reasoned that it was absurd and accepted this as fact, and yet she continued to partake in the behaviours. But then Freud discovered the substitution at play: “she reproached herself [originally] with the masturbation she had been practicing in secret without being able to renounce it.” What is interesting here is the connection of obsession with masturbation, whereby masturbation is elsewhere referred to by Freud as the first obsession.
Case #2 is about a young medical student who had a difficult time with his own obsessional behaviours: for killing his cousin, violating his sister, setting fire to a home, etc. Freud discovered at the root was a difficulty he faced while reading a medical book on masturbation, to which he was himself addicted but did not admit it, and he felt a suffering of his own morality.
Case #3 is about several women who had the obsessional idea of tossing themselves out of a window because of not being satisfied in their marriage, and difficulties — feelings of guilt I suppose — of thinking about other men during their marriage. These obsessions had to do with conflicting feelings for which they felt immoral.
And then there are 8 or 9 more cases, which I shall skip. Before continuing I want to remark upon the following: masturbation seems to be at the core of a lot of the cases, feelings of sexuality and a request feeling of failing somehow morally.
Freud then tackles the question of how the substitution can possibly come about. Freud supposes that obsessions tend to be inherited, citing “similar heredity is often enough found in obsessional cases, as in hysteria.” This is all Freud states about the origin of substitutions, that they are often found also in the parents or primary care givers. He turns next to the motive for substitutions: an act of defence — from the agency of the ego — against an idea that is incompatible to consciousness. The repression of the idea through this defence often eradicates the originating conflict from consciousness. And this can happen in two ways: sometimes one remembers eradicating the original conflicting idea and other times eradication of the idea happens unconsciously and the subject cannot recollect it at all.
This brings us to section 2.
Section 2 addresses phobias. And, like we suspected from the first part of our reading, phobias are a part of the obsessional experience in some way. They are a narrower experience within the obsessional rubric. There are two groups of true obsessionals, those described in the previous section and then also those who may be phobic. In phobia the emotional state is always anxiety, and Freud adds, “fear” — it is not characterized by doubt, anger, and so on. Freud adds that obsessions have much more diversity to them whereas phobias are more “monotonous and typical.”
And then he constructs two groups of phobias, each distinguished by the type of the object that is feared. Thus, we can define phobia already as a fear of an object. First, there are “common phobias” which are exaggerated fears of which everyone experiences to some extent (night time, death, illness, solitude, and so on). Second, there are “contingent phobias” which are not often experienced by “normal man.” A fear of locomotion, for example. In of itself I do not find myself satisfied by Freud’s distinction and his turn to “normal man” versus the “wide variety of men.” I suspect he is using this only as a rhetoric device and will provide a more technical definition momentarily.
To distinguish obsessions from phobias one should look to the “mechanism” since “substitution” is no longer the dominant operation in the latter. Whereas obsession functions through substitution, phobia does not. For the phobic subject there is no incompatible idea that has been replaced with another, thereby concealing the original unconscious idea. Rather, there is the absence of the idea entirely: we focus more on the emotional state itself, which is fear or anxiety, and then the fear of the anxiety itself. Say, for example, the “recollection of an anxiety attack.” The subject who is phobic fears the conditions which would produce the attack itself. In other words, in my understanding, this means that there is no unconscious idea but rather a full consciousness of the conditions by which the anxiety might spring forth. Freud links phobias therefore with the “anxiety neurosis,” which are forms of neurosis whereby the chief symptom is the emotional state itself rather than the repressed ideational content.
Yet the anxiety neurosis also has a sexual origin, like the rest of the neuroses. Yet, for that matter, it is not related to ideational content of those sexual origins. Freud puts it like this: “its specific cause is the accumulation of sexual tension, produced by abstinence or by unconsummated sexual excitation.” It seems to me that this implies that it is more related to the drives and less with the signifying material itself. It is related to the possibility of unfulfilled sexuality: ‘relative impotence’ ‘excitation without satisfaction,’ ‘enforced abstinence,’ and so on. It is in these situations that anxiety neurosis develops.
Freud concludes by claiming that phobia and obsession may co-exist, and that he has frequently seen it. There are cases where a phobia exist along with a true substitutive obsession. What could this mean? He cites a “protective procedure” of the substitutive function in relation to the fear. It is here that Freud leaves a thread dangling and concludes his essay. He cites as an example his case #7. Case number seven has to do with the body, and this should not go unnoticed:
A woman suffered from attacks of this obsession which ceased only when she was ill, and then gave place to hypochondriacal fears. The theme of her worry was always a part or function of her body; for example, respiration: ‘why must I breathe? Suppose I didn’t want to breathe?’ etc.
And then Freud provides his overview:
At the very beginning she had suffered from the fear of becoming insane, a hypochondriacal phobia common enough among women who are not satisfied by their husbands, and she was not. To assure herself that she was not going mad, that she was still in possession of her mental faculties, she had begun to ask herself questions and concern herself with serious problems. This calmed her at first, but with time the habit of speculation replaced the phobia. For more than fifteen years, periods of fear (pathophobia) and of obsessive speculating had alternated in her.
Is this not, then, a case of what today we call “ordinary psychosis” whereby the drives give way and there is no mechanism by which they can be cut into the signifying system? In such cases a substitutive function — a Compensatory Make-Believe Function, as Jacques-Alain Miller has called it — might come forth to provide a different sort of substitution. Had Freud looked into the linguistic nature of the substitution he would have noted that it was not of the Oedipial variety, most likely, since, as Freud put it, there was only a fear and a fear of fear, without unconscious ideational content. And the fear of the body, the speculation of the body, as an attempt to patch the body back into the psyche, seems to be just one sort of substitution.
