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WorkSigmund Freud

Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety

Freud reverses his own theory of anxiety, and answers a disciple who had traced every fear back to birth.

by Sigmund Freud154 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Hemmung, Symptom und Angst
First published
(aged 70)
Original language
German

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Overview

For much of his career Sigmund Freud had explained anxiety as sexual excitement that could find no outlet and was discharged, transformed, as fear. In this book of 1926 he gives that account up, says so plainly in an addendum revising his earlier opinions, and turns it round. Anxiety, he now argues, is a signal the ego gives itself when it senses danger, and it is anxiety that sets repression going — not, as he had believed, repression that produces anxiety. He reaches the reversal by re-reading two of his cases, Little Hans, the boy who would not go into the street because he feared horses, and the Russian patient known as the Wolf Man, and finding that in both the fear came first: fear of castration, a danger the child took to be real. The dangers change as a child grows, from the loss of the mother to castration to the anger of conscience, but behind all of them stands the helplessness of the newborn. That brought Freud onto ground claimed by Otto Rank, once the paid secretary of his Vienna circle, whose The Trauma of Birth had appeared in 1924 and traced later anxiety back to the shock of being born. Others in Freud's inner committee read Rank's book as giving up the Oedipus complex. Freud accepts birth as the first model of anxiety but rejects Rank's central assumption, that a newborn keeps sense impressions of its birth which later fears revive, as unproven and very improbable. In 1926 Rank resigned his posts in the International Psychoanalytical Association and left Vienna for Paris, and the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag published Freud's book the same year.

Key concepts

What is the difference between an inhibition and a symptom?

An inhibition is a restriction of one of the ego's normal functions, such as eating, walking, working or sex, and need not be pathological at all. A symptom is the sign of a pathological process, a substitute for a satisfaction that was blocked. The two can overlap, but an inhibition happens within the ego, while a symptom arises in the ego from outside it.

What is the difference between realistic and neurotic anxiety?

Realistic anxiety is fear of a danger that is known and comes from outside, like a wild animal. Neurotic anxiety is fear of a danger the person does not know, which turns out to come from a drive within. Freud's step in this book is to show that the inner danger matters only because it once threatened an outer one, such as punishment or the loss of love.

Why does Freud bring back the word defence?

Because repression turned out to be only one of the ways the ego protects itself against the demands of the drives. Obsessional neurosis uses others, such as undoing and isolating, which do not resemble repression at all. Freud therefore revives his old term defence as the general name for all these techniques, and makes repression one special case of it.

How do anxiety, pain and mourning differ?

All three answer the loss of a loved person, Freud argues in an addendum, but at different points. Anxiety is the reaction to the danger of losing the object. Pain is the reaction to the loss itself. Mourning is the slower emotional work of separating from what has been lost, which demands that the person give up their attachment.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Anxiety as a Warning

Does repression cause anxiety, or anxiety cause repression? Freud reverses the answer he had given for decades and says so in plain words.

Freud had long explained anxiety as dammed-up sexual excitement turned into fear. Re-reading his own cases, above all the boy who would not go into the street for fear of horses, he finds that the fear came first: the horse stood for the father, and the danger was castration. Anxiety now becomes a signal the ego gives itself when it senses danger, and that signal sets defence and repression going. When the signal fails, anxiety floods the person instead of warning them.

  • anxiety
  • signal anxiety
  • danger
  • repression
  • ego
  • defense mechanisms
  • affect
  • psychoanalytic theory
  • phobia

Enter a dialogue

The Dangers of Growing Up

What is a child actually afraid of? Freud lists the dangers in the order life brings them, and finds one helplessness behind them all.

Birth is the first model of anxiety, Freud grants Otto Rank, but he rejects Rank's claim that later fears revive memories of being born. The child's early fears, of being alone, in the dark or with a stranger, reduce to missing the mother. Then come castration, the anger of the super-ego, and finally social anxiety and the fear of death. Each danger fits an age, and each is a version of the infant's helplessness before excitement it cannot master without someone who cares for it.

  • birth trauma
  • object loss
  • castration anxiety
  • childhood
  • superego
  • trauma
  • danger

Enter a dialogue

Inhibitions and Symptoms

Why does someone suddenly find they cannot write, walk or work? Freud separates a restriction the ego places on itself from a symptom, and studies the techniques of obsessional neurosis.

An inhibition is the ego giving up a function, often because the act has taken on a forbidden sexual meaning, like a cook who will not go near the stove once the master has made advances. A symptom is a sign of a deeper conflict, which the ego then adapts to as if it were a piece of the outside world. Obsessional patients add two techniques: undoing, a second act that cancels the first like negative magic, and isolating, a pause that cuts a thought off from its connections.

  • phobias
  • symptoms
  • symptom formation
  • obsessional neurosis
  • hysteria
  • regression
  • ambivalence
  • neurosis

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
154
distinct concepts
152
by passages held, corpus-wide
#406

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “psychoanalysis” and “repression”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
psychoanalysisrepression21
anxietyneurosis16
anxietypsychoanalysis15
egopsychoanalysis14
egorepression14
anxietyego10
anxietyrepression10
phobiapsychoanalysis10
anxietydefense mechanisms9
defense mechanismsrepression8
phobiarepression8
defense mechanismsego7
anxietyphobia6
egosymptom formation6
anxietysymptom formation5
psychoanalysissymptom formation5
defense mechanismspsychoanalysis4
defense mechanismssymptom formation4
defense mechanismsneurosis3
defense mechanismsphobia3
neurosissymptom formation3
egoneurosis2
neurosispsychoanalysis2
neurosisrepression2
repressionsymptom formation2
neurosisphobia1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst) you are here DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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