In the article, The Neuropsychoses of Defense (1894), present in the work First Psychoanalytic Publications (1893-1899), Freud tries to formulate a theory about acquired hysteria, phobias, obsessions, and some hallucinatory psychoses.

Laplanche and Pontalis (2004) elucidate that "Obsessive neurosis, before being isolated by Freud as an autonomous disorder, was part of a general picture - obsessions were related to mental degeneration or mistaken as neurasthenia".

Understanding Obsessional Neurosis

The obsession occurs after a displacement of the affection from its original representation, repressed after an intense psychic conflict. Thus, the subject of neurotic structure, devoid of conversion capacity [in the case of obsessive neurotics], maintains in his psyche the affection. The original representation remains in consciousness, but loses its force; the affection, now free, moves freely to the incompatible representations.

These incompatible representations connected with affection characterize obsessive representations. Freud (1894 [1996], p. 59) points out that "In all the cases I have analyzed, it was the sexual life of the subject that had aroused an afflicting affection, of precisely the same nature connected with his obsession." Before his last formulations about the etiology of neuroses, Freud believed that all children - at an early age - were seduced by the father figure.

In the same year [1896], Freud used for the first time the term Psychoanalysis to describe his new psychotherapeutic method - formulated to investigate the obscurity that is the unconscious - based on the cathartic method of Josef Breuer (1842 - 1925). Through his new method, Freud investigates the hysterical symptoms from their root. In an attempt to investigate the origin of hysterical symptoms, in his analyses, Freud realized that the origin of the symptoms was related to a trauma that occurred in childhood - a trauma of sexual genesis.

Obsessive Neurosis and Psychoanalysis

According to the psychoanalyst, "the event of which the subject has retained an unconscious memory is an early experience of sexual intercourse with actual arousal of the genital organs, resulting from sexual abuse committed by another person" (1896 [1996], p. 151).

Freud believed that the origin of hysteria was caused by a passive (traumatic) sexual experience in childhood - from 8 to 10 years old - before the child reached puberty, and all events after puberty were not in themselves responsible for giving rise to the neuroses, but rather agents provocateurs, that is, events that brought out what was latent: the neurosis.

For a long time, the therapist believed that both hysteria and obsessional neurosis were born in a very similar way. While in hysteria the subject plays a passive role, in obsessional neurosis there is an active relationship, in which there is an event that provides pleasure, but, simultaneously, the enjoyment of this pleasure is full of self-recriminations since it depends on an intense psychic conflict.

Freud and Wihelm Fliess Obsessive Neurosis

In one of the multiple letters exchanged between Freud and Wihelm Fliess (1858 - 1928), Freud tells that he was having some doubts about what he had said about the etiology of neuroses, he says it is very unlikely to believe that all fathers [father figure] commit perverse acts. In this way, the psychoanalyst abandons the idea that the neuroses - hysteria and obsessive neurosis - originated from a passive/active and unwanted sexual relationship with its progenitor.

Only in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1901-1905), Freud develops his new theory: infantile sexuality - in infancy, the child is totally seized by desires that are satisfied through its erogenous zones, which vary according to the stage of psychosexual development in which it is.

He also develops his theory on the Oedipus complex and how fantasies act in the psychic sphere. In the article A Contribution to the Problem of Choice in Neurosis (1913), Freud develops an issue already problematized in previous articles.

The choice of neurosis

Now, to understand how the process of "neurosis choice" works, he returns to one of the phases of infantile psychosexual development: the sadistic-anal [pre-genital] phase, in which there is a libidinal investment that Freud called the "fixation point". "[...] Thus, the fixation on the anal phase would be at the origin of obsessive neurosis and of a certain type of character" (LAPLANCHE; PONTALIS, 2004, p. 190).

The obsessional neurosis starts from a fixation of the libido in the anal phase (1 - 3 years old), when the child has not yet reached its period of object choice, that is, it is in its autoerotic phase. Later, if the subject experiences a painful experience, it is very likely that he/she will regress to the phase in which there was fixation.

In one of the cases of obsessional neurosis analyzed by Freud - a woman who during her childhood felt an intense desire to have children, a desire motivated by an infantile fixation. In adulthood, this desire continued until the moment she realized that she could not get pregnant by her husband, her only object of love. In the face of this, she reacted to this frustration with an anxiety hysteria.

Obsessive Neurosis and the first obsessive symptoms

Initially, she tried to hide her deep sadness from her husband; however, he realized that his wife's anxiety was caused precisely by her inability to have children with him and felt like a failure with the whole situation, so he begins to fail in sexual relations with his wife. He travels. She, believing that he had become impotent, produces the first obsessive symptoms the night before, and with it his regression.

Her sexual need was transferred to an intense compulsion for washing and cleaning; she maintained protective measures against certain harm and believed that other people had reason to fear her. That is, she used reactive formations to go against her own anal-erotic and sadistic impulses.

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Most of the time, the obsessive neurotic has a strong and aggressive temperament, and very often becomes impatient, irritable, and unable to let go of certain objects. This temperament, or as Freud puts it - character, is related to the regression to the pre-genital sadistic and anal erotic stage.

Final considerations

According to Ribeiro (2011, p.16), "the subject's encounter with sex is always traumatic and, in obsessional neurosis, is accompanied by an excess of jouissance that brings guilt and self-recrimination (sic)". Thus, the obsessive person comes into conflict with his desire - desire that is the main point of obsessional neurosis.

"The recalcitrance impinges on the representation of the trauma and the affect is displaced to a substitute [sic] idea. In this way, the obsessive subject is tormented by self-recrimination [sic] about apparently futile and irrelevant facts" (ibid, p. 16).

Soon, the subject makes an enormous effort to deny his desire and, after an intense psychic conflict, the original representation is repressed, thus appearing the obsessive representations, which have much less intensity than the original one; but now they are supplied by the affection, which remains the same.

Bibliographic References

FREUD, Sigmund Freud. A Hereditariedade e a Etiologia das Neuroses. Rio de Janeiro: IMAGO, v. III, 1996 (Standard Brazilian Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud). Original title: L' HÉRÉDITÉ ET L'ÉTIOLOGIE DES NÉVROSES (1896). LAPLANCHE, J.; PONTALIS, J. Fixation. Translation: Pedro Tamen. 4th ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001. Original title: VOCABULAIRE DE LA PSYCHANALYYSE.LAPLANCHE, J.; PONTALIS, J. Neurose Obsessiva. Translation: Pedro Tamen. 4º ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001. Original title: VOCABULAIRE DE LA PSYCHANALYSE.04 FREUD, Sigmund. As Neuropsicoses de Defesa. Rio de Janeiro: IMAGO, v. III, 1996 (Standard Brazilian Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud). Original title: DIE ABWEHR-NEUROPSYCHOSEN (1894) .RIBEIRO, Maria AnitaCarneiro. A neurose obsessiva. 3.ed. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2011.

This article was written by Luckas Di' Leli ( [email protected] ). I am a philosophy student and I am in the process of training in Psychoanalysis at the Brazilian Institute of Clinical Psychoanalysis (IBPC).