The answer is that the neurotic interferes with this healing process. He keeps picking the scab off the wound. By his defense or resistance, he keeps the injury alive. That is what it means to be neurotic and why we can define neurosis as a struggle against fate.
This idea of fate was never far from Freud's consciousness. He remarked about some people, “The impression they give is of being pursued by some malignant fate or of being possessed by some extraneous power, but psychoanalysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile experiences.”2 Freud illustrated this with the case of the benefactor whose proteges invariably abandon him and “who thus seems doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude,” of the man whose friends regularly betray him, and of the lover whose affairs always end the same way. He even mentions the case of a woman whose three husbands had each to be nursed by her on their deathbeds.
Freud believed that such observations indicated the existence of a “compulsion to repeat-something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle.”3 Freud called that something the “death instinct,” which he saw as a “compulsion inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.”4 There is much in common between instinct and fate. Both can be described as blind forces inherent in the nature of things. Both have the quality of predictability. Both are structured in the organism either genetically or characterologically. There is, however, an important difference between them. Instinct describes an act or a force that furthers the life process. It is an active principle. We speak, for example, of an instinct for survival. Fate, on the other hand, is a passive principle. It describes the way things are.
We have seen that people do not always learn from experience, but repeat self-destructive behavior patterns. In my opinion such behavior reflects the operation of fate, because it is a manifestation of character rather than the expression of an instinctual force. The distinction can be made clear by using the analogy of a record player and comparing life to the music it sends forth. The active force is electricity, which runs the motor, which turns the record, allowing the needle to follow the grooves. When the record come to an end, the music ceases-the equivalent of death. The latter is not a compulsion but a state of being.
In this analogy the compulsion to repeat can be seen as a “broken record.” The needle goes round and round in the same groove, repeating the same notes because it is unable to advance. Thus, the repetition compulsion can be seen as the result of a break in the personality, which fixates the individual at a certain pattern of behavior he cannot change. But human beings are not mechanical devices. The repetition compulsion can also be seen as an attempt by the personality to return to the situation where it got stuck, in the hope of someday getting unstuck. However, as long as the break exists, the needle will go round and round in the same groove, the pattern endlessly repeated. That is its fate until the break is healed.
We shall see in a later chapter that when the break in the personality is severe, it gives rise to a death wish in the person. If the wish is conscious it constitutes a suicidal desire or intention. In many cases, however, it is unconscious and severely restricts the individual's ability to live his life fully. Such a wish, though structured in the personality, is not a death instinct, for in most cases it arises from a highly traumatic oedipal situation. To one degree or another that situation breaks the unity of the personality in modern man. His life becomes like a broken record, endlessly replaying the conflicts of his oedipal situation. I would venture the guess that the woman who nursed three husbands on their deathbeds had been in a similar position with her father when she was a child.
In describing the Oedipus complex, Freud revealed the dilemma of modern man, namely, that his success is achieved at the cost of his personal fulfillment and that his power over nature is gained at the expense of his orgiastic potency. But where Freud accepted the inevitability of this dilemma and attempted to justify it biologically in terms of the death instinct, I see the dilemma as the product of this culture and subject, therefore, to change as the culture changes. Pending that change we must find ways to work with that dilemma and the underlying oedipal conflict in the therapeutic endeavor to help a person gain a greater measure of fulfillment in his life.
Few books on psychology today are concerned with the oedipal problem. They don't deny its existence; they simply ignore it. On the thesis that we can be masters of our fate, each offers a recipe for the good life. You are told how to do if. how to be successful, how to be aggressive, how to fulfill your potential, how to be happy, etc. On a practical level the advice is sound in most cases. But the effect of these books upon people's lives is almost negligible. The problems of living seem to increase rather than decrease. The misery in people's lives doesn't seem to lessen. There does seem to be a malign fate operating in the lives of many people that psychology is impotent to change, a fate that is tied to the oedipal situation in their childhood.
The Nature of Fate
One of the themes of this book is that character determines fate. Character refers to a person's typical, habitual, or “characteristic” way of being and behaving. It defines a set of fixed responses, good or bad, that are independent of conscious mental processes. We cannot change our character through conscious action. It is not subject to our will. Generally, we are not even aware of our character because it has become “second nature” to us.
Fate, like character, can be good or bad. There is nothing in the definition of fate that implies a negative value. Fate is not synonymous with doom. True, it is man's fate to die, but it is also his fate to live. Webster's New International Dictionary defines fate as “that principle or determining cause or will by which things in general are supposed to come to be as they are or events to happen as they do; the necessity of nature.” Events happen as they do because of nature's laws. Thus, whether we call it fate, a law of nature, or God, we signify by these terms that events are part of a process that is beyond man's control. In Greek mythology, the fates were known as the Moiria. They were named Clotho (the Spinner), who spins the thread of life; Lachesis (Disposer of Lots), who determines its length; and Atropes (Inflexible), who cuts it off.
Destiny is often used as a synonym for fate, but the two words have slightly different meanings. Destiny is related to the word destination. It refers to what one becomes, whereas fate describes what one is. Fish are fated to swim as birds are fated to fly, but that is hardly their destiny.
Thus, it would be correct to say that it is my fate to be born as it is my fate to die, but my destiny was to become a psychiatrist. The first two are inherent in the nature of life, but not the third. Whether one becomes a king or a slave, a success or a failure, may be predetermined, but it is certainly not a necessity of nature. The oracle at Delphi did not foretell the destiny of Oedipus, which was to vanish from the earth and find an abode with the gods. He prophesied his fate, which was that he would kill his father and marry his mother. That, as we shall see, is a statement about the nature of things. Under certain conditions it is the fate of all men.
One of the characteristics of fate is its predictability. Those of us who do not believe in fate or oracles might think that the future is unpredictable. To some extent this is true, but there is a greater measure of predictability in life than most people realize. Prediction is possible wherever there are structures, for structure determines function or action. This concept is easy to illustrate. Because of its structure an automobile cannot fly like a plane. One can safely predict that it will roll on the ground. Because a human body has a certain structure, it can function in certain ways and no others. Although we can swim underwater, we cannot breathe underwater like a fish because we do not have any gills. A structure sets limits, which makes prediction possible. Thus, knowing the structure of government agencies, we can predict their behavior. Similarly, it would be safe to predict that, all other factors being equal, a one-legged person cannot run as fast as a two-legged person. The number of examples is limitless. Since structure determines behavior, it creates fate.
The important thing about this concept
