Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896) (II)
At this point, we will note a paradox shadowing Freud’s account. Where there is a symptom-generating “trauma,” it is invariably parasitic upon memories of earlier and more fundamental “scenes” — first, some pubescent sexual experience, which itself transmits a traumatic charge from, second, an infantile sexual scene. But when we finally isolate the infantile ur-scene — which, given the chronology, could not possibly involve “memories” of anything earlier — we discover it is “traumatic” in a very peculiar sense. After all, if by “trauma” we mean an episode that is necessary and sufficient, on its own, for producing neurotic symptoms (an approximation of the expression’s colloquial meaning), then we must conclude that, for Freud, “traumas” do not exist. (This inference appears all the more striking given the context: an essay purportedly centering “trauma.”) In other words, the scenes that do produce symptoms, in adulthood, draw their traumatic force from memories of antecedent scenes that did not cause symptoms.
While Freud occasionally admits exceptions, the “scenes” in question are essentially distributed among three groups: (a) the trauma of later adulthood, which provokes the symptom (even while lacking in suitability and force); (b) the trauma of puberty which, though potentially evincing suitability and force, need not, and — in any case — likewise depends on the cooperation of memories; and (c) the trauma of infancy, which — final traumatic causa sui — does not originally have any traumatic “effect” at all.
To be sure, Freud insists that these infantile scenes do involve a direct, objective violation. They are “occurrences of premature sexual experience” (203) that, “affecting the subject’s own body” (203), posses a self-evident “importance” and “determining” (203) power that do not characterize later scenes. Freud liberally describes these early experiences as “sexual abuses” (207), “sexual assaults” (207), and “acts of sexual aggression” (208). Nor, of course, does he hesitate to call these scenes “traumas” by name:
“Sexual experiences in childhood consisting in stimulation of the genitals, coitus-like acts, and so on, must therefore be recognized, in the last analysis, as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms” (206-7, my italics)
And yet, at several moments, Freud’s very conception of infantile trauma seems to corner him into suggesting that the sexual abuses were not, in fact, traumatic. The “infantile sexual experiences…remain without effect to begin with” (212); or again, though “the memory of infantile sexual experiences produces such an enormous pathogenic effect…the actual experience itself has none” (213); or finally, and perhaps most remarkably, the childhood injury is “an experience that was innocuous at the time it happened” (213).
Thus the infantile trauma and the adult trauma are each, on their own, necessary but insufficient conditions for the possibility of neurotic symptoms. While no symptoms can emerge in post-pubescent life in the absence of the childhood scene, that scene cannot cause illness from out of its own resources. We are confronted, them, with the puzzling, counter-intuitive idea of a childhood injury — an overpowering and unspeakable violation of the child’s physical and mental integrity, and the template for all subsequent traumas — that may well, notwithstanding these qualities, leave no trace on that child’s psychological health. It is as though a massive boulder were dropped into a lake without creating so much as a ripple in the water and, indeed, as though no effect could ever occur unless and until, long afterwards, a pebble fell around the same place — whereupon the original boulder’s splash will belatedly erupt.
How is such a thing possible? And might the peculiarity of this mechanism account somehow for Freud’s subsequent turn from exogenous to endogenous causes — from the reality of trauma to the arena of drive-based phantasie? Even in this article, the considered statement of Freud’s nominal seduction theory, where the significance of real trauma is acknowledged and valued as nowhere else — even at this stage of his “overvaluation of reality (204), as Freud himself puts it in his 1924 footnoted mea culpa — it is strictly speaking not the trauma, or even its memory, that generates the eventual mental suffering, but rather the would-be hysteric’s defense against the traumatic memory, construed by the “ego” as an “incompatible idea” to be summarily repressed:
“I may also remind you that a few years ago I myself pointed out a factor, hitherto little considered, to which I attribute the leading role in provoking hysteria after puberty. I then put forward the view that the outbreak of hysteria may almost invariably be traced to a psychical conflict arising through an incompatible idea setting in action a defence on the part of the ego and calling up a demand for repression. What the circumstances are in which a defensive endeavour of this kind has the pathological effect of actually thrusting the memory which is distressing to the ego into the unconscious and of creating a hysterical symptom in its place I was not able to say at that time. But to-day I can repair the omission. The defence achieves its purpose of thrusting the incompatible idea out of consciousness if there are infantile sexual scenes present in the (hitherto normal) subject in the form of unconscious memories, and if the idea that is to be repressed can be brought into logical or associative connection with an infantile experience of that kind” (210-11)
And Freud continues with a striking elaboration:
“Since the ego‘s efforts at defence depend upon the subject‘s total moral and intellectual development, the fact that hysteria is so much rarer in the lower classes than its specific aetiology would warrant is no longer entirely incomprehensible” (211)
Once again, it is not the trauma per se, but the “defensive endeavor” of the adult against its memory that “has the pathological effect” — a psychological response to inner “conflict” that presupposes “the subject’s total moral and intellectual development” (211). Hysteria is occasioned, not by the injury sustained by the child, but by the moral crisis that afflicts the adult — “the (hitherto normal) subject” — once faced with the unwelcome memories of an “injury” that does not comport with his mature self-conception. The passage strongly implies that, in the absence of this stringent moral development, no “conflict” need arise: the sexual scenes of childhood present no special threat to the morally uncultivated adult and so can be acknowledged without difficulty. This is allegedly one reason for the comparative rarity of hysteria among “the lower classes.” The childhood scene both was and is traumatic, not “in itself,” but only from the standpoint of a morally developed ego for which the memories of that scene are inadmissible, so radically do they contradict its self-image.
Freud notes the counter-intuitiveness of this position: “it is true that we are not accustomed to the notion of powers emanating from a mnemic image which were absent from the real impression” (213) — a sort of action at a chronological distance for which our familiar explanatory schemas do not prepare us. In fact, rather than ignoring or diminishing the paradox, Freud underscores it: “None of the later scenes, in which the symptoms arise, are the effective ones; and the experiences which are effective have at first no result” (213).
Again, Freud’s implied conjecture regarding the relatively low incidence of hysteria in “the lower classes” (211) — they are lacking in “total moral and intellectual development” — more than hints that, in these cases, the childhood trauma is not “traumatic” at all. That is, the injury does not, need not, become “pathogenic,” unless there are developed moral conceptions with which its “unconscious memory” need conflict. By contrast, for adults in this group, it is unclear whether the memories of childhood injury had ever become “unconscious” at all. And Freud does not dispute the objection that “it is easy, by making a few enquiries, to find people who remember scenes of sexual seduction and sexual abuse in their childhood years, and yet who have never been hysterical” (207), or “the observed fact that many people who remember scenes of that kind have not become hysterics” (209).
How and why these sexual assaults originally became unconscious in would-be hysterics, and not in others, is a question Freud raises in passing but does not attempt to resolve:
“The scenes must he present as unconscious memories; only so long as, and in so far as, they are unconscious are they able to create and maintain hysterical symptoms. But what decides whether those experiences produce conscious or unconscious memories — whether that is conditioned by the content of the experiences, or by the time at which they occur, or by later influences — that is a fresh problem, which we shall prudently avoid” (211)
Yet Freud’s subsequent doctrine of “primal repression” seems designed to answer this question. It will entail that the pubescent conflict that occasions a (more or less successful) “repression” is not the first of its kind — that already in childhood (say, at the climax of the Oedipal phase), some content (experience, wish, or fantasy) was construed as an “incompatible idea” and forthwith disavowed. But against what could this “content" be assessed as “incompatible,” if not the developed intellectual and moral ideas of a cultured adult? Either we must credit the child with properly moral ideas at the moment of repression, or — what seems more likely — with ideas we recognize as antecedents of morality, such as, for instance, castration anxiety.