Awareness that one is responsible for one’s self awakens in young people, often in a milieu where parents do not know how to listen or can no longer be trusted. (Location 108)
The twentieth century, which discovered the power of the atom and found ways of harnessing it, is also opening up to the unconscious power of the libido. The sense of personal responsibility could not be greater. (Location 113)
those who live or work in continuous contact with children, if they are honest enough to note what they see, will bring many observations to support the discoveries of psychoanalysis. (Location 129)
A doctor who lacks knowledge of the structure of the mind reminds us of a surgeon who, faced with an abscess about to burst, tries to hide the swelling and smear it with analgesics instead of draining the abscess. Sedatives and “a change of scenery” fall into that category. (Location 188)
it is said, can do the work itself, hence patients are being told such things as “with time”, “be patient”. Yes, but the pus will ooze for a long time and the scar will be ugly. The abscess could also become encysted and, although apparently eliminated, the seat of the infection can reawaken during a phase of lower general resistance or of an injury at this sensitive point: anxieties, obsessions, depression, insomnia, cardiac or digestive troubles, appear suddenly in an adult because of an unhappy emotion or event which he could have surmounted were it not for the neurotic infantile trauma ready to reawaken. It (Location 190)
The importance of infantile traumas in all the works devoted to psychoanalysis is sometimes surprising. However, everyone knows that in all individuals the most dangerous illnesses and the shocks which traumatise the most are those which attack an embryonic organ; an organ with the least resistance or an organ which has already suffered a previous lesion, for which healing is not yet assured. What is true in the physical domain is also true in the domain of the psyche. (Location 196)
The drives are primary, aim-oriented impulses of a physiological nature which demand satisfaction. Some of these drives are in conflict with the prohibitions. These drives and prohibitions being unconscious, the link between them—the complex—is also unconscious. (Location 219)
But the reactions engendered by this unconscious conflictual situation manifest themselves through behaviour. The subject then thinks and acts despite himself according to motives stemming from unconscious determinants, whilst his need to make sense of them always manages to enable him to justify his actions in his own eyes. (Location 221)
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for Freud and psychoanalysts, the term “sexual” does not only designate the physical aspects linked with the genital act of procreation; it also encompasses all that is to do with hedonistic activity, which is to say everything which has to do with pleasure-seeking. (Location 226)
Through studying the phenomena of post-hypnotic behaviour observed by Hippolyte Bernheim, a French specialist in hypnotherapy whom he visited,1 Freud noticed that an action which had been ordered by the doctor under hypnosis was emphatically inscribed on the conscious mind, whilst neither the memory of the order to perform the action nor the memory of hypnosis could be accessed. (Location 252)
a subject opening his umbrella in the middle of a meeting, according to the order received under hypnosis, might reply to the questions of the group that “I want to see if my umbrella is working”. A psychic phenomenon can therefore be unconscious and effective. (Location 259)
However, one must notice the following difference: the action ordered under hypnosis, once performed, ceases to play a role in the unconscious of the subject; however, the unconscious force emanating from the subject himself tends to repeat itself indefinitely, according to a rhythm which varies with each individual. This is the reason why neurosis cannot be cured spontaneously. (Location 264)
Should it happen that, right from its beginning, the libidinal thrust finds prohibitions in the external world, the representation is repressed; but the underlying affective charge remaining, it is transformed into extreme anxiety. (Location 271)
If the affective charge finds a way to graft itself onto another idea, better tolerated by the outside world, a symptom is formed: an unrecognisable use of the repressed drive. This appearance of the symptom frees the subject of his anxiety and gives him an immediate feeling of well-being. (Location 275)
A classical experiment will allow us to understand the formation of the superego. If some fish are put into a bowl and the bowl is divided into two by a transparent pane of glass, the fish on either side desperately try to swim through the transparent wall and crash against it ceaselessly; until the moment when they act as if they “had lost the will” to exit the compartment which is reserved for them. From then onwards, they will never crash against the glass wall again, and if, after a few weeks, the partition is removed, one notices that the fish carry on behaving “as if it was still there”; the prohibition has been internalised and is by now part of the “personality” of the fish. (Location 279)
Repression only affects ideas. The affective charges which sustained the ideas (and which, as we have said before, cannot be destroyed) provoke in the conscious of the subject, through the accumulation of nervous unsatisfied tension, an anxiety from which he suffers and whose cause he does not know. (Location 288)
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Anxiety tries to liberate itself by producing a symptom, which will then allow an emotional discharge (the affective charge attaches itself to another idea). (Location 292)
We can compare the libido to the water from a spring. It has to flow; if it is prevented from welling up where it emerges, it will appear somewhere else. When the water first appears, it is called a spring; it does not have to go further than a few metres before it becomes a brook. If one wants to stop the flow of the brook, one has to dam it; but that dam needs to be reinforced again and again as the water pressure rises, and however large the dam, however powerful its walls, it will only be an obstacle to water for a certain length of time, beyond which it will be breached, unless some small gaps allow for an overflow, or, there again, if there is an outlet through which the reservoir can discharge, powering a hydroelectric plant, for example. It is the role of the superego to favour “sublimation”, which is the deployment of the libido into social activity which is tolerated or even stimulated by the external world. But if the outflow is not in proportion with that of the spring, the water must find additional openings: this is the role of the symptoms; and these breaches occur at the points of least resistance. This is what happens when drives cannot reach the conscious and awaken or reinforce symptoms corresponding to an early developmental period which were tolerated at the time. The libido is tempted to retrace an old known path, and to proceed to this or that re-investment around “fixation points”, depending upon an array of conditions which in the past had led it to emphasise this or that symptom when it appeared. So, back to the metaphor; under the thrust of a flood, the water from the reservoir will first break through the flood gates which close the access to beaches where the water was allowed to stay temporarily when the dam and the hydroelectric plant were not yet functional. The big difference between what happens to water on the surface of the earth and what happens with the libido inside an individual, is that the inhibiting force, which opposes the expression of the drives, stems from the individual himself. The dynamic element of the id is the libido, and the dynamic element of the superego is the same libido. (Location 300)
And this was the error of the first years of the psychoanalytic method, when naively it was thought that it was good for patients to be told the meaning of their symptoms. (Location 329)
At the same time as the ego of the subject desires in good faith to submit to analytic treatment and help the doctor with the best will in the world, as soon as psychoanalysis attempts to separate the two antagonistic forces, the subject deploys an unconscious latent opposition, just as if he was organising a defence. The name given to this phenomenon is resistance. (Location 331)
This is why psychoanalytic method aims to circumvent repressive mechanisms and not what has been repressed. (Location 340)
The originality of the psychoanalytic method is to permit the observation of an individual’s behaviour to be as objective as possible. The patient’s relationship to the therapist is outside social space and time; the patient does not know the therapist as a social being and knows nothing of his personal opinions and reactions; the patient will never hear from him the slightest value judgements. (Location 348)
We saw that in the Freudian sense of the word, sexual does not mean genital, and the genital epithet pertains only to some manifestations of sexuality: those which come later and represent an advanced stage in the adult development of the individual. But in the child, hedonism (by this I mean “the search for pleasure”) awakens very early. (Location 367)
Now there are no better objective criteria to human development than emotional criteria, by which I mean the behaviour of the individual towards his love objects. (Location 374)
any therapy that aims to hinder or lessen the presenting symptoms will have only a palliative effect. (Location 384)
The oral stage is the name given to the phase governed by the libido which lasts from birth to weaning and which is under the predominating influence of the erogenous oral zone. Although referred to as the “oral stage”, one also has to remember that we are talking about the whole oral, digestive and respiratory system (grasping and biting the nipple with the lips and teeth, tasting, swallowing, babbling, crying, breathing in and out, and so on). (Location 388)
The pleasure of sucking, irrespective of the need to feed, is an autoerotic pleasure. It is a type of primary narcissistic pleasure, an original autoerotism, the subject not yet having the notion of an outside world separate from him. (Location 393)
As soon as something interests the child, he puts it in his mouth. Absorbing the object, merging with it, will bring about the pleasure of “having” which is the same for the baby as the pleasure of “being”. (Location 404)
Thus, little by little, the child identifies with his mother during a first mode of relating which furthermore will last all his life, even though other modes will appear: if she smiles, he smiles, if she speaks, he gabbles, thus he develops, passively storing up sounds, images and sensations. This is the oral stage in its first, passive form. (Location 406)
If we wait until this moment to begin weaning, weaning will be experienced as a consequence of aggression; that is to say, a punishment through frustration. In children who have been kept at the breast too long, there is always a difficulty in fully taking pleasure in their ability to be aggressive without provoking a need for self-punishment. (Location 412)
And this could well be the first discovery of masochistic autoerotic pleasure, which is one of the normal components of sexuality. (“Masochism”, in its first approximation, can be understood as being in the order of “do something to me”, the pleasure of passively experiencing touch on the body (the general progression of the faeces, their appearance at the rectal passage, are not in fact voluntary acts and therefore (Location 450)
To poo or pee at the right moment when the adult demands therefore becomes a way that the child rewards the mother, a sign of a good relationship with the mother whilst the refusal to comply will be likened to a punishment, or to a falling out with her. Through mastery of the sphincters, the child discovers the notion of his power over what is his private property: his faeces, which he may give or not. The autoerotic power is over the bowel movement, the emotional power over his mother, whom he can reward or not. This gift to the mother can be compared with all the other “gifts” that one “presents”, money, ordinary objects which become precious because they have been given, including a baby, a little brother or sister, whom, in childhood fantasy, the mother produces through her anus after having eaten miraculous food. (Location 457)
“sadistic” can be understood roughly as in the same vein as “I do something to you with my body”, “I want to have the right of life or death over objects, over living matter, over you—as I wanted to have over my poo”.) (Location 465)
the child only renounces a pleasure in order to experience another, that of satisfying a beloved adult. Identification, a mechanism already known at the oral stage, is one of his pleasures. (Location 470)
Then, instead of playing with his poo, he absorbs himself in making mud pies and paddling in mud and water; and because of this unconscious displacement, the severity or otherwise of the parental attitude towards cleanliness in general, including the sphincters, will foster or hamper the happy development of the child and his adaptation to the social world; this is reflected being at ease in his body and in his manual dexterity. (Location 476)
The identification has been successful. It is because he loves the adult that he plays at being annoying and fighting with her. The ambivalence that appeared at the end of the oral stage is taking shape and growing. (Location 486)
The love object sought by individuals of this character type is not a priori heterosexual. The subject seeks to rediscover in relation to the object the emotional experience he had with his mother based on the image the infant felt in his own body. (Location 504)
The important thing is that the individual rediscovers the feelings that he experienced with the dominant and idealised adult in the pregenital stage. (Location 507)
To subjugate or be subjugated is the acme of this all consuming love relationship. This is an ethic of possession, which finds its end and justification within itself. It is therefore a latent and unconscious homosexuality which underlies the choice of object, whether the person is of the other sex or not. (Location 509)
When this anal character is predominant in a woman, she can make a good and faithful employee to a demanding master, through whom she gains narcissistic advantage for having been chosen as his victim. (Location 517)
Frigidity in women and impotence in men comes from over-investment in action, doing, or forcing the other to do, over feeling authentically expressed. (Location 524)
Based on a dualistic schema derived from anal investment (“passive—active”), the child establishes a series of understandings qualified by the actual relationships the child has with those around him. Any new piece of knowledge is identified with the object he already knows. (Location 534)
Objects that oppose his wishes are “naughty”, and he attacks them; he is on bad terms with them and with whatever resembles them or is associated with them. (Location 537)
be “well behaved” will mean to choose to act according to what he knows the adult expects; this can corrupt the ethical code of the child for whom to be well behaved can come to mean being passive, immobile, and without curiosity. (Location 543)
This object, generally an animal, represents for the child’s unconscious the adult from whom the child has withdrawn his aggressive libidinal investment so as to project it onto its replacement, the feared animal. (Location 554)
this baby masturbation is negligible and will stop of its own accord, reappearing only during the third year. (Location 561)
Prohibiting masturbation may result in the return of urethral incontinence with or without thumb sucking. (Location 566)
Sexual curiosity begins before the third year, during the anal sadistic phase. The aim is primarily towards knowing where babies come from. (Location 573)
The question is generally dodged by adults, who speak of gooseberry bushes and of storks, but the child discovers very soon that the mother has a big tummy before the newborn arrives, and then that she breastfeeds. (Location 575)
Then comes another question. What is the difference between girls and boys? There again, the adult usually avoids answering. The child then uses his own personal knowledge and, going back to his experience of giving or withholding his poo, where the dualism is characterised by the opposites active and passive, he says to himself that “the boy is stronger”, which is generally true during early childhood. (Location 580)
The boy, frightened by tales of genital mutilation, becomes fully aware of what until now he has refused to see: the girl really doesn’t have one. This happens around five or six, an age when conversation with other children, and most of all sexual games between boys and girls, will leave him with no doubt on the question. Before the age of six, he still thinks that the girl “has a smaller version”, unable as he is at that age to think other than in relation to himself. But usually, despite his acceptance of the lack of a penis in girls, the belief that his mother still has one, persists. The mother cannot lack what she has given. It is through her disfavour that the girl does not have one. (Location 586)
When the mother is not there when he wants her, the child calls and looks for her. If he finds her, she may be busy and reject him by saying “Later on, now I am doing this or that”, the child asks “why?”. “So that you can have something to eat”, answers the mother, “so that the house is cleaned, “so that Daddy is happy; go and play!‘” The child obeys, taking with him whatever he can from his mother; her words, which he repeats to himself, often aloud. Or else he remains quiet, watching her. (Location 598)
This longing engenders ambition, the wish to make up for his inferiority through the practical exploitation of his knowledge. This is, without any doubt, the emotional basis and the starting point of a greater and greater interest that the individual brings to learning, knowing, and it is the beginning of being able to value “Knowledge”. (Location 627)
This is why, when a child is asked to keep partly or completely still, it is experienced as sadistic, and even more so if he is told to keep quiet by an adult, hypersensitive to noise. Chattering is a sign of both bodily and mental health in all children under seven. Mental concentration on a school task or in play, without accompanying noises or body movements and a running commentary, is a sign of a morbid lack of energy. Being made to keep still, when he has to concentrate mentally, can only be developed gradually and needs to be punctuated by moments of noisy bodily letting go. This training is more often damaging than useful; it is, unfortunately, too often synonymous with the well-behaved child, who gives every satisfaction to obsessed or hysterical adults whose thoughts and fantasies are disturbed by the child’s vitality. (Location 637)
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The silence and immobility of the well-behaved child are rarely anything more than a mutilation of vitality, a reduction to the status of faecal object, an enforced death to which the child submits. Before sinking into “mental retardation”, which is the effect of this “death”, he develops sadistic fantasies, which can become phobic hallucinations, the source of perverse erotic pleasure at all stages of the libido which is being blocked of active expression. Rhythmic masturbatory compulsions, twitching, stuttering, insomnia, encopresis, enuresis, are the last refuge of the libido for this socially inert child, tortured by a perverted upbringing. (Location 642)
we will not discuss family conflicts, the mechanisms of which can be practically and fundamentally superimposed on conflicts between the parents. (Location 659)
The boy naturally takes the role of the father and the girl that of the mother. (The reverse is symptomatic of neurosis.) (Location 672)
Around four, four and a half at the latest, the boy embarks openly in an emotional battle with his father; he plays at killing him, tries to totally monopolise his mother’s affections, tells her that he is going to marry her, that he is going to take her far away to his house in a plane and that they are going to have children. He enters the Oedipal phase. (Location 673)
What do these two grown-ups do together? Another question that the child tries to resolve: he watches them, listens to them talking, without understanding their conversation. But the adults chase him away, and sometimes they stop talking when he appears. And the mystery of his parents’ intimacy connects to another, which remains unsolved: the role of the father in the conception of children. (Location 682)
(The child should always sleep in a room other than that of the parents and with the door closed. And this from the age of six months at the latest. One would then avoid the most important cause of nerviness in the child.) (Location 690)
What will become of this Oedipal configuration, which commences around four years old and reaches its full development around six years old? Bowing to nature, the child must not only abandon the rivalry, occasionally full of hatred, with the parent of the same sex, but identify with him or her. The child will have to develop the qualities, which will make a man of the boy and a woman of the girl. The structural work of the unconscious energetic process of the castration complex, which we will study later on, and the lessening of the libidinal thrust inherent in latency, will converge to help the child in this difficult transition. This withdrawing of libidinal drive, very marked after nine years old, eases the conflicts, even if they are not fully resolved, and up until about twelve years old, a repression, which never fails, pushes back into the unconscious all the curiosity and all the sexual desires which had been so strong in second infancy. (Location 698)
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With the onset of puberty, poor social skills and achievements (at school or in sport depending on family values) can make it difficult for the child to flourish because the child will not be able to legitimately trust in himself. And it will be said with reason that this child is not blossoming, that he is at an “awkward age”. (Location 721)
When the child asks us a question, for example, we never reply directly, but refer the question back to the child: “What do you think?” and our remarks consist of only a few encouraging monosyllables. (Location 2034)
Through drawing, in fact, we enter straight into the subject’s imaginative representations, his feeling states, his inner world, and his symbolism. This enables us, after we have tacitly understood it, to orientate the “conversations” we have with the child, to elucidate the meaning of his representations when they are aberrant. We never give direct interpretations of these drawings. (Location 2038)
The psychoanalytic diagnosis is subsequently fine-tuned during treatment; the initial diagnosis is a diagnosis of symptoms. (Location 2047)
we do not speak a “logical” language aimed at the intelligence of the child, who is not yet logical (let’s not forget this); we want to speak to his unconscious—which is never “logical” in anyone (something we must not forget either!)—this is why we naturally employ the symbolic and emotional language, which is his and touches him directly. (Location 2051)
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this is what transference means. This is a situation in which there is emotional bonding to the psychoanalyst, who becomes a figure, of the utmost importance, within the inner world of the child for the duration of the treatment. (Location 2057)
The therapy itself is only “conveyed” within the transference. (Location 2061)
we will see, we always proceed in the following way: first of all, we have an interview with the mother or the parents, always in the presence of the child, except in special cases when we ask for a one-to-one interview with the mother, sending the child back to the corridor for a few minutes. We never have this one-to-one talk after a private interview with the child. Whilst speaking to the adult, we also take the opportunity to glance at the way the child is reacting. We generally have him settled at a table with paper and pencil in front of him, and we say: “Would you like to make me a beautiful drawing, anything, whatever you like?. (Location 2073)
We then request that the mother leave us alone with the child; we do this during the first visit only if neither the mother nor the child are resistant to it. Should this be the case, we do not hurry things, and we say that we find their mistrust perfectly natural and we only ask that the mother remain as a rigorously silent observer during the initial interview which we are having with the child. (Location 2082)
This means that we are obliged to perform a therapeutic action on the very first day even before we know the exact details of the case. Common sense is the major tool in our a priori therapeutic arsenal. There is nothing psychoanalytic in this. This is the basis of “conscious” psychotherapy, that is to say, methods used by our non-psychoanalytic colleagues. (Location 2094)
Parents, in effect, have only two attitudes in the face of psychological or neurotic symptoms. They claim either that the child has an illness, a mental or physical “abnormality”, or has ill will, is lazy, or is deliberately nasty. The first of these interpretations removes any responsibility from the child, and the second loads him with all the responsibility. These two attitudes each as wrong as the other have the consequence of fixing the child even more into the vicious circle of his neurotic symptoms. (Location 2099)
We have just used the term “family neurosis”; this is because we encounter in the case of more than fifty per cent of neurotic children, neurotic behaviour on the part of the parents or one of the parents. (Location 2209)
This detailed example should demonstrate the goal we set ourselves: which is to be impartial and to help the child find a means of expressing his repressed drives, adapting them to the reasonable demands of his circle and to his own ethics, appeasing his guilt feelings as well as satisfying the legitimate demands of his libido, in the best possible way. (Location 2254)
When parents tell us about the misbehaviour of their children, how nasty, vicious, lazy, impertinent, and so on they are, we do not criticise them, we just content ourselves with listening attentively, asking them to give us the precise circumstances without echoing their complaints, or reproaches. Our benevolent attitude towards the child never falters; each of our reactions, our expressions, our words, our gestures is deliberately neutral or oriented in the therapeutic direction, which we believe is indicated. We never apportion blame. We seek to understand the “economic” reason (that is to say, “that which is the most advantageous for the pleasure principle”) that pushes a human being to rebel and to live on bad terms with their immediate circle, which is not in the a priori logic of the human being. (Location 2262)
The common principle of psychological health being an attunement between the sensibility of the subject and that of their surroundings. (Location 2285)
From a psychoanalytic point of view, one cannot therefore say that psychological suffering is in itself either a cause or a proof of neurosis, it is only a cause or a proof of emotional discordance. It is the practical way in which a subject reacts to it which will be called a normal reaction or a neurotic reaction, the normal reaction being that which allows the personality to preserve the wholeness and the free play of their life drive, as a consequence of their finding a creative way out. (Location 2288)
One of the objections often raised is that treatments are extremely long and, because of this very fact, costly. This is true, and all truly psychoanalytic experiences, that is to say, treatments based on the rebuilding of one’s personality by the subject himself, in which the doctor only lends her actual presence as a sensitive, “responsive witness”, that of a contractual and temporary impartial mediator, are necessarily long. It is only among these treatments that one can count perfect and definitive cures, whatever happens later in the subject’s life. (Location 2305)
A cure is only assured when the analysand, apart from the lasting disappearance of the symptoms, “is internally at peace with himself”. That is to say, that he reacts towards real difficulties in life without anxiety, through a spontaneous attitude adapted to the demands of a moral code that is in accord with the milieu in which he chooses to live, and with his own; whilst allowing his instinctual drives adequate expression (libidinal discharges in sufficient quality and quantity) which ensure the conservation of the acquired equilibrium. (Location 2320)
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it is certain that the taste for working with mental illness will never come to an individual whose attention has not been drawn towards conflicts that he did not understand. (Location 2351)
Some people would want all psychotherapists to be wonderful and innately balanced. Can they not realise the impossibility of what they are asking? That such beings exist, we cannot deny, but we can also affirm that there are very few of them amongst doctors, and probably even fewer amongst those interested in mental problems. If we ourselves had not had our attention drawn by emotional conflict, not only around us, but also within ourselves, we would probably never have studied in detail the questions we are talking about here. (Location 2376)
None of us can undertake our work without a sublimated libido. We well know that sublimations are mechanisms of defence against anxiety, that is to say, against mental suffering, and the difference from a symptoms said to be neurotic is only a difference of social worth. (Location 2392)
But if necessary, we make our own the therapeutic methods used at all epochs by our colleagues. We employ them in our psychotherapy, especially in order to obtain the trust of the parents when we are dealing with young children, because the practical possibility of treating their children, or not, depends on them. (This is why it is necessary to know adults well and their emotional reactions through the practice of classical adult psychoanalysis, in order to prevent harmful reactions, or to ward them off as much as possible, so as to shelter our little patients, their children, from their unconscious reactions, which are often damaging behind their conscious good intentions.) (Location 2401)