Beyond the Pleasure Principle (33 page)

Straightaway, points 2 and 3 show us a distinct difference between fear and other states, e.g. those of sorrow and pain. In these latter cases, any motor manifestations that happen to occur are not directly integral to the phenomenon itself; where they exist, they clearly stand out as being not constituent elements of the whole process, but consequences of it or reactions to it. Fear is thus a particular state of unpleasure, with release actions that follow specific pathways. In accordance with our general philosophy in these matters we are inclined to think that the root of fear lies in an increase in excitation that on the one hand generates unpleasure of a particular kind, and on the other hand relieves it by means of the above-mentioned release processes. This purely physiological summary is scarcely going to satisfy us, however: we are tempted to suppose that a
historical
factor is at work here, linking the sensations and innervations of fear firmly together. Our supposition, in other words, is that the state of fear constitutes the reproduction of a prior experience containing the necessary conditions for such an increase in stimulus and for release via specific pathways, and that this is how the unpleasure of fear acquires its specific character. In the case of human beings, birth suggests itself to us as being just such a paradigmatic experience, and we are accordingly disposed to regard the state of fear as a reproduction of the trauma of birth.
⁴²

In saying this we have adduced nothing that might serve to grant fear a special place amongst the states of affect. We take the view that the other affects are also reproductions of ancient, perhaps pre-individual events of life-and-death importance, and may be regarded as universal, typical, inborn hysterical attacks, in contradistinction to the attacks characteristic of hysterical neurosis, which develop at a much later stage and on an individual basis, and whose
genesis and significance as memory-symbols have become clear to us thanks to psychoanalysis. It would be highly desirable, of course, if we could substantiate this hypothesis in respect of a whole series of other affects – but at present we are still very far from achieving this.

Our contention that fear may be traced back to the experience of birth obliges us to deal with a number of self-evident objections. Fear is a reaction that is probably common to
all
organisms, at any rate all the higher ones, but birth is experienced by mammals alone, and it is questionable whether birth is traumatic for all of the latter. Fear thus exists
without
the paradigm of birth. But this objection ignores the boundaries dividing psychology from biology. Precisely because fear – as the reaction to danger – fulfils a biologically indispensable function, it may well be differently constituted in different organisms. Furthermore, we do not know whether it has the same repertoire of sensations and innervations in organisms far removed from human beings as it does in humans themselves. This accordingly presents no obstacle to the supposition that in human beings the paradigm for fear is the birth process.

If the structure and origins of fear are indeed thus, then the question immediately arises: what is its function, and in what circumstances is it reproduced? The answer seems both obvious and compelling: fear arises in the first place as a reaction to a
danger situation
, and is then regularly reproduced whenever a situation of the same kind recurs.

This calls for further comment, however. The innervations involved in the original state of fear were probably also senseful and purposive, just as the muscle actions in an initial hysterical attack are. So if we want to understand the hysterical attack, then of course we simply need to look for a situation in which the relevant movements formed part of some apt and necessary set of actions. We accordingly find that during birth the innervation process, by being directed at the respiratory organs, probably served to prepare the lungs for action, while the acceleration of the heart-beat was intended to counteract any potential poisoning of the bloodstream. Needless to say, this purposive element does not come into the
picture whenever the original fear-state is subsequently reproduced as an affect, just as it is also conspicuously absent whenever the initial hysterical attack is repeated. Therefore if an individual encounters a
new
danger situation, it can easily be counter-purposive for him to respond by reproducing the original fear-state – namely the reaction to a previous danger – instead of reacting in a manner appropriate to the current one. The purposive element re-emerges, however, if the danger situation is perceived as impending rather than present, and is duly signalled by an attack of fear. More appropriate responses can then instantly take the place of this fear. It thus becomes clear at once that fear can emerge in two quite different ways: one that is counter-purposive, where there is a new situation of
actual
danger, and one that is purposive, namely one aimed at signalling an
impending
danger and preventing it from becoming a reality.

But what constitutes a ‘danger’? In the birth process there is an objective danger to life; we know what that means in terms of physical reality – but in psychological terms it means nothing at all. The danger posed by birth does not at the time impinge in any way on the psyche. We surely cannot attribute to the foetus any knowledge whatsoever that the process might end in the extinction of its own life. All that the foetus is capable of registering is a massive upset in the economy of its narcissistic libido. Large quantities of excitation come surging into it, producing unpleasurable sensations of a new kind; various organs peremptorily achieve increased cathexis, which amounts to a sort of prelude to the process of object-cathexis that is soon to commence. But which element in all of this will be put to use as a marker indicative of a ‘danger situation’?

Unfortunately we know far too little about the psychic make-up of the newborn to be able to answer this question directly. I cannot even vouch for the validity of the description I have just offered. It is easy enough to assert that the newborn child will repeat the affect of fear in all subsequent situations that remind it of its birth; the crucial issue, however, is the question as to what serves to remind it, and what it is reminded of.

There is really only one course open to us, and that is to study the circumstances in which babies and somewhat older children show a
readiness to generate fear. In his book
Das Trauma der Geburt [The Trauma of Birth
] (1924), Rank tried very hard to prove a link between the earliest phobias in children and their experience of the birth process but in my view he did not succeed. One can offer two objections to his argument. The first is that it rests on the supposition that in the course of their birth children receive specific sense impressions, particularly visual ones, any recurrence of which can call forth the memory of the birth trauma and therewith the associated fear reaction. This assumption is totally unproven and highly improbable: it is simply not credible that children retain any sensations from the birth process other than tactile ones and ones of a very generalized nature. Thus if a child subsequently exhibits fear of small animals that disappear down holes or emerge from them, this is due in Rank's view to its perception of an analogy, but one of which it necessarily remains unaware. The second objection is that in his analysis of these subsequent fear situations Rank picks and chooses according to the needs of his own argument in deciding which is the operative factor in any given case – the child's memory of its blissful intra-uterine existence, or its memory of the traumatic disruption of that existence. To do this is to open the floodgates to sheer arbitrariness of interpretation. Some instances of childhood fear are flatly unamenable to the application of Rank's principle. If a child is put on its own in a dark place, then on Rank's view we might expect it to welcome this restoration of its situation in the womb, whereas it is precisely in such circumstances that it reacts with fear and when we hear this being attributed to the child's memory of the disruption of uterine bliss by the birth process, we can no longer fail to recognize the factitiousness of this would-be explanation.

I have to conclude that the phobias of very early childhood cannot be directly attributed to the experience of birth, and indeed have so far defied all attempts to account for them. A certain degree of apprehension
⁴³
is unmistakably evident in babies. Rather than - say - being at its strongest just after birth and then slowly abating, it only manifests itself later on, when the psyche begins to develop, and carries on throughout a certain period of the individual's childhood.
If early phobias of this kind persist
beyond
that period, then we tend to suspect the presence of a neurotic disorder, even though we have no idea what its relationship might be to the later and clear-cut neuroses of childhood.

The manifestation of fear in young children is readily comprehensible to us only in very few circumstances, and these are the ones we need to focus on – as when the child finds itself alone, or in darkness, or faced with a stranger instead of the person intimately familiar to it (that is, its mother). These three circumstances boil down to a single determining factor: distress at the absence of the loved (and longed for) person. Once we appreciate this, however, we are well on the way to achieving a real understanding of the phenomenon of fear, and to resolving the apparent contradictions connected to it.

The memory-image
⁴⁴
of the longed-for person no doubt becomes intensely cathected, at first probably in a hallucinatory manner. But this does not produce the desired result, and it seems as if this longing then changes abruptly into fear. This fear conveys a strong sense of being an expression of utter bewilderment on the child's part, as if this still very undeveloped creature knew no better way of giving vent to its highly cathected longing. Fear thus emerges as a reaction to the distressing absence of the object – and at this point two parallels come forcefully to mind: the fact that in castration fear, too, the issue is separation from a highly prized object; and the fact that the very first manifestation of fear, namely the ‘primal fear’ of birth, arises out of separation from the mother.

Our next consideration takes the argument beyond this specific focus on object-loss. The fact that babies want their mother within sight is surely for the sole reason that they already know from experience that she will instantly gratify all their needs. The situation that the child registers as ‘dangerous’, and from which it seeks to be protected, is accordingly that of non-gratification, of an
increase in the tension caused by unmet needs
, in the face of which it is entirely powerless. To my mind, everything falls neatly into place once considered in this perspective. The situation of non-gratification, in which the quanta of stimulation reach an unpleasurable level without
being brought under control through processes of psychic utilization and release, must seem to the baby directly analogous to the experience of being born; it must seem to be a repetition of that same danger situation. The common factor in both is the economic disruption caused by the sudden increase in the quanta of stimulation demanding urgent processing; this factor is accordingly the real nub of the ‘danger’. Fear presents itself as a reaction in both circumstances - and in the case of the baby, too, proves to be just as purposive as before, in that its form of release via the respiratory and vocal muscles causes the mother to come and attend to the child's needs, much as it caused its lungs to become active on parturition in order to get rid of the internal stimuli. There is no reason whatever to suppose that a child retains anything from its birth other than this means of identifying danger.

With the child's realization that an external, directly apprehensible object can put an end to the dangerous situation that harks back to its birth, the burden of the danger accordingly shifts from the economic situation to the factor determining it, namely loss of the object. It is now the distressing absence of the mother that constitutes the danger, and the baby gives out a fear signal as soon as this danger presents itself, even
before
the economic situation it so dreads has come into being. This change represents the first major step forward in the self-preservation regime of the child, in the process embracing the transition from a state whereby fear recurs automatically and involuntarily, to a state whereby it is
intentionally
reproduced as a signal of danger.

In both respects – as an automatic phenomenon and also as a rescue signal – fear is manifestly a product of the infant's psychic helplessness, which is self-evidently the counterpart of its biological helplessness. The striking symmetry whereby fear during birth and fear in the baby once it is born are both determined by separation from the mother requires no psychological interpretation: a perfectly straightforward biological explanation resides in the fact that the mother, having first satisfied the entire needs of the foetus by means of her own bodily mechanisms, then carries on precisely this same function
after
parturition as well, while drawing to some extent on
other means too. Intra-uterine life and the initial phase of childhood are much more of a continuum than the very marked caesura of the birth process might lead us to suppose: the child's
psychic
situation of having the mother as its object amply takes the place of its
biological
situation in the womb – though this should not cause us to forget that the mother was not an object for the child in its intra-uterine life, and indeed that no objects at all existed at that stage.

It is plain that there is no scope in this context for abreacting the birth-trauma, and that the sole identifiable function of the child's fear is to serve as a signal in order to prevent a potential danger situation. However, object-loss as the determinant of this fear has very considerable further repercussions. For the next form of fear that ensues, namely the fear of castration that emerges in the phallic phase, likewise consists in fear of separation, and entails this same determinant. The danger here is that of being separated from one's genitals. An altogether plausible hypothesis of Ferenczi's permits us to see very clearly how this links back to the subject's earlier perceptions
⁴⁵
of the danger situation. The high narcissistic value placed upon the penis can be attributed to the fact that possession of this organ guarantees reunification with the mother (in the form of a mother-surrogate) through the act of coitus. To be robbed of it is tantamount to being separated from the mother all over again, and thus it also means becoming the helpless victim of unpleasurable tension caused by an unmet need – just as happened during birth. As before, the individual is afraid that the need will intensify – but the need is now a specific one, namely that of genital libido, and no longer a generalized one as was the case in infancy. I would add here that the
fantasy
of returning to the womb represents the coitus-substitute of the impotent (those inhibited by the threat of castration). Taking Ferenczi's lead, we can say that such individuals, having previously sought a vicarious return to the womb by means of their genital organ, now regressively substitute their entire person for that organ.