Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/45

 THE CASTRATION COfPLEX 201

The impressions of the sense organs teach the infant to separate the engram complexes of this primitive ego into one part which answers to the wish for repetition, and into another part which is withdrawn from the tendency to repetition (Freud). The withdrawal of the nipple, defaecation, and micturition, especially supply material for these observations. Nipple, faeces, urine are the bridges from the ego to the comprehension of the external world.

Our primitive and auto-erotic ego is by preference a pleasure ego; the formation of the concept of the external world is asso- ciated with pain factors {Unlustmotnente):, and so from the very beginning the external world constitutes an enemy, ^ until the sense organs of distance, eye, ear, and nose, secondarily add pleasure which is withdrawn from the primitive ego's investment with pleasure. Thus our final pleasure-ego is a remnant — a remnant which owes its origin to the fact that something is removed from us of which the sense organs have taken possession, and which they have stamped with their seal and offer us as external world.

In all views of life one finds again the wish to undo the separation between ego and external world. One speaks of the necessary synthesis of macro- and micro-cosmos, of life in har- mony with the infinite, of the feeling of being one with nature, and calls this the condition and essence of happiness.

This happiness that all mean to strive after, for which everyone yearns, is bound up with the primitive narcissism and auto-erotism. Sucking, defaecation and micturition are the kernels of this concept; but the nipple is the leader in this triumvirate, and thus it happens that the mamma as mother becomes the central concept of the external world, for whom the desire for reunion strives, while the nipple in the form of its later double, the penis, is perceived as the centre of one's own personality, and an injury to it is felt as a severe injury to the ego itself.

It is this separation in the primitive ego, the formation of the external world, which, properly speaking, is the primitive castration ; and when I spoke of the withdrawal of the nipple as castration it is only another way of expressing the same thought.

» That is to say, ambivalency. Really it would be more correct to say the hostile thing is the external world. It is therefore so easy to draw back object-erotic quantities to a painful organ. The painful organ belongs as well to the external world through its pain, as it belongs to the ego through its remaining qualities. This may also contribute to the explanation of ma- sochism. The primitive ego finds itself again in the pain-pleasure.