An Autobiographical Study; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety; The Question of Lay Analysis; and Other Works.
The second work is 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety'. It appears that it may have been Freud's rejection of Rank's exaggerated estimate of the importance of birth-anxiety that stimulated this reconsideration of the whole problem of anxiety.
Freud had come to realize that symptoms were not produced simply by repression of disturbing wishes, but that in many cases the entire conflict responsible for a patient's symptoms could be unconscious.
Before “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” Freud distinguished between normal and neurotic anxiety.
Theodore Shapiro focused on how these two works contribute to a more sophisticated theory of development. In “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (section VIII), Freud directed our attention to the emerging child in the course of development, and focused on how children's fantasies develop.
Important experience occurs from birth to about five years, during which period structuralization takes place. “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” shows how one-, two-, and three-to-five-year-olds see the world differently.
(1926) Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. Standard Edition 20:87-175.
19354616-625Inhibitions, Symptoms and AnxietySigmundFreud
Our verbal usage permits us, in describing pathological phenomena, to distinguish between inhibitions and symptoms, although without attaching very much importance to the distinction. If we did not encounter cases of which we are forced to say that they exhibit only inhibitions, without any symptoms, and if we did not wish to know the reason for this, we should scarcely think it worth while to demarcate the concepts "inhibition" and "symptom".
In the case of certain particular inhibitions the trend expressed is rather easily recognized.
The more general inhibitions of the ego follow a simple mechanism of another character.
As long as we pay sole attention to the attempt at flight on the part of the ego, we do not even come close to the question of how symptoms are formed. Symptoms result from the injuring of the instinctual impulse through repression.
The question whether all primary hysterical symptoms are so constructed should merit careful investigation.
True conversion hysteria belongs in this category; its most severe symptoms may be free from any admixture of anxiety.
The sensation of unpleasure (Unlust) which accompanies the appearance of symptoms varies to an extraordinary degree.
We turn to the compulsion neurosis in the expectation that we may learn more in this disorder of the way in which symptoms are created. The symptoms of compulsion neurosis are, broadly speaking, of two kinds and of contradictory purport.
Two impressions emerge immediately from this cursory survey of compulsive symptoms. The first is that in these symptoms a continuous struggle against the repressed is being maintained, in which the tide of battle turns increasingly against the repressing forces; the second, that ego and superego here participate to a particularly large degree in the formation of symptoms.
19365415-443Inhibitions, Symptoms and AnxietySigmundFreud
IX
It now remains to deal with the relationship between symptom formation and anxiety development.
According to this latter view, all symptom formation would be brought about solely in order to avoid anxiety; the symptoms bind the psychic energy which otherwise would be discharged as anxiety, so that anxiety would be the fundamental phenomenon and the central problem of neurosis.
Since we have reduced the development of anxiety to a response to situations of danger, we shall prefer to say that the symptoms are created in order to remove or rescue the ego from the situation of danger.
19365261-279Inhibitions, Symptoms and AnxietySigmundFreud
VII
Let us return to the infantile zoöphobias, since these cases we understand better than any others.
This same concept will prove to hold good, I believe, for the phobias of adults also, even though here the material which the neurosis elaborates is far more complex, and even though a number of other factors which go to the forming of symptoms are superadded. Fundamentally the situation is the same.
One might say, then, that symptoms are created in order to avoid the development of anxiety, but such a formulation does not go below the surface. It is more accurate to say that symptoms are created in order to avoid the danger situation of which anxiety sounds the alarm.
We know that psychoneuroses develop with particular readiness on the basis of these "actual" neuroses; and this may mean that the ego makes attempts to minimize and to fix by means of symptoms the anxiety which it has learned to hold temporarily in suspension.
197725873-875A Literary Footnote to "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety"WilliamD.
29 8th AvenueBrooklyn, New York 11217
IN THE DISCUSSION OF ANIMAL PHOBIAS in "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety," besides the well-known cases of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, Freud (1926) briefly mentions a third patient, a young American.
1906 John Dough and the Cherub New York: Dover Publications, 1974Freud, S. 1926 Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety Standard Edition 20 104-105 London: Hogarth Press, 1959
875
1959The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX (1925-1926): An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis and Other WorksThe Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, London
20
1-292
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XX (1925-1926): An Autobiographical Study, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, The Question of Lay Analysis and Other Works
Translated from the German under the General Editorship of
James
Strachey
Anna Freud
Alix Strachey
Alan Tyson
Sigmund Freud with his Father in 1864
ii
Contents
VOLUME TWENTY
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
STUDY (1925 [1924])
page
Editor's Note
3
An Autobiographical Study
7
Postscript (1935)
71
INHIBITIONS, SYMPTOMS
AND ANXIETY (1926 [1925])
Editor's Introduction
77
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
87
Addenda:
157
A.
Clearly both ideas have ground in common; there are inhibitions which are symptoms and symptoms which consist essentially of inhibitions; but they do not in general coincide.
The development which then began continued and reached in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety the point of full consummation and clear formulation:
Just as the ego controls the path to action in regard to the external world, so it controls access to consciousness.
Freud remained faithful to the imperative of analyzing—or trying to analyze—goal-directed behavior in terms of conditioning by antecedents; he tried to find the 'mechanism' of which Welch spoke. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety offers a clear example of this tendency.
24
There was an earlier attempt by Freud, a decade before Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, in which some important points were made; but Freud did not follow them up.
In The Ego and the Id Freud made the point particularly with reference to that 'differentiating grade within the ego' which he had first called ego ideal and which he now called superego; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety applied it to ego activities in the narrower sense of the word.