biography” (7). Freud explicidy refers to Kant in his paper “The Unconscious”:
Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception—that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world. (1957e, 171; emphasis added)
What an amazing thing to say. As difficult and imperfect as our knowledge of our own minds is—and Freud is alluding to unconscious mental processes when he refers to “internal perception”—he says that “external” reality is even more unknowable than that! What is the ego’s relationship with this unknowable and hostile reality like? How does that relationship generate anxiety and what, in turn, does that tell us about the nature of reality, as Freud conceived it?
It was due to anxiety, in Freud’s view, that the ego developed out of the id in the first place, what Freud once referred to as “a frontier creature”, whose purpose was to “mediate between the world and the id . . . and to make the world fall in with the wishes of the id” (196 Id, 56). As I argued in The Death of Desire (Thompson 1985, 1–23), Freud’s initial conception of the ego was that of a defensive, repressive agency. Even when he modified this view to include a synthetic function, the synthetic function itself continued to be perceived in terms of defense. Freud never abandoned his conception of Das Ich as basically defensive, partially because he never entirely abandoned his view of reality as predominandy hostile. Freud viewed the individual as essentially opposed to the world and culture. Culture and reality are repressive, thus they present a threat to every human being. But isn’t this how neurotics typically perceive reality, as essentially hostile, ungratifying, threatening? Isn’t the nature of “transference” such that the patient in psychoanalysis anticipates—and, indeed, experiences—the analytic relationship in such terms? Loewald proposes that
on three levels, then, the biological, psychological, and cultural, psychoanalysis has taken for granted the neurotically distorted experience of reality. It has taken for granted the concept of a reality as it is experienced in a predominantiy defensive integration of it. Stimulus, external world, and culture, all three, on different levels of scientific approach, representative of what is called, reality, have been understood unquestioningly as they are thought, felt, experienced within the framework of a hostile-defensive (that is, regressive-reactive) ego-reality integration. It is a concept of reality as it is most typically encountered in the obsessive character neurosis, a neurosis so common in our culture that it has been called the normal neurosis. (1980, 30)
Loewald concludes that “psychoanalytic theory has unwittingly taken over much of the obsessive neurotic’s experience and conception of reality and has taken it for granted as the ‘objective reality’” (30). Of course, Loewald is referring to Freud’s conception of reality, and that conception, generally accepted by contemporary analysts, is based on Freud’s understanding of anxiety and fear. Freud discussed anxiety throughout his lifetime and revised his thoughts about it periodically. He returned to the subject in 1933 in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in his lecture “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1964c, 81–111). Here Freud reviews his earlier paper on anxiety in the Introductory Lectures, while incorporating more recent thoughts from his “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1959a).
Freud initially believed that anxiety was the consequence of sexual repression. Accordingly, when an idea is repressed, “it’s quota of affect is regularly transformed into anxiety” (1964c, 83). Anxiety was conceived in terms of a transformation of libido and, so, served an unconscious purpose. The symptom of anxiety was a displacement of the repressed wish that was incapable of being fulfilled. Anxiety was thus unconsciously exciting. Freud eventually came to the conclusion, however, that this theory was untenable. Certain symptoms and conditions, such as phobias, showed that neurotics went to great lengths to avoid anxiety, so the view that anxiety was unconsciously experienced as pleasure wasn’t necessarily universal. Freud conjectured that at least some “symptoms are created in order to avoid the outbreak of the anxiety state. This is confirmed too by the fact that the first neuroses of childhood are phobias” (84). Earlier, Freud had defined real anxiety as a signal elicited from an external threat or danger. Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, was a derivative of the economics of sexual life. This suggested there was an ulterior motive in the neurotic experience of anxiety, similar, for example, to conversion hysteria. But Freud began to suspect that there was a real fear in neurotic anxiety as well. Yet, this fear was presumably located on the “inside” rather than “outside.” In other words, “what he is afraid of is evidendy his own libido. The difference between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two points: that the danger is an internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognized” (84). Freud concludes that “anxiety, it seems, in so far as it is an affective state, is the reproduction of an old event which brought a threat of danger; anxiety serves the purposes of self-preservation and is a signal of a new danger; it arises from libido that has in some way become unemployable and . . . is replaced by the formation of a symptom” (84).
Freud subsequently incorporated his formulation of the structural model into his new conception of anxiety. The ego is increasingly conceived as the seat of anxiety, whereas the id is the source of passion (85). Freud concluded that “it was not the repression that created anxiety; the anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression” (86). Whereas neurotic anxiety was previously interpreted in terms of the (id’s) unconscious demand for pleasure, it is now understood—in the same way as normal anxiety—as a response to “a threatening external danger.” Freud resolves his apparent dilemma by proposing “castration” as the external danger, the inevitable consequence of the boy’s lust for his mother.
But we have not made any mention at all so far of what the real danger is that the child is afraid of as a result of being in love with his mother. “The danger is the punishment of being castrated, of losing his genital organ. You will of course object that after all that is not a real danger. Our boys are not castrated because they are in love with their mothers during the phase of the Oedipus complex. But the matter cannot be dismissed so simply. Above all, it is not a question of whether castration is really carried out; what is decisive is that the danger is one that threatens from outside and that the child believes in it” (86; emphasis added).
Castration—which is to say, the threat of castration—now becomes the source of all our (male) neurotic fears. This threat is “perceived” as a real danger, coming from outside. Yet, as Freud acknowledges, castration doesn’t ever really occur, so in what sense is it real? Keep in mind that what we’re talking about—the threat of castration—is a concept, not an event. Yet, children are said to experience, in phantasy, the possibility of danger, not because they perceive it, but because they believe it. But isn’t this how Freud characterized “internal” (i.e., hallucinatory) reality, as something we believe is so, in contrast to something that is actually the case? This presumably external, real threat is, fundamentally, a belief that is apparently derived from (a) noticing that girls lack a penis and (b) threats from adults to cut off one’s hands or penis for playing with oneself. In what sense, however, are threats and discoveries of this kind real, rather than a product of the imagination?
What about the situation with girls? Freud observes that “fear of castration is not, of course, the only motive for repression: indeed, it finds no place in women, for though they have a castration complex they cannot have a fear of being castrated. Its place is taken in their sex by a fear of loss of love, which is evidendy a later prolongation of the infant’s anxiety if it finds the mother absent. You will realize how real a situation of danger is indicated by this anxiety (87; emphasis added). We can see what these two
