Freud characterizes her anxiety as essentially envious; and sometimes he attributes her anxiety to the “loss of her mother.” In fact, Freud could never finally determine the nature of anxiety in girls because he never determined its source in boys, the standard by which he continued to compare and contrast the nature of feminine anxiety.
What is it about castration anxiety that can be said to be real? Does the father actually threaten to cut off his son’s penis because he covets his mother? Does the father ever, directly and unequivocally, confront his son about their “rivalry”? Freud says the answer to these questions is “no.” The boy, he suggests, more or less puts it together. He takes this piece of evidence (“Don’t play with your penis”) and that (“That’s naughty!”), and another (“Why don’t girls have penises?”) and interprets these (presumed) experiences and (possible) observations and, in his imagination, concludes he is at risk because the world, his father, forbids him from enacting his sexual phantasies. But if the experience of this prohibition isn’t actually conveyed to him, then on what is the child’s intuition founded?
Freud hoped to couch his theories in scientific terms, seeking to prove his “findings” through a scientific—in the main empirical—definition of reality. We can see the problem he faced when trying to define his notion of reality logistically, as though situating it “outside” settles the matter.
The distinction between “internal” and “external” may be valid in scientific experiments concerned with physics or mechanics, or even chemistry. But it falls short when applied to a specifically human reality, because for us there is no way of existing “outside,” strictly speaking. That which exists beyond our imagination is social, not “external.” They aren’t the same thing. Although there is an inside and outside to a house, there is no inside and outside to a person. This is only apt in terms of anatomy or physiology, but not in terms of experience. The social world isn’t “outside” of me. In fact, I am in a social world. I inhabit that world. Freud’s depiction of an external reality that presumably causes castration anxiety in boys is actually the social world to which boys belong. It isn’t dangerous because it poses an “external threat”—it’s threatening because boys are involved in a setting that includes fathers, a situation that interferes with—and to that degree endangers—what they want to be to their mothers, that is, the object of unrealizable phantasy. Trying to distinguish between internal and external aspects of reality only confuses the actual sources of anxiety: the world to which one belongs.
Reality, in essence, is social. It is life. This conceptual problem eluded Freud because he insisted on couching his observations about human nature in scientific terms. This problem was only compounded later by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein (1937), who based her conception of anxiety on the notion of internal and external “objects.” How is one to reconcile the difference if the one is always “invading” the other? When human experience is conceived as a mere reflection of “internal” phantasies, is it any wonder that some analysts reject the concept of reality entirely, replaced with “operations” that purportedly determine our experiences for us? These developments are a far cry from Freud’s efforts to determine what is real and why we’re so afraid of it.
The world to which we belong includes our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about it. When Freud finally traced the source of castration anxieties to the beliefs that children have about their fathers, he was describing a social—actually, an existential—conception of reality, not a “scientific” one. This is a conception of reality that science has no access to. It has to be thought, experienced, and eventually realized. What threatens children most are the limitations society imposes on them. Transformed into phantasies, their unbridled wishes become treasures they are afraid they’ll lose if discovered. The reality they encounter doesn’t merely conflict with their desires—it threatens to displace them. Reality challenges them to accept the limits to what is obtainable through their experience of frustration. Reality isn’t inherently ominous; it entices and threatens at the same time. Its blows can be harsh, but they also transform. Freud discovered that children haphazardly experience these disappointments through anticipation and belief. If his term for this experience—castration—seems so literal, we should remember that our most tangible experience of reality is contained in that moment of knowing that something precious—however much we may want it—eludes us.
3 Realistic and Wishful Thinking
Once Freud formulated his theory of the structural model in 1923, his earlier allusions to the unconscious as a “second subject,” depicted by “counter-will,” gradually disappeared. The precedent for this revision was probably determined earlier still, however, by Freud’s distinction between “primary” and “secondary” thought processes. In fact, the publication in 1911 of “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1958b) roughly coincided with his final reference to the unconscious as “counter-will” in 1912.
Freud believed that the primary thought processes were essentially unconscious. They were presumed to account for displacement, condensation, and the ability to symbolize. This type of thinking is supposed to apprehend time and syntax and gives rise to dreaming. Freud felt these processes were governed by the pleasure principle and so, “strive toward gaining pleasure” and draw back from “any event which might arouse unpleasure. . . . Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power” (1958b, 219). Freud also believed that unconscious processes were “the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental process” (219). Originally, whatever the infant wished for “was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night” (219).
Yet, this state of bliss is soon awakened by the “real world”:
It was only the non-occurence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step. (219)
Freud’s theory of the unconscious—especially after the introduction of the structural model—rests on the distinction between these two principles and related styles of thinking. The secondary thought processes, ruled by the reality principle, characterize the ego’s concern about the outer world. Secondary process thinking “binds” the free energy of the unbound primary processes and is responsible for rationality, logic, grammar, and verbalization. However, if the primary processes are only capable of striving toward pleasure and avoiding unpleasure, and the secondary processes are essential for delaying gratification and forming plans in pursuit of pleasurable goals, to what does Freud refer when he suggests that it’s the psychical apparatus that “decides to form a conception of the real circumstances” and “endeavors to make a real alteration in them” (219)? Is this psychical apparatus the primary or the secondary process? It can’t be the secondary process, because Freud just explained that the psychical apparatus decided to bring these processes into being. On the other hand, he justified the need for “realistic” modes of thinking because the primary processes are presumably incapable of them. If, after all, the primary processes were capable of the kind of judgment and rationality needed to decide to create the secondary processes, wouldn’t the latter prove redundant?
Charles Rycroft, the British psychoanalyst, questions Freud’s conception of the “two types” of thinking in “Beyond the Reality Principle” (Rycroft 1968, 102–13). He questions, for example, whether it makes sense to argue that the primary processes actually precede the ones that are said to be secondary. Rycroft suggests that even Freud doubted it, because according to a footnote in “Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” Freud himself admitted that
it will rightly be objected that an organization which