Chapter 27 Lecture 26 Libido: Narcissism

We have recently spoken repeatedly of the difference between the sexual and ego instincts.First, from the point of view of repression, we know how the two instincts rebel against each other, and how the sexual instinct then superficially yields and seeks gratification in a devious way to compensate for its loss.In the second place, the sexual and ego instincts have different relations to necessity from the outset, so that they develop differently from each other and have different attitudes towards the principle of reality.Finally, we are convinced by observation that the intellectual instinct is much more closely related to the feeling of anxiety than is the ego instinct—a conclusion which seems to be incomplete only on one point.In support of this conclusion, the following remarkable fact may be cited: hunger and thirst, the two most important instincts for self-preservation, are never transformed into anxiety, while the libido of dissatisfaction is transformed into anxiety. is a very common phenomenon.

No one can deny the reason why we make a sharp distinction between sexual instinct and ego instinct; in fact, to say that sexual instinct is a special activity of the individual already tacitly recognizes the distinction between the two.What is at issue is only what significance this distinction has, and whether we take it seriously.The answer to this question depends on the following two points: 1. Whether we can define the extent to which the sexual instinct differs from the ego instinct in its physical and psychological expression; 2. What are the consequences of these differences? important.We do not intend to insist on the essential difference between the two instincts, and even if there is a difference, it is not easy to understand.They are all described as sources of individual faculties. If we want to discuss whether they are basically the same kind or belong to two kinds, we must not only use these concepts as the basis, but must be based on biological facts. .As far as we are concerned, we know very little about this; even if we knew more, it would not help the study of psychoanalysis.

Jung believed that all instincts originate from one.It is therefore obviously useless to call every faculty derived from instinct "libido."Since by this method we cannot eliminate the so-called sexual functions from the psychic life, the libido has to be divided into two types, sexual and non-sexual.The term libido, however, should still be preserved to designate the sexual faculty, as we have used it before. Therefore, I think that the question of whether the sexual instinct should be distinguished from the instinct of self-preservation is of little importance to psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis is not qualified to discuss this question.From a biological point of view, it is clear that there are many ways to justify the importance of this distinction.Because the only function of an organism is sex, which transcends the individual and is connected with the species.The exercise of this faculty is not as often beneficial to the individual as other activities, and, in order to obtain high sexual pleasure, may inevitably lead to danger or death of life.However, a part of the individual's life still needs to be passed on to future generations, so there is a metabolic process different from others to achieve this purpose.Individuals think that sex is very important, and that sex, like other functions, is just a means to achieve individual satisfaction, but from a biological point of view, individual organisms are just a stretch of species, which is not the same as the immortal germplasm germ-plasm. Compared with plasm, its life is very short, but it is only temporarily used as a shelter for germplasm.

But psychoanalytic explanations of neuroses do not require such far-reaching discussions.The distinction between sexual and ego instincts has been used as the key to understanding "transference neuroses."The origin of this neurosis has been traced to a fundamental situation in which the sexual and ego instincts contradict each other, or—to use biological terms, though not quite precisely—the ego in its own right. The eligibility to be an independent organism is opposed to its own eligibility to be part of the continuation of the species.This division probably did not come into existence until man, so that, on the whole, his superiority over other animals may be due to his ability to suffer from neurosis.The excessive development of the human libido and the extraordinary complexity of its psychic life, which may be due to the development of the libido, seem to constitute the conditions leading to this contradiction.In any case, man has clearly advanced far beyond that of the animals under these conditions, so that his neurotic capacity seems to be only the counterpart of the capacity of human cultural development.But these are still only inferences which lead us away from the present subject.

Our investigations are still conducted on the assumption that the manifestations of the sexual instincts can be distinguished from those of the ego instincts.In the transference neurosis this distinction is not difficult to make.The ego's investment in the capacity of its own sexual objects we call "libido", while other investments from the self-preservation instinct may be called "interests"; And its ultimate destiny, we can get a preliminary understanding of the various forces in the spiritual life.The neuroses of empathy provide the best material for this study.But much about the self—with its various organizations of structure and function—remains elusive.We have to believe that other kinds of neurotic analysis may be used to aid in the understanding of these problems.

The concepts of psychoanalysis have long been applied to the study of these other emotions. In 1908, following a discussion between Abraham and me, it was stated that the dementia prcox is characterized primarily by a libido without investment in external objects. 〔The Psycho-Sex-ual DifferenceS betWeen Hysteria and Dementia Prcox〕.But then a problem arises: what is the end of the dementia's libido, having left its external body?Abraham did not hesitate to think that the libido had returned to the ego, and that this recovery of the libido was the origin of the grandiose delusions in praecox.This kind of exaggerated delusion is just like exaggerating the value of the other party when you are in love.Thus, for the first time, we have come to understand a feature of psychotic emotions through our study of their relationship to the normal way of life in love.

I will tell you that this insight of Abraham survives in psychoanalysis and forms the basis of our theory of psychosis.We have come to understand the concept that the libido, though attached to certain objects and expressing a desire for gratification in these objects, can drop these objects and substitute the ego itself; Points of view gradually develop more carefully.P. Nakey used the term narcissism narcissism to describe a sexual perversion in which an adult individual abuses his own body with the same hugging and caressing as he would do to a lover.We shall now borrow the term for this use of the libido.

It only takes a little reflection to see that if there is such a phenomenon of loving one's body in the world, it must not be entirely exceptional or meaningless.Perhaps this narcissism is the universal and primitive phenomenon from which object-love comes.But the phenomenon of narcissism need not disappear.We must remember the evolution of the "object libido" object-libido, at the beginning of this evolution, many of the sexual impulses of children seek satisfaction in their own bodies - this is what we call the satisfaction of masturbation - the reason why sexual life This capacity for self-eroticism is the explanation for the inability to learn to obey the principle of realism, to degenerate.The phenomenon of autoeroticism thus appears to be the sexual activity of the libido in the narcissistic direction.

To sum up in one sentence, we have acquired a considerable idea of ​​the relationship between the "libido of the ego" and the "libido of the object", and this idea can be illustrated by using an analogy from zoology.You need to know that the simplest living thing is just a mass of undifferentiated protoplasm.This protoplasm is often extended outwards with so-called "pseudopodia"; but these pseudopodia can also be retracted and the protoplasm can be gathered together.These false feet protrude just as the libido is projected onto the object, while the greatest amount of the libido remains in the ego; according to our conjecture, the ego libido, under normal conditions, does not Difficult to transform into object libido, and object libido can finally be taken back by the ego.

With the help of these concepts it is now possible to explain whole psychic states, or, to take a step back, to describe normal life situations in libidinal terms, such as states of love, organic disease, and sleep.As far as the state of sleep is concerned, we may suppose that the state of sleep arises from the desire to accomplish sleep by concentrating on it, detached from the external world.We have already seen that the mental activity of dreams in the middle of the night is also aimed at maintaining sleep and is completely controlled by egoistic motives.With the help of the libidinal theory, we can go a step further and consider that during sleep all investments in external objects, whether libidinal or egoistic, are withdrawn and concentrated in the ego.Doesn't this give us a new insight into the nature of recovery and fatigue in general due to sleep?The similarity between sleep and life in the womb is thus both confirmed and psychologically enlarged.The archetypes of the distribution of the libido or the phenomena of primitive narcissism can be reproduced in sleep, when the libido and the interests of the ego are co-located, in the self-contained ego, one and indivisible.

There are two observations to make here in passing.First, what is the difference between narcissism and egoism?It seems to me that narcissism is the complement of egoism to the libido.We speak of egoism, looking only at someone's interests.As for narcissism, it is concerned with the satisfaction of libidinal needs.In actual life, the two can be unrelated motives.A man may be absolutely egoistic, but if his ego seeks libidinal satisfaction in an object, his libido is also strongly attached to the object; The ego is not damaged by the desire for the object.A person can be egoistic and at the same time intensely narcissistic, that is, feeling little need for the object, and this narcissism manifests itself either in direct sexual gratification, or in so-called "love," as distinguished from "sensuality." "Sensuality.In these situations, egoism is the obvious and constant element, while narcissism is the variable element.The opposite of egoism is altruism. Altruism is not a term for libido investing in objects; altruism differs from libido in that it does not have the desire to seek sexual satisfaction in objects.But altruism can also be a libidinal investment in objects, provided that love reaches its highest intensity.Roughly speaking, sexual objects can absorb part of the ego's narcissism, so the ego often overestimates the object's sexuality.If altruism is added to this, and the egoism derived from love is directed toward the object, then the sexual object becomes supreme; it completely engulfs the ego. Suppose, after these boring scientific speculations, I quote a poem to explain the difference between narcissism and love.And it may be helpful to you to make an "economic" comparison.The poem is quoted from Goethe's "We Stostliche Divan", which is a dialogue between Chulika and her lover Hartan: Chulika—slave, conqueror, and crowd—all agree with one voice that the existence of the self is a man's true happiness.If he does not lose his true self, he has no need to reject anyone; if he remains himself, he can bear the loss of anything. Hardan——even if you are like this: I came from another road. In Chu Lika, I saw the sum of happiness in the world. If she is interested in me, I will sacrifice everything.If she leaves me, my ego is destroyed at once.Then everything about Hartan was past; if she soon fell in love with some happy lover, I had to become one with him in my imagination. Secondly, the extension of the theory of dreams.The causes of dreams are inexplicable unless we assume that the repressed ideas in the unconscious have declared their independence from the ego, so that although the ego has withdrawn its investment in objects in order to sleep, this idea is still not affected by the desire for sleep. dominate, while preserving its activity.Only this assumption allows us to understand how exactly this unconscious material can take advantage of the elimination or weakening of the nocturnal censorship to shape the remaining experience of the day and thus create a dream desire which is forbidden to the individual.Conversely, this residual experience already had a connection with the repressed unconscious material, which might produce a resistance against the desire for sleep and the withdrawal of the libido.We must now, therefore, reintroduce all the concepts of dream formation in the previous lectures into this important dynamic. Certain conditions—such as diseases of the organism, stimuli of pain, and inflammation of organs—apparently cause the libido to withdraw from the object.The libido thus withdrawn is reattached to the ego and invested in the ailing part of the body.We might almost say that in this case the withdrawal of the libido from objects is more surprising than the withdrawal of ego-interest from external things.This seems to contribute to our understanding of melancholia, in which organs which are apparently innocuous, demand the attention of the ego.But I shall not discuss this, or any other situation which can be explained by the return of the libido of the object to the ego; for I now feel that you must have two protests.First, you will ask me why I must insist on libido and interest, as well as the distinction between sexual and ego instincts, when discussing sleep, disease, etc. In fact, in order to explain these phenomena, we only need to assume that each person has a kind of freedom. The flowing and consistent force can be projected onto the object, and can also be condensed in the self, so as to achieve the purpose of this aspect, and the goal of that aspect can also be achieved.Secondly, you will ask me how I am so bold as to regard the libido's departure from the object as the origin of the disease, if this transfer from the object libido to the ego libido—or ego faculties in general— Change is a normal psychological process that occurs every day and every night. Here's my answer: Your first protest sounds like it has some serious grounds.From the study of conditions such as sleep, illness, and love, it may not be sufficient to see the difference between ego libido and object libido, or libido and interests.At this point, however, you forget the studies from which we started, which are, in fact, the basis for the psychic situation in question.Now that we understand the contradictions arising from the neurosis of the transference, we are compelled to distinguish libido from interest, sexual instinct from self-preservation instinct.Since then, this distinction has often attracted our attention.And if we want to solve the mystery of so-called narcissistic neuroses, such as praecox, or to fully explain their similarities and differences with hysteria and obsessive-compulsive neuroses, we have to assume the possibility that the object libido can become the ego libido, Or in other words, we have to assume that we have to admit the existence of ego libido.We then invoke the undeniable theories derived therefrom to account for sickness, sleep, and love.Apply these theories everywhere to see where they work.Without experience directly based on analysis, there is only one conclusion: namely, that the libido, whether attached to the object or the ego, is always the libido and does not become the ego's interest; and the ego's interest must not become the libido. many.But this statement still only expresses the distinction between the sexual instinct and the ego instinct; this distinction, which we have examined critically, remains useful from a heuristic point of view until its worthlessness has been proved. Your second protest also raises a legitimate question, but the argument is still wrong.It is true that the return of the object libido to the ego is not always pathogenic; it is also true that the libido is withdrawn every night before sleep and then restored after waking.For example, after protoplasmic microorganisms withdraw their pseudopods, they often protrude again.But if there had been a definite, powerful process forcing the libido to withdraw from the object, the result would have been very different.The libido, which has thus become narcissistic, can no longer find a way to return to the object; the libido is hindered in its free movement, and it has to be sick.Once the narcissistic libido accumulates above a certain limit, it seems to become intolerable.We may suppose that it is projected onto the object for this very reason.And the ego has to release libido, so as not to cause disease due to excessive accumulation of libido.If our project were to make a more specific study of dementia praecox, I might tell you that the process which takes the libido out of the object and cannot return to it is closely related to repression and should be regarded as Another form of depression.At any rate, if you know the preliminary conditions for the production of these processes, which, as far as we know, almost coincide with the action of repression, you will have no difficulty in understanding these new facts.The so-called contradictions are also similar to each other, and the forces that contradict each other are also equal.The result, however, differs from that of hysteria only because of a difference in tendency.The weakness of all libidinal development in these patients lies in another period of development.And the point of attachment that causes the symptoms is also in a different position, perhaps within the stage of incipient narcissism; dementia praecox eventually returns to this stage.In conclusion, in the case of narcissistic neuroses we have to assume a period of developmentally obsessive libido much earlier than hysteria or obsessional neuroses, but you have heard that narcissistic neuroses are actually more empathetic than transference neuroses. The neuroses are more serious, but the concepts derived from studies on the latter are sufficient to explain the former.There are indeed many points of communication between the two; basically, they are the same set of phenomena.It is therefore difficult for a person to give an adequate explanation of the psychiatric affiliation of transference neuroses without prior analytic knowledge of the transference neuroses. Unlike the symptoms of praecox, their attacks do not accumulate in the ego as a result of libido returning from objects, as in narcissism.They also exhibit other phenomena that can be traced back to the results of the libido's efforts to restore itself by returning to the object.In fact, these are the distinguishing features of the disease; they resemble the symptoms of hysteria, and occasionally also those of obsessive-compulsive neurosis;In the case of dementias praecox, the efforts of their libido to return to the object or the idea of ​​an object do seem to be fruitful, but what is obtained is only a shadow of the original—such as a noun or image attached to the original.Due to space limitations, this question will not be discussed further, but it seems to me that the aspect of the libido's effort to return to the object can be used to understand the difference between conscious and unconscious ideas. Analytical studies are now expected to go a step further.Since the concept of ego libido, narcissistic neuroses have been possible to understand; our present task is to find out the causes of dynamics in these diseases, and at the same time to expand our understanding of spirituality through the understanding of ego. knowledge of life.Our aim is to establish a psychology of the ego, but ego psychology cannot be based on the material provided by our own self-perception; according to.We might think that if ego psychology were to hold, our existing knowledge of the libido from studies of the transference neuroses would be irrelevant.However, we have not yet made much progress in this area.The study of narcissism cannot be carried out in the efficient way of studying transference neuroses, and you will soon see why.As far as narcissistic patients are concerned, we often walk a short distance before hitting a wall and not being able to pass.You know that in the transference neurosis there is also this wall of resistance, but this wall can be broken down piece by piece.As for the resistance of narcissism, it cannot be overcome; at best, one can only stretch one's neck to peep at what is passing by outside the wall, just to satisfy curiosity.Therefore, we have to try to change the research method, but we can't find a way to improve it.There is no shortage of material on these patients, not enough to resolve our doubts, but a considerable amount of material.Now we can only interpret what they say with the knowledge we get from the research on transference neuroses.The similarities between the two disorders are sufficient to warrant a satisfactory starting point.As for the effect of using this method, it depends on the future. Apart from this, there are other difficulties which hinder our progress.To be honest, only people who have done analytical research on transference neuroses are qualified to study narcissistic neuroses and narcissistic-related psychoses.But psychiatrists never study psychoanalysis, and we psychoanalysts have seen too few examples of psychosis.Now it is necessary to train a group of psychiatrists to be trained in psychoanalysis.The United States has already begun to work hard in this direction. Several leading psychiatrists are lecturing on the theory of psychoanalysis to students, and the chief doctors in hospitals and lunatic asylums also want to use the theory of psychoanalysis as a guide for observing patients.We have also sometimes delved into some of the mysteries behind the scenes of narcissism, so now we want to give you some insights into the disease. Paranoia is a chronic insanity that has a very uncertain place in today's psychiatric classification.But it is undoubtedly closely related to dementia praecox; I have proposed that both should be under the same name of paraphrenia, and the forms of paranoia have different names according to the content of the phantasies, such as grandiose phantasy, The fantasy of being oppressed, of being jealous, of being loved, of erotomania, etc.We by no means expect psychiatry to account for these phenomena.To take an old bad example, psychiatry has tried to explain each other out of these symptoms in an intellectual effort: the patient is convinced that he is being persecuted, and therefore assumes that he must be an important person, and thus develops a tendency to grandiosity. fantasy.According to the concept we have analyzed, this exaggerated phantasy is caused by the ego's enlargement due to the withdrawal of the libido from the object. This is a secondary narcissism of narcissism, which is a reply to the earlier naive form.But in the phantasy of being persecuted, we get a clue of understanding from observation.First, we know that in the majority of cases the persecutor and the persecuted are of the same sex; this could be interpreted well, but in some well-studied cases it seems that the patient, in health, would have been He was extremely fond of this same-sex person, and only regarded him as a persecutor after he became ill.This disease can be further developed by association, and a loved person can be replaced by another person, for example, a father can be replaced by a strict teacher or authority.From these often consistent observations, we think that a person adopts persecution paranoia as a talisman because he wants to ward off a powerful homosexual impulse.Love turns into hate, and hate is enough to endanger the life of the object of both love and hate. This transformation is no different from the transformation of libidinal impulse into anxiety, which is a frequent result of repression.Let me illustrate with an example I saw recently.A young doctor had to leave his apartment because there he had terrorized the son of a university professor.This person was also his close friend, and he now thought that this friend had superhuman magic power and evil intentions; he thought that he was responsible for all the family misfortunes in recent years, as well as his own difficulties in both public and private affairs.And not only that, this evil friend and his father caused a great war, causing the Russians to invade the frontier; they used various methods to harm his life; so he firmly believed that if this evil man did not die, there would be chaos in the world.But in fact, he still loves him so much that even though he has the opportunity to shoot him, he is too soft to shoot him.As a result of my short conversation with the patient, I realized that the two people's close friendship began when they were classmates in school; at least once they went far beyond the scope of friendship, and the two had a complete friendship in a certain night. sexual intercourse.The patient said in terms of age and personality that he should have the emotion of loving women at that time, but he never meant it.He was once engaged to a beautiful and wealthy woman, but she broke the contract because he was too cruel.Years later, just as he was able to give a woman sexual satisfaction for the first time, his illness broke out.When she embraced him in gratitude and love, he suddenly felt a mysterious pain, like a sharp knife cutting his head.Later, he described how he felt at that time, as if the head was cut open during an autopsy; because his friend was a pathological anatomist, he gradually thought that only this friend would seduce him with this woman .Then he could better understand the intrigues and plots of other persecutions he had suffered from this friend. But the persecutors and the persecuted can sometimes be of the opposite sex. Doesn't it contradict the facts to say that this disease is resistance to homosexuality?I have had the opportunity to examine a disease of this kind, and although it seems to contradict this statement, it actually proves each other.A young woman imagines herself persecuted by a man with whom she has twice been intimately involved; in fact she initially harbors a grudge against a woman who may be regarded as a substitute for the girl's mother .It was not until after the second meeting with him that she transferred the persecution phantasy from the woman to the man; so in this case, the statement that the persecutor was of the same sex as the persecuted still stands.It is just that the first phantasy is not mentioned in the patient's complaints to lawyers and doctors, so that on the surface it contradicts our theory of paranoia. Choosing the same sex as the object has a deeper relationship with narcissism than choosing the opposite sex; therefore, once the enthusiasm of homosexuality is rejected, it is especially easy to turn back into narcissism.In these lectures I have not yet had the opportunity to tell you all that we know about the basic plan of the path of the impulse of love, nor can I add now.All I want to tell you is the following: the choice of an object, or the development of the libido beyond the narcissistic period, can be of two types.The first is the narcissistic type, which uses objects similar to the ego to replace the ego itself; the second is the anaclitic type, the libido takes the elders who can meet the needs of one's childhood as objects.A narcissistic type with a strong libidinal obsession with object choice is also a characteristic of persons with pronounced homosexual tendencies. You will recall that in the first lecture of this volume I quoted a woman's fantasy jealousy.Now that our lecture is coming to an end, you will surely expect me to explain hallucinations psychoanalytically.But I can tell you not so much about the matter as you would expect.Fantasies, which are not affected by logic or actual experience, are explained, like obsessions, by their relation to unconscious material; concept manifested.The difference between the two is actually based on the topogra-phical and dynamic differences of the two emotional situations. Depression can be divided into many different clinical types, and like paranoia, we can also glimpse the internal structure of this disease.We have seen that the relentless self-condemnation with which these patients are deeply distressed is actually concerned with sexual objects that have been lost or are no longer valued through some fault.Therefore, we think that people with depression have indeed withdrawn their libido from the object, but because of a "narcissistic self-comparison with others" narcissistic identification process, the object is transplanted into the ego and replaced by the ego. object.I can only give you a narrative concept of this process, but I cannot use the terms of situation and dynamics to explain it.The ego is then regarded as the object that has been abandoned; all the vengeful brutality that would have been inflicted on the object is inflicted on the ego.By extension, the suicidal impulses of depressed persons are also more intelligible on the basis of the assumption that the patient's hatred of the ego is as strong as the hatred of the object of both love and hatred.In depression, as in other narcissistic pathologies, the emotional life is evidently marked by what Breuer has termed, and which we often speak of as ambivalent; Human beings have two opposing emotions, love and hate.It is a pity that we cannot have a more detailed discussion of the word ambivalence in these lectures. In addition to the narcissistic neurosis there is also a form of hysterical "comparison" which we have long known.I wish I could, in a few words, make you understand the difference between the two; unfortunately, it is impossible.Depression has a cyclical or cyclical nature, and now a few words will interest you.Under suitable conditions, we can analyze and treat the disease between the end of the disease and the future to prevent the recurrence of its disease.I have tried again and again with success.Thus we know that in melancholia, mania, and other disorders, a special method of resolving conflicts is at work, which has the same prerequisites as the other neuroses.You can imagine that psychoanalysis is still very useful in this respect. I would also like to tell you that the analysis of narcissistic neuroses helps to gain some knowledge of the ego and its organization of faculties and elements.We have done preliminary research in this area before.From the analysis of the phantasies observed we have come to the conclusion that the ego has a faculty which is constantly watching, criticizing, and comparing, and is therefore opposed to another part of the ego.Therefore, we think that the patient's complaints, that every action of ours is watched by someone, and that every thought is known and examined, but at this time we have actually spoken a truth that no one can know as the truth.His mistake is only that he thinks that this hateful force does not belong to him and exists outside his own body; in fact, in the process of his own development, he has created an ego-ideal, which he I feel in my ego that there is a sensory yardstick against which I measure my actual self and all my activities by means of my ego ideal.We presume that he created this ideal with the aim of thereby obtaining the self-satisfaction associated with the dominant narcissism of childhood, which had been repeatedly repressed and sacrificed since old age.This self-critical faculty is what was formerly called the ego's censorship or "conscience"; it is the same faculty which manifests itself in night-dreams as a resistance to immoral desires.If this faculty is decomposed in the illusion of being monitored, we can know that the origin of this faculty is due to the influence of parents, teachers and social environment, and through the process of comparing ourselves with these model characters. These are some of the results of psychoanalysis applied to narcissistic neuroses.Unfortunately, there are too few, and there are many that have not given us clear concepts, because such concepts can only be expected to be achieved after years of research on new materials.These results are made possible by the application of the concepts of the ego libido or the narcissistic libido; with the help of these concepts we are able to extend the conclusions from the transference neuroses to the narcissistic neuroses.But now you may ask me whether all the disturbances of narcissistic neuroses and psychoses can be explained libidinally, whether the development of the disease is due to libidinal factors in psychic life and not at all out of order.From my point of view, the solution of this problem does not seem very important; at the same time, we do not have the ability to answer it now; just wait for the future solution.It will then be proved, I suppose, that the capacity to cause disease is peculiar to the libidinal impulse.So the libido says that victory can be won both in actual neuroses and in the most serious forms of psychosis.Because I know very well that the characteristic of the libido is not to obey the domination of reality and necessity.But I think that the ego-instinct can also have a related relationship here. Since the libido has pathogenic emotions, the functions of the ego-instinct have to be disturbed by this.Even if we admit that the ego instinct is the chief victim in severe mental illness, I do not see that this invalidates the direction of our research; we will have to wait for the future. Let me come back to anxiety for a moment, in the hope of illustrating a point that I have not understood before.We have said that the relationship between anxiety and libido is clear, but it is not easy to reconcile it with the undeniable assumption that real anxiety in response to danger is the expression of a self-existing instinct.But if the feeling of anxiety arises not from the ego instinct but from the ego libido, how are we to deal with it?After all, the feeling of anxiety is often harmful to the body, and the deeper the level, the more obvious the damage.它常干涉着那唯一可以保全自我的行动，不管它是逃避的或自卫的行动。所以，假使我们把真实的焦虑的情感成分属于自我里比多，而把它所采取的行动属于自存本能，那么一切理论上的困难都可迎刃而解了。你们将不再主张我们因知道恐惧而逃避了。我们的知道恐惧而逃避，都起源于对危险的知觉而引起的同一冲动。经过危险而幸存的人，以为他们未曾有恐惧之感，他们只是相机行动——譬如举枪瞄准进攻的野兽——这确是他那时最有利的办法。