Primal
Scene (Urszene)
Scene of sexual intercourse between the parents which
the child observes, or infers on the basis of certain indications, and phantasises.
It is generally interpreted by the child as an act of violence on the part of
the father.
The term 'Urszenen'
makes its first appearance in a manuscript of Freud's dating from 1897 (1),
where it is used to connote certain traumatic infantile experiences which are organised into scenarios or scenes (see 'Phantasy'); at
this point Freud gives no special
consideration to the type of scene involving parental intercourse. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a),
there is no mention of primal scenes as such, but Freud does underline the
importance of the observation of coitus between the parents in so far as it
generates anxiety: 'I have explained this anxiety by arguing that what we are
dealing with is a sexual excitation with which their [children's] understanding
is unable to cope and which they also, no doubt, repudiate because their
parents are involved in it' (2).
Analytic experience was to cause Freud to
attribute an increasing importance to the scene where the child happens to
witness sexual relations between its parents: 'Among the store of phantasies of
all neurotics, and probably of all human beings, this scene is seldom absent'
(3). It falls into the category of what Freud calls the primal phantasies* (Urphantasien). It
is in his account of the case of the 'Wolf Man'-- 'From the History of an
Infantile Neurosis' (1918b [1914])-that the observation
of parental intercourse is called 'the primal scene'. Basing himself upon this
case, Freud brings out different aspects: first, the act of coitus is
understood by the child as an aggression by the father in a sado-masochistic
relationship; secondly, the scene gives rise to sexual excitation in the child
while at the same time providing a basis for castration anxiety; thirdly, the
child interprets what is going on, within the framework of an infantile sexual
theory, as anal coitus.
In
addition, according to
Ruth Mack Brunswick, 'the understanding
and interest which the child brings to the parental coitus are based on
the child's own preoedipal physical experiences
with the mother and
its resultant desires' (4).
Should we look upon the primal scene as the memory of an actually experienced
event or as a pure phantasy? Freud debated this problem with Jung, he debated
it in his own mind, and it is raised at several points in the case-history of
the Wolf Man. However varied Freud's proposed solutions may
seem, they invariably fall
within certain bounds . In
the first version
of The Wolf Man, where he is concerned to establish
the reality of the primal scene, he is already laying stress on the fact that
it is only through a deferred action* (nachtriiglich) that it is grasped and interpreted by the child. At the other end of the scale, when he
comes to emphasise the
role of retrospective
phantasies (Zurilckphantasien), he
still maintains that reality
has at least provided
certain clues (noises, animal
coitus, etc.) (5).
Over and above the discussion of the respective dosages of phantasy
and reality in the primal scene,
what Freud seems
to be getting at and what he wants
to uphold, particularly against Jung, is the idea that this scene belongs to the
(ontogenetic or phylogenetic) past of the individual and that it constitutes a happening which may be of the order of myth but which is already given prior to any meaning which is attributed to it after the fact.
(1) Cf. FREUD,S. Anf , 210;
S.E., I, 248.
(2) FREUD, S., G.W., 11-IJI, 591; S.E., V, 585.
(3)
FREUD, S. 'A Case of Paranoia
Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease'
(1915/), G.W., X, 242; S.E., XIV, 269.
(4)
BRUNSWICK , R. M . 'The Preoedipal Phase of the Libido Development' (1940) in The Psycho-Analytic Reader (1950), 243.
(5)
Cf. FREUD, S., G.W., XII, 137n.; S.E., XVII, 103n.
From J. Laplanche
and J.-B. Pontalis,
The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans, Donald Nicholson-Smith (Norton, 1973), 335-6