A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Especially noteworthy among these forbidden wishes are those of incest,
i.e., those directed towards sexual intercourse with parents and
brothers and sisters. You know what antipathy society feels toward such
intercourse, or at least pretends to feel, and what weight is laid on
the prohibitions directed against it. The most monstrous efforts have
been made to explain this fear of incest. Some have believed that it is
due to evolutionary foresight on the part of nature, which is
psychically represented by this prohibition, because inbreeding would
deteriorate the race-character; others maintained that because of having
lived together since early childhood the sexual desire is diverted from
the persons under consideration. In both cases, furthermore, the
incest-avoidance would be automatically assured, and it would be
difficult to understand the need of strict prohibitions, which rather
point to the presence of a strong desire. Psychoanalytic research has
incontrovertibly shown that the incestuous love choice is rather the
first and most customary choice, and that not until later is there any
resistance, the source of which probably is to be found in the
individual psychology.
Let us sum up what our plunge into child psychology has given us toward
the understanding of the dream. We found not only that the materials of
forgotten childhood experiences are accessible to the dream, but we saw
also that the psychic life of children, with all its peculiarities, its
egoism, its incestuous love-choice, etc., continues, for the purposes of
the dream, in the unconscious, and that the dream nightly leads us back
to this infantile stage. Thus it becomes more certain _that the
unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile_. The estranging
impression that there is so much evil in man, begins to weaken. This
frightful evil is simply the original, primitive, infantile side of
psychic life, which we may find in action in children, which we overlook
partly because of the slightness of its dimensions, partly because it is
lightly considered, since we demand no ethical heights of the child.
Since the dream regresses to this stage, it seems to have made apparent
the evil that lies in us. But it is only a deceptive appearance by which
we have allowed ourselves to be frightened. We are not so evil as we
might suspect from the interpretation of dreams.
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