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AGGRESSION IN THE RESCUE

FANTASY
BY RICHARD STERBA (DETROIT)

The increasing recognition of the significance of the aggres-

sive tendencies in normal and above all in neurotic psychic
processes, has in recent years led to a revision of the findings
of psychoanalytic research with the result that in different
psychic productions a new significance has been discovered.
It has been seen that they are no longer to be considered
as containing only positive libidinal tendencies but, almost
without exception, negative destructive ones as well.
We investigate here the rescue fantasy for its aggressive
content although the life-preserving, love-affirming attitude of
the individual producing the fantasy towards the object to
be rescued appears to contradict the presence of any aggressive
intention.
Freud devoted some paragraphs to the rescue fantasy in his
paper, Contribution to the Psychology of Love." He showed
there that the rescue fantasy primarily expresses the wish to
give back to the parents the life which one owes to them, by
rescuing one or both of them from danger of death. Where
the mother is concerned, we find tender emotions mixed with
the longing to be big and independent at the origin of the
fantasy. If the son rescues the father in his fantasy there is
an attitude of defiance expressed in it, a denial" of the fact
that one has to thank one's father for one's life. In what
Freud said, we find the first indication of a negative component
in the rescue fantasy which has not been elaborated in analytic
literature.
The content, 'rescuing', expresses only a part of the complex
fantasy, for the object to be rescued must first have been
brought into the danger from which the producer of the
fantasy is to save it. The adolescent who fantasies saving
1 Freud: Coil. Papers, IV, p. 200.

5°5
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506 RICHARD STERBA

the king or the president from the danger of a murderous

attack, only undoes the crime in his unconscious fantasy of
having brought the father substitute into danger. Clinical
analytic investigations show us most clearly the unconscious
aggressive content of the rescue fantasy.
A first example is taken from the analysis of an eighteen-
year-old homosexual girl. The great difficulty in her analysis
was her absolute refusal to give up the hope of becoming a
boy. One day she was told that it would be necessary for
her to accept her female anatomical constitution. The reac-
tion was a protestation which one can only call grandiose.
That evening she went out with a young man who was court-
ing her and let him deflower her. There was severe bleeding
which continued for four days, and she was therefore referred
to a gyn~cologist. He could find only a small erosion not
important enough to account for the continuous bleeding and
declared this to be psychogenic. It did not cease for a week
and then menstruation began a week before the expected time
(this patient had always had a regular period every twenty-
eight days). The menstruation was prolonged from the usual
three, to eight days. When it ceased, the patient had an
attack of nosebleed during the analytic hour, which recurred
during the two following hours. After this show of hostility
against me, for such it was-reminding one of the superstitions
of the Middle Ages when it was believed that the victim's
wounds would begin again to bleed at the approach of the
murderer-the patient told me the following dream.
At a trial, the analyst is condemned to death. The execu-
tion finally depends on whether some women agree to it or
not. An endless row of women pass by the judge's table .
strange thin veils streaming from their heads. The situation
is such that the women when they are asked if they agree that
the analyst is to be beheaded, are compelled to say, 'I do'. At
our patient's tum, she is the only one who dares to say, 'No',
thus saving the analyst's life.
The dream is obviously a fantasy of rescue. Analysis how-
ever shows that the saving is merely a facade and the happy
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AGGRESSION IN THE RESCUE FANTASY

ending of a lie. The court has sentenced the analyst to death

and the women are in favor of the execution. The patient's
'no' has another significance. The women with veils who
are compelled in the dream to agree as they pass the table,
are women at the wedding altar where the situation necessi-
tates saying 'I do'. (The altar is called in Latin mensa which
means 'table") This saving dream, then, shows itself in its
deeper content to be a combination of protest and spiteful
revenge. The aggression in the rescuing is obvious here.
Two minor examples illustrate the same. A patient, at a
time when she feels rebuked by the analyst, produces the
following fantasy of rescue.
There is a war and the analyst is badly wounded. The
patient, a field nurse, finds him, a poor wreck of a human
being, blind, without legs and arms. She saves him from
further dangers which menace him and takes care of him.
He could not have survived without her help and finally he
sees how much she loves him and is grateful to her to the
end of his life.
Here an interpretation is superfluous. Cruelty and revenge
are too clearly expressed.
The next example is a slip of the tongue of a patient who
begins to relate a rescue fantasy with the -words: 'Doctor, I
have had a rescue fantasy against you', instead of 'about you',
thus betraying the aggressive content even before relating it.
Two further examples are given, the first from the analysis
of a woman, the second an item found in a newspaper.
During puberty, a girl had seriously evolved the plan, in
order to rescue him from military service, of creeping into
her older brother's room while he was sleeping and quickly
cutting off one of his fingers. She was greatly astonished at her
father's anger when she related to him her plan.
In the New York Times of July 20, 1940, there appeared
the following:
'A sleep-walking farmer killed his three-year-old daughter
while dreaming he was saving her from a mad dog. He often
walks in his sleep and is subject to nightmares. During a
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RICHARD STERBA

nightmare he dreamed that a dog was attacking his children,

leaped from bed and snatched up his little daughter. When
he swung her out of the dog's reach, the authorities said, her
head struck the staircase and her skull was fractured. Then
he went back to bed, still asleep. The farmer was not held
and no charge was filed against him.'
These examples have been chosen from many. In my expe-
rience it is justifiable to look for some aggressive content
in every rescue fantasy and I am convinced that it is to be
found.
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