Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud

real obstacles, the sexual ideal can be used for surrogate gratification. The person then enacts the narcissistic type of object-choice by loving what he once was but has meanwhile forfeited, or by loving whatever possesses the qualities that he himself doesn't have at all (cf. above under
c
) [ page 19 ]). The formula parallel to the one cited above runs as follows: ‘Whatever possesses the qualities that the ego lacks
qua
ideal, is consequently loved’. This particular resort holds special significance for the neurotic, whose ego becomes depleted because of his excessive object-cathexes, and who is hence incapable of achieving his ego-ideal. Having squandered his libido on objects, he then seeks a way back to narcissism by adopting the narcissistic type of object-choice and choosing a sexual ideal possessed of thequalities he himself cannot attain. This is healing through love, which as a rule he prefers to the psychoanalytical variety. Indeed, he has no faith in any other healing mechanism; he generally embarks on his therapy in expectation of it, and duly focuses this expectation on the person of the physician treating him. What stands in the way of this curative scheme, of course, is the patient's incapacity for love as a result of his panoply of repressions. If the treatment manages to remedy this to some degree, we often meet with a successful if unintended outcome in that the patient withdraws from treatment in order to make a love-choice, and to entrust his further recovery to his shared life with the loved person. We might be content with this outcome if it did not bring with it all the dangers of a crushing dependence on his helper in adversity.
    The ego-ideal opens up a significant new avenue for our understanding of mass psychology. 41 This ideal has a social element as well as an individual one, for it is also the shared ideal of family, class, nation. Besides narcissistic libido, it also harnesses a large quantum of a person's homosexual libido, which thereby reverts to the ego. Non-gratification resulting from non-fulfilment of this ideal releases homosexual libido, which converts into guilty conscience (social fear). 42 Guilty conscience originates as fear of parental punishment, or rather – to put it more accurately – fear of losing the parents' love; later, the indeterminate mass of fellow human beings takes the parents' place. We can thus more readily understand the fact that paranoia is frequently caused by the ego being wounded, by gratification being refused within the domain of the ego-ideal. Also, in the case of the paraphrenic illnesses, we can better understand the concomitance within the ego-ideal of ideal-formation and sublimation, the retrogression of sublimations, and the re-formation 43 of ideals that occurs in certain circumstances.
    (1914)

Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through
    It seems to me by no means superfluous to remind the student of psychoanalysis again and again of the profound changes that psychoanalytical technique has undergone since its first beginnings. First of all, in the phase of catharsis as practised by Breuer, the technique was to focus directly on the factor of symptom-formation, and make a rigorously sustained attempt to reproduce the psychic processes of that situation in order to resolve them through conscious activity. Remembering and abreacting 1 were the goals at that stage, to be achieved with the help of hypnosis. Once hypnosis had been discarded, the task that then demanded our attention was to use the free associations of the patient to work out what he himself was failing to remember. The process of interpretation and the communication of its results to the patient were seen as the means to overcome the resistance within him; there was still the same focus on the situations in which the symptoms first arose, and any others that proved to underlie the onset of the illness, whilst abreaction diminished in importance and appeared to be replaced by the