The Dynamics of Human Aggression

Theoretical Foundations, Clinical Applications

Ana-Maria Rizzuto, W.W. Meissner, Dan H. Buie

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135941796
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Psychoanalyse

This book seeks to resolve an issue that has divided psychoanalysts and other scholars of aggression for decades, namely the nature of aggression. The work expands and unifies the Freudian drive-based explanation of aggression into contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice and brings Freudian theory into the 21st Century.

Section III
Clinical Perspectives

Chapter 8

Aggression in Phobic States

In this chapter we wish to extend the implications of our view of aggression to the analysis of phobic states as seen in both classic childhood phobias and in adult phobic conditions. Our purpose is to demonstrate the applicability of our theory in a specific clinical context.

EARLIER APPROACHES

The role of aggression in the genesis of phobic symptoms and phobic states has been viewed as a well-established finding of psychoanalytic research. Fenichel (1944) summarized the classic position, in which phobic formations were involved in defenses against both libidinal and aggressive impulses and employed a variety of defenses, including regression, repression, reversal, projection, and displacement. Anna Freud (1977) would later add condensation and externalization.

In general, these formulations attributed the origin of whatever anxiety the phobic phenomenon was defending against to libidinal and aggressive impulses. As Anna Freud (1977) observed, the distinction between anxiety and fear was paramount, in that it was not fear that lay at the root of the phobia, but anxiety. The anxieties can reflect any level of developmental danger— annihilation, separation, loss of the object’s love, castration, even moral condemnation. However, they serve essentially as a warning signal against the related intrapsychic danger. While the mechanisms required to create the phobia formation are intended to contain anxiety within manageable limits, so that the internal danger does not become traumatic, the phobic anxiety itself escapes this containment and the ego is to this extent threatened, but now by an external threat rather than an internal one. Thus, oral-sadistic impulses to bite or devour can be transformed into fears of being bitten (Flescher, 1955), sadomasochistic wishes to be beaten and tortured can take the form of fears of dark streets (Brenner, 1959), or other fears of attack or destruction (Bernstein, 1962), and murderous wishes against the oedipal father can become animal phobias (S.Freud, 1909; Rochlin, 1973).

The prevailing view of the place of aggression in the formation of phobic processes sees it as a given. The aggressive instinctual drive serves as an independent source of instinctual danger, to one or another degree in conjunction with, and reinforced by, external realistic factors. In the early classic view, any conjunction with real determinants or situations was not required to explain the phobic phenomenon (e.g., early kleinian understanding of the death instinct), but more recent views would regard a more complex interweaving of developmental and environmental components as integral to any understanding of the vicissitudes of aggression.

In our view of aggression, it is not postulated, but instead articulated within a specifically motivational context. Our hope is that this will permit a more definitively motivational understanding of the role and import of phobic expressions. We will focus on the phobic phenomenon in the case of Little Hans (S.Freud, 1909) and in that of Frankie (Bornstein, 1949; Ritvo, 1965). We will then examine the genesis of phobic symptoms in an adult.

LITTLE HANS

Hostility and sadism were the impulses central to Little Hans’s phobia. He wished his father dead so that he would be free to engage in sadistic, phallic acts with his mother and have babies with her. These impulses were aggressive in the sense that they were motivated to overcome obstacles to their achievement. Before the phobia developed, there was little outward show of these hostile and sadistic aims, and what expression they did obtain was so mild as to evoke no opposing response from his parents. The obstacles to achievement of his aims were, presumably, entirely intrapsychic.

Freud (1909) thought of the setting of Hans’s phobia as a “battle” (See page) between opposing forces within the child’s mind: impulses of hostility and sadism on one side and repression on the other. According to Freud, Hans’s instinctual impulses strove not only to gain ultimate satisfaction, but also to force their way into consciousness. When the instincts were intensified by experiences of deprivation and erotic stimulation, they gained enough force to partially overcome the obstacle of repression. At that point the phobia “burst out” so that previously unconscious ideas “forced their way into consciousness” (See page) in the form of fears of horses biting him and horses falling down.

Prior to the phobia, repression had protected Hans from feeling hostility toward his father and from the fear of castration, the natural punishment for his forbidden and destructive impulses. When these impulses began to emerge into consciousness, Hans desperately needed adjunctive ways to oppose awareness and expression of them. His phobia served the purpose. His fear of punishment for his impulse to bite his father and see him fall down dead was disguised and externalized as a fear of horses biting him. We would go beyond Freud’s interpretation and speculate that this projection also served to reinforce the obstacle to expression of his hostile impulses because it was experienced as a genuine threat; at the same time, it served to maintain a sense of safety and a loving relationship with his father, who otherwise would have been the subject of this projection.

Horses falling down were a disguised representation of Hans’s desire to penetrate his mother sadistically with his penis and have babies with her. Freud explained the fear attached to horses falling down in accord with his current ideas about anxiety hysteria, i.e., with the return of the repressed “the pathogenic material was remodelled and transposed on to the horse-complex, while the accompanying affects were uniformly turned into anxiety” (See page, emphasis in original).

In more contemporary terms, we would add specifically that attaching fear to the sight and expectation of horses falling down would not simply be a disguise of his instinctual aim and a displacement as to object. This fear also compelled him to avoid the possibility of witnessing such an event. We would say that his fear of seeing horses falling down served as an additional obstacle to awareness of and expression of his sadistic incestuous impulses. At the same time, this component of the phobia served as a means of preserving a sense of safety in the presence of his mother, safety from knowing and experiencing forbidden impulses and associated anxiety in relation to her. The phobia also preserved his sense of loving security with her.

In a way resembling our own thinking, Freud (1909) also viewed the phobia as posing an obstacle to impulses striving toward expression. He wrote:

…the essence of Hans’s illness was entirely dependent upon the nature of the instinctual components that had to be repulsed. The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very great measure of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and that was its purpose. It was therefore a powerful reaction against the obscure impulses to movement which were especially directed against his mother. For Hans horses had always typified pleasure in movement…but since this pleasure in movement included the impulse to copulate, the neurosis posed a restriction on it and exalted the horse into an emblem of terror. (See page)

Aggression, then, in the phobia of Little Hans was located not in the quality of his affects, nor in the quality of his erotic or hostile impulses, but rather in the interplay of opposing forces. Prior to the phobia, the striving toward consciousness and satisfaction on the part of his impulses was more or less successfully opposed by the obstacle of repression. Aggression enters the picture to the extent that extra psychic effort may be required to break through the repressive barrier. In addition, insofar as his father posed a threatening obstacle to his desire to possess his mother libidinally, additional aggression would also have come into play with the motive of overcoming and getting rid of this now external obstacle. But the hostile impulse toward his father was also threatening and created a fear of losing his father. The aggressive impulses directed at his father, in serving to overcome the obstacle posed by the father to Hans’s libidinal desires, thus simultaneously became themselves an obstacle to a secure, protective, and loving relation to his father.

FRANKIE

Frankie began his analysis at age five years; it lasted about three years. In Bornstein’s (1949) classic description of his neurosis, there were several symptoms mentioned, including school phobia, wolf fright, and an elevator phobia. The analysis of each of these symptoms revealed the following dynamics.

1. The school phobia: Frankie was unable to go to school because of his fear of separation from his mother. He feared both that his mother would abandon him and that his own hostile impulses would destroy her. On the way to school, he was afraid of being trapped on the bus, afraid he would forget his stop, that he would be unable to open the door, that he would miss his stop. These fears were related to the wish that his sister had been trapped inside his mother and thus never born. Frankie was very sad, feeling that he was losing his mother to his little sister; his longing for his mother was intense. His affects followed the sequence: unconscious anger at his sister and mother, the wish to destroy them, fear of losing his mother, and deep sadness at the thought of losing her, connected with an underlying longing for her.
2. The wolf fright: The wolves were prohibiting figures, similar to the nurse, preventing him from acting on his desire to go to his parents’ bedroom to watch and listen. These wishes involved sexual curiosity and evoked sexual excitement by reason of his identification with his mother and father in the sexual act. All these experiences also evoked jealousy and stirred up thoughts about babies being born; this in turn stimulated intense rage, thoughts of revenge, and sadness. The wolves also represented Frankie himself as a castrator of those who produce babies.
3. The elevator phobia: Frankie said, ‘The elevator might crash down, or the door might not open, and I would be trapped” (Bornstein, 1949, See page). The symptom was overdetermined. (a) The elevatorman was father as well as Frankie himself through identification with the aggressor-castrator father; Frankie also feared his own impulse to kill his father. (b) He envied his mother because she enjoyed being thrown up in the air by his father; he feared his own impulse to throw her out of the window for revenge. (c) He feared his wish to participate in sexual excitement with his father: the consequence might be that “We all [land] in the cellar” (See page, italics added). (d) He feared the pleasurable sensation of being lifted because he associated it with becoming pregnant. Pregnancy reminded him of his loneliness when mother got pregnant with his sister and left him. (e) He feared his wish to become pregnant because it meant losing his penis. He was terrified by his wish to be carried in his mother’s womb, to insure against her desertion, because the womb was a castrating organ. (f) He feared that his desire to have his sister trapped in his mother’s womb would result in the punishment of his being trapped in the elevator.

Later in the analysis, Frankie developed a fear of the analyst, reflecting his wish/fear to be kidnapped and carried away by the analyst. All this was related to the “primal trauma” when Frankie was five months old: his night feeding had suddenly been stopped, leading to an intense unsatisfied hunger for milk and affection expressed in screaming for hours.

Frankie was crying out for union; he was trying desperately to overcome the obstacle to his security which was posed by separation. Here we can see that Frankie’s longing to possess the mother would motivate a fantasy of aggression action in the sense of overcoming an obstacle, i.e., as expressing the primitive urge to orally incorporate the object in order to overcome the distance of separation. The purpose of the phobic aggression was to overcome the separation and the related displacement by his sister. In addition, the defenses of displacement and projection contained in the structures of the phobias served as obstacles to Frankie’s gaining conscious awareness of his hostile impulses toward his sister.

Ritvo’s (1965) report of Frankie as an adult in analysis further supports this formulation. Ritvo, in trying to understand the shift from the phobic neurosis to the later obsessional neurosis, obsessive doubting replacing phobic anxiety, implied that the central element manifested in the later obsessional neurosis was the need to overcome the obstacle posed by separation from the mother; this would be consistent with our formulation. In contrast, Ritvo saw the fear that the father might never find his way home as related to Frankie’s aggression against his mother and his unconscious, revengeful wish that his mother, who had abandoned him when his sister was born, should never return.

The fear of being trapped in the bus referred to his original death wish against the baby sister who should have been trapped inside the mother and never allowed out. The fear of wolves was the fear of an imaginary representative of the prohibiting nurse and the father, as well as himself with his strong voyeuristic and castrative impulses. He had to fear for the safety of his genitals, if he were to act on his voyeuristic curiosity about the primal scene. The elevator fear was due to: (a) his hostile impulses against his mother and his identifica tion with her; (b) the death wish against his sister and his desire to take her place; and (c) his masturbation conflicts, including fear of erections, fear of losing control over his own emotions, fear of being lifted—all evoking the danger of castration. Ritvo comments:

Passive wishes in the transference produced reappearance of the wish to be carried passively inside the mother like the sister was carried. Hard upon it comes the old urge to attack the pregnant mother and the baby inside her. These wishes and their retaliatory consequences were of prime significance in the dynamics of his phobic symptoms as a child…. The passive strivings toward the father, in reaction to his own competitive, oedipal feelings, belong to a later developmental period when maturation and cognitive development had placed the intellect and mental functioning at his disposal for defensive purposes. These later passive strivings are warded off by the more purely mental operations characteristic for the obsessional neurosis and obsessive character. These same conflicts for which he sought a solution by the formation of phobic symptoms as a child in the phallic-oedipal phase he later tried to cope with by the obsessive doubting about his mind. (See page)

Frankie had tried for years to erase all feeling from his interactions with important persons in his life. He practiced this isolation of affect to protect himself against consequences of emotional dependence on them. This isolation also protected him against feelings of guilt for disturbing sexual thoughts or fantasies about his mother or sister, especially during his adolescence. As a child, he was forced to resort to inventing the omnipotent King Boo-Boo to protect himself from the terror of his passivity and destructive impulses, but as an adult he could find more ordinary and appropriate means of containing the current renditions of the older conflicts.

Ritvo (1965) further observed that there were also dream references to unconscious passive wishes for oral and anal homosexual gratification. In such dream thoughts, the old wishes and fantasies of oral impregnation and of being in his mother’s womb, as his sister had been, that were so prominent a part of the childhood analysis, seemed to continue to find expression.

The focus of Ritvo’s analysis is on how doubts replaced fears. “The doubts contained a refusal to recognize fully that he had reached these achievements…. To have accepted that reality… would have meant relinquishing his passive longing for protection, his cherished ‘womb-type notion’” (See page). Frankie enables us to understand not only “how the past is contained in the present” but also how the mode of conflict solution had to undergo alteration because of advances in development. Ritvo’s report supports our formulation that the central element in Frankie’s childhood phobias, similar to the central ingredient still present but manifested in the later obsessional symptoms, was the need to overcome the obstacle posed by the threat of separation from the mother. It is in this overcoming of the obstacle that aggression played its part in his phobia formation.

CLINICAL EXAMPLE FROM AN ADULT

Paul, a handsome, well-built, twenty-two-year-old college senior, had no symptoms until he applied to medical school. He then became increasingly anxious and preoccupied over his admission. He was accepted, but he experienced no joy from his success. Instead, his anxiety increased, and unusual thoughts began to crowd his mind. The thoughts were related to dating girls and being afraid that he would contract syphilis from kissing or even from some more superficial physical contact. The fear of syphilis became his constant preoccupation. He developed a phobia of looking at his penis out of fear that he would see a lesion there, even though he had never had sexual relations.

He seemed concerned about his ability to function as a physician if he should get syphilis. He reasoned that syphilis affects the brain, makes the individual demented and dangerous, and would lead to two grave consequences: first, the physician might kill his patients, and second, he might spread syphilis to the rest of the world and many would die.

His great ambivalence about going to medical school and leaving his “youth” behind appeared in writings prior to his admission. Every time he tried to write the word “accepted,” he would automatically substitute “excepted.”

Paul was the oldest of two boys of a middle-class family. His brother was four years his junior. His mother was a devoted house-wife and mother, extremely overprotective, who had raised him as her favorite, her “golden boy.” The whole family entertained the highest expectations of him and had great hopes for his future. Up to that point, he had satisfied his mother’s expectations by his achievements and excellent behavior. The father was a professional man who also doted on his son and made a point of being close to him. The brother was much less involved with the family. Both parents were very much invested in the son’s becoming a physician. The patient had always been a model child. He remembered his childhood as a good experience. He was a bit of a loner and never very close to any of his classmates.

He had two important memories from childhood. The first was his playing with a marionette and in a moment of frustration shaking it so hard that he “killed it”; the other was when he fantasized himself as Tom Sawyer and set out to find a girlfriend. He selected a girl and experienced tremendous feeling for her, but never approached her in any manner. He seemed, by far, more invested in wanting the same feelings of love and freedom Tom had felt. Tom was an orphan, not encumbered by parents; he could devote himself to an adventurous life of constant mischief far removed from the restrictive and obsessive world in which Paul’s parents lived.

Paul felt he had never been involved in the outside world and perceived going to medical school as his entering “THE WORLD.” In that world, one had to take care of oneself, compete constantly, and be in charge of peoples’ lives (which meant one could kill them). Furthermore, one had to have real sex (intercourse) instead of just “making out” or exaggerating about how much sex one was having. For him, real sex meant the possibility of killing the woman, “like a marionette.”

The treatment revealed a profound fear and hatred of women and of their power to engulf him and dominate him. He traced this fear to his mother, who had been greatly idealized by the family, in particular by the father. The father described the mother in adoring terms, claiming she was “snow-white pure, a true angel.”

But the treatment revealed another side of the mother. She could be extremely sweet, but, if things did not go her way, she could be aloof and removed or, suddenly, she could go into a rage, furiously calling Paul a “dirty bastard.” In those moments, which he dreaded, she would turn, in his words, “from an angel into a demon.” On those occasions, he would be terrified of her and, as he learned during the treatment, furious with her but unable to recognize it. Instead, he found himself having frightening thoughts of smashing things or killing people. The thoughts always frightened him and he was able to see that he had had them since he was a little boy. He made sense of his memory of “killing” the marionette by linking the destruction of his toy in a moment of irritation with his then unconscious murderous wishes.

Much discussion went into Paul’s discovering the murderous desires he had for his mother and how he saw her death as the only means of his being free from her oppressive overprotection, her constant fear of his being harmed or getting sick. He felt his mother had “squashed” him and “loved him to death.” On the other hand, he felt that his father was his only source of affection, and he was terrified that if he left home, he would lose his relationship with his father. The clinging feelings included fear and revenge because he remembered bitterly how many times he had wished to go out on his own, to be adventurous like Tom Sawyer, and his parents had forbidden him to do what he wanted.

He improved in the course of the treatment and finally was able to go out with girls and, with much fear, even kissed one. His fear ...