PART III GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES (continued 2)

One hardly ever meets with a patient who does not attempt to make a reservation in some department of his thoughts, in order to guard them against intrusion by the analysis. One patient, who in the ordinary way was remarkably intelligent, concealed a most intimate love-affair from me for weeks in this way; when accused of this violation of the sacred rule he defended himself with the argument that he considered this particular story his private affair. Naturally analytic treatment cannot countenance a right of sanctuary like this; one might as well try to allow an exception to be made in certain parts of a town like Vienna, and forbid that any arrests should be made in the market-place or in the square by St. Stephen’s church, and then attempt to take up a “wanted” man. Of course he would 244never be found anywhere but in those safe places. Once I decided to permit a man to make an exception of such a point; for a great deal depended on his recovering his capacity for work and he was bound by his oath as a civil servant not to communicate certain matters to any other person. He was content with the result, it is true, but I was not: I made up my mind never again to repeat the attempt under such conditions.

Obsessional patients are exceedingly clever at making the technical rule almost useless by bringing their over-conscientiousness and doubt to bear upon it. Patients with anxiety-hysteria sometimes succeed in reducing it to absurdity by only producing associations which are so far removed from what is wanted that they yield nothing for analysis. However, I do not intend to introduce you to these technical difficulties of the treatment. It is enough to know that finally, with resolution and perseverance, we do succeed in extracting from the patient a certain amount of obedience for the rule of the technique; and then the resistance takes another line altogether. It appears as intellectual opposition, employs arguments as weapons, and turns to its own use all the difficulties and improbabilities which normal but uninstructed reasoning finds in analytical doctrines. We then have to hear from the mouth of the individual patient all the criticisms and objections which thunder about us in chorus in scientific literature. What the critics outside shout at us is nothing new, therefore. It is indeed a storm in a teacup. Still, the patient can be argued with; he is very glad to get us to instruct him, teach him, defeat him, point out the literature to him so that he can learn more; he is perfectly ready to become a supporter of psycho-analysis on the condition that analysis shall spare him personally. We recognize resistance in this desire for knowledge, however; it is a digression from the particular task in hand and we refuse to allow it. In the obsessional neurosis the resistance makes use of special tactics which we are prepared for. It permits the analysis to proceed uninterruptedly along its course, so that more and more light is thrown upon the problems of the case, until we begin to wonder at last why these explanations have no practical effect and entail no corresponding improvement in the symptoms. Then we discover that the resistance has fallen back upon the doubt characteristic of the obsessional neurosis and is holding us successfully at bay from this vantage-point. The patient has said to himself something of this kind: “This is all very pretty and very interesting. I should like to go on with it. I am sure it would do me a lot of good if it were true. But I don’t believe it in the least, and as long as I don’t 245believe it, it doesn’t affect my illness.” So it goes on for a long time, until at last this reservation itself is reached and then the decisive battle begins.

The intellectual resistances are not the worst; one can always get the better of them. But the patient knows how to set up resistances within the boundaries of analysis proper, and the defeat of these is one of the most difficult tasks of the technique. Instead of remembering certain of the feelings and states of mind of his previous life, he reproduces them, lives through again such of them as, by means of what is called the ‘transference,’ may be made effective in opposition against the physician and the treatment. If the patient is a man, he usually takes this material from his relationship with his father, in whose place he has now put the physician; and in so doing he erects resistances out of his struggles to attain to personal independence and independence of judgement, out of his ambition, the earliest aim of which was to equal or to excel the father, out of his disinclination to take the burden of gratitude upon himself for the second time in his life. There are periods in which one feels that the patient’s desire to put the analyst in the wrong, to make him feel his impotence, to triumph over him, has completely ousted the worthier desire to bring the illness to an end. Women have a genius for exploiting in the interests of resistance a tender erotically-tinged transference to the analyst; when this attraction reaches a certain intensity all interest in the actual situation of treatment fades away, together with every obligation incurred upon undertaking it. The inevitable jealousy and the embitterment consequent upon the unavoidable rejection, however considerately it is handled, is bound to injure the personal relationship with the physician, and so to put out of action one of the most powerful propelling forces in the analysis.

Resistances of this kind must not be narrowly condemned. They contain so much of the most important material from the patient’s past life and bring it back in so convincing a fashion that they come to be of the greatest assistance to the analysis, if a skilful technique is employed correctly to turn them to the best use. What is noteworthy is that this material always serves at first as a resistance and comes forward in a guise which is inimical to the treatment. Again it may be said that they are character-traits, individual attitudes of the Ego, which are thus mobilized to oppose the attempted alterations. One learns then how these character-traits have been developed in connection with the conditions of the neurosis and in reaction against its demands, and observes features in this character which would 246not otherwise have appeared, at least, not so clearly: that is, which may be designated latent. Also you must not carry away the impression that we look upon the appearance of these resistances as an unforeseen danger threatening our analytic influence. No, we know that these resistances are bound to appear; we are dissatisfied only if we cannot rouse them definitely enough and make the patient perceive them as such. Indeed, we understand at last that the overcoming of these resistances is the essential work of the analysis, that part of the work which alone assures us that we have achieved something for the patient.

Besides this, you must take into account that all accidental occurrences arising during the treatment are made use of by the patient to interfere with it, anything which could distract him or deter him from it, every hostile expression of opinion from anyone in his circle whom he can regard as an authority, any chance organic illness or one complicating the neurosis; indeed, he even converts every improvement in his condition into a motive for slackening his efforts. Then you will have obtained an approximate, though still incomplete, picture of the forms and the measures taken by the resistances which must be met and overcome in the course of every analysis. I have given such a detailed consideration to this point because I am about to inform you that our dynamic conception of the neuroses is founded upon this experience of ours of the resistances that neurotic patients set up against the cure of their symptoms. Breuer and I both originally practised psycho-therapy by the hypnotic method. Breuer’s first patient was treated throughout in a state of hypnotic suggestibility; at first I followed his example. I admit that at that time my work went forward more easily and agreeably and also took much less time: but the results were capricious and not permanent; therefore I finally gave up hypnotism. And then I understood that no comprehension of the dynamics of these affections was possible as long as hypnosis was employed. In this condition the very existence of resistances is concealed from the physician’s observation. Hypnosis drives back the resistances and frees a certain field for the work of the analysis, but dams them up at the boundaries of this field so that they are insurmountable; it is similar in effect to the doubt of the obsessional neurosis. Therefore I may say that true psycho-analysis only began when the help of hypnosis was discarded.

If it is a matter of such importance to establish these resistances then surely it would be wise to allow caution and doubt full play, in case we have been too ready with our assumption that they exist. Perhaps cases of neurosis may be found in which 247the associations really fail for other reasons, perhaps the arguments against our theories really deserve serious attention, and we may be wrong in so conveniently disposing of the patient’s intellectual objections by stigmatizing them as resistance. Well, I can only assure you that our judgement in this matter has not been formed hastily; we have had opportunity to observe these critical patients both before the resistance comes to the surface and after it disappears. In the course of the treatment the resistance varies in intensity continually; it always increases as a new topic is approached, it is at its height during the work upon it, and dies down again when this theme has been dealt with. Unless certain technical errors have been committed we never have to meet the full measure of resistance, of which any patient is capable, at once. Thus we could definitely ascertain that the same man would take up and then abandon his critical objections over and over again in the course of the analysis. Whenever we are on the point of bringing to his consciousness some piece of unconscious material which is particularly painful to him, then he is critical in the extreme; even though he may have previously understood and accepted a great deal, yet now all these gains seem to be obliterated; in his struggles to oppose at all costs he can behave just as though he were mentally deficient, a form of ‘emotional stupidity.’ If he can be successfully helped to overcome this new resistance he regains his insight and comprehension. His critical faculty is not functioning independently, and therefore is not to be respected as if it were; it is merely a maid-of-all-work for his affective attitudes and is directed by his resistance. When he dislikes anything he can defend himself against it most ingeniously; but when anything suits his book he can be credulous enough. We are perhaps all much the same; a person being analysed shows this dependence of the intellect upon the affective life so clearly because in the analysis he is so hard-pressed.

In what way can we now account for this fact observed, that the patient struggles so energetically against the relief of his symptoms and the restoration of his mental processes to normal functioning? We say that we have come upon the traces of powerful forces at work here opposing any change in the condition; they must be the same forces that originally induced the condition. In the formation of symptoms some process must have been gone through, which our experience in dispersing them makes us able to reconstruct. As we already know from Breuer’s observations, it follows from the existence of a symptom that some mental process has not been carried 248through to an end in a normal manner so that it could become conscious; the symptom is a substitute for that which has not come through. Now we know where to place the forces which we suspect to be at work. A vehement effort must have been exercised to prevent the mental process in question from penetrating into consciousness and as a result it has remained unconscious; being unconscious it had the power to construct a symptom. The same vehement effort is again at work during analytic treatment, opposing the attempt to bring the unconscious into consciousness. This we perceive in the form of resistances. The pathogenic process which is demonstrated by the resistances we call Repression.

It will now be necessary to make our conception of this process of repression more precise. It is the essential preliminary condition for the development of symptoms, but it is also something else, a thing to which we have no parallel. Let us take as a model an impulse, a mental process seeking to convert itself into action: we know that it can suffer rejection, by virtue of what we call “repudiation” or “condemnation”; whereupon the energy at its disposal is withdrawn, it becomes powerless, but it can continue to exist as a memory. The whole process of decision on the point takes place with the full cognizance of the Ego. It is very different when we imagine the same impulse subject to repression: it would then retain its energy and no memory of it would be left behind; the process of repression, too, would be accomplished without the cognizance of the Ego. This comparison therefore brings us no nearer to the nature of repression.

I will expound to you those theoretical conceptions which alone have proved useful in giving greater definiteness to the term repression. For this purpose it is first necessary that we should proceed from the purely descriptive meaning of the word “unconscious” to its systematic meaning; that is, we resolve to think of the consciousness or unconsciousness of a mental process as merely one of its qualities and not necessarily definitive. Suppose that a process of this kind has remained unconscious, its being withheld from consciousness may be merely a sign of the fate it has undergone, not necessarily the fate itself. Let us suppose, in order to gain a more concrete notion of this fate, that every mental process—there is one exception, which I will go into later—first exists in an unconscious state or phase, and only develops out of this into a conscious phase, much as a photograph is first a negative and then becomes a picture through the printing of the positive. But not every negative is made into 249a positive, and it is just as little necessary that every unconscious mental process should convert itself into a conscious one. It may be best expressed as follows: Each single process belongs in the first place to the unconscious psychical system; from this system it can under certain conditions proceed further into the conscious system.

The crudest conception of these systems is the one we shall find most convenient, a spatial one. The unconscious system may therefore be compared to a large ante-room, in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception-room, in which, too, consciousness resides. But on the threshold between the two there stands a personage with the office of door-keeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception-room when he disapproves of them. You will see at once that it does not make much difference whether the door-keeper turns any one impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has entered the reception-room; that is merely a matter of the degree of his vigilance and promptness in recognition. Now this metaphor may be employed to widen our terminology. The excitations in the unconscious, in the antechamber, are not visible to consciousness, which is of course in the other room, so to begin with they remain unconscious. When they have pressed forward to the threshold and been turned back by the door-keeper, they are ‘incapable of becoming conscious’; we call them then repressed. But even those excitations which are allowed over the threshold do not necessarily become conscious; they can only become so if they succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness. This second chamber therefore may be suitably called the preconscious system. In this way the process of becoming conscious retains its purely descriptive sense. Being repressed, when applied to any single impulse, means being unable to pass out of the unconscious system because of the door-keeper’s refusal of admittance into the preconscious. The door-keeper is what we have learnt to know as resistance in our attempts in analytic treatment to loosen the repressions.

Now I know very well that you will say that these conceptions are as crude as they are fantastic and not at all permissible in a scientific presentation. I know they are crude; further indeed, we even know that they are incorrect, and unless I am mistaken, we have something better ready as a substitute for them; whether you will then continue to think them so fantastic, I do not know. 250At the moment they are useful aids to understanding, like Ampère’s manikin swimming in the electric current, and, in so far as they do assist comprehension, are not to be despised. Still, I should like to assure you that these crude hypotheses, the two chambers, the door-keeper on the threshold between the two, and consciousness as a spectator at the end of the second room, must indicate an extensive approximation to the actual reality. I should also like to hear you admit that our designations, unconscious, preconscious, and conscious, are less prejudicial and more easily defensible than some others which have been suggested or have come into use, e.g. sub-conscious, inter-conscious, co-conscious, etc.

If so, I should think it more significant if you then went on to point out that any such constitution of the mental apparatus as I have assumed in order to account for neurotic symptoms can only be of universal validity and must throw light on normal functioning. In this, of course, you are perfectly right. We cannot follow up this conclusion at the moment; but our interest in the psychology of symptom-development would certainly be enormously increased if we could see any prospect of obtaining, by the study of pathological conditions, an insight into normal mental functioning, hitherto such a mystery.

Do you not recognize, moreover, what it is that supports these conceptions of the two systems and the relationship between them and consciousness? The door-keeper between the unconscious and the preconscious is nothing else than the censorship to which we found the form of the manifest dream subjected. The residue of the day’s experiences, which we found to be the stimuli exciting the dream, was preconscious material which at night during sleep had been influenced by unconscious and repressed wishes and excitations; and had thus by association with them been able to form the latent dream, by means of their energy. Under the dominion of the unconscious system this material had been elaborated (worked over)—by condensation and displacement—in a way which in normal mental life, i.e. in the preconscious system, is unknown or admissible very rarely. This difference in their manner of functioning is what distinguishes the two systems for us; the relationship to consciousness, which is a permanent feature of the preconscious, indicates to which of the two systems any given process belongs. Neither is dreaming a pathological phenomenon; every healthy person may dream while asleep. Every inference concerning the constitution of the mental apparatus which comprises an understanding of both dreams and neurotic symptoms has an irrefutable claim to be regarded as applying also to normal mental life.

251This is as much as we will say about repression for the present. Moreover, it is but a necessary preliminary condition, a prerequisite, of symptom-formation. We know that the symptom is a substitute for some other process which was held back by repression; but even given repression we have still a long way to go before we can obtain comprehension of this substitute-formation. There are other sides to the problem of repression itself which present questions to be answered: What kind of mental excitations suffer repression? What forces effect it? and from what motives? On one point only, so far, have we gained any knowledge relevant to these questions. While investigating the problem of resistance we learned that the forces behind it proceed from the Ego, from character-traits, recognizable or latent: it is these forces therefore which have also effected the repression, or at least they have taken a part in it. We know nothing more than this at present.

The second observation for which I prepared you will help us now. By means of analysis we can always discover the purpose behind the neurotic symptom. This is of course nothing new to you: I have already pointed it out in two cases of neurosis. But, to be sure, what do two cases signify? You have a right to demand two hundred cases, innumerable cases, in demonstration of it. But then, I cannot comply with that. So you must fall back on personal experience, or upon belief, which in this matter can rely upon the unanimous testimony of all psycho-analysts.

You will remember that in the two cases in which we submitted the symptoms to detailed investigation analysis led to the innermost secrets of the patient’s sexual life. In the first case, moreover, the purpose or tendency of the symptom under examination was particularly evident; in the second case, it was perhaps to some extent veiled by another factor to be mentioned later. Well now, what we found in these two examples we should find in every case we submitted to analysis. Every time we should be led by analysis to the sexual experiences and desires of the patient, and every time we should have to affirm that the symptom served the same purpose. This purpose shows itself to be the gratification of sexual wishes; the symptoms serve the purpose of sexual gratification for the patient; they are a substitute for satisfactions which he does not obtain in reality.

Think of the obsessive act of our first patient. This woman has to do without the husband she loved so intensely; on account of his deficiencies and short-comings she could not share his life. She had to be faithful to him; she could not put anyone else in 252his place. Her obsessional symptom gives her what she so much desires; it exalts her husband, denies and corrects his deficiencies, above all, his impotence. This symptom is fundamentally a wish-fulfilment, in that respect exactly like a dream; it is, moreover, what a dream is not always, an erotic wish-fulfilment. In the case of the second patient you could see that her ritual aims at preventing intercourse between the parents or at hindering the procreation of another child; you have probably also divined that fundamentally it seeks to set her in her mother’s place. It again therefore constitutes a removal of hindrances to sexual satisfaction and the fulfilment of the subject’s own sexual wishes. Of the complications referred to in the second case I shall speak shortly.

I wish to avoid making reservations later on about the universal applicability of these statements, and therefore I will ask you to notice that all I have just been saying about repression, symptom-formation and symptom-interpretation has been obtained from the study of three types of neurosis, and for the present is only applicable to these three types—namely, anxiety-hysteria, conversion-hysteria, and the obsessional neurosis. These three disorders, which we are accustomed to combine together in a group as the TRANSFERENCE NEUROSES, constitute the field open to psycho-analytic therapy. The other neuroses have been far less closely studied psycho-analytically; in one group of them the impossibility of therapeutic influence has no doubt been one reason for this neglect. You must not forget that psycho-analysis is still a very young science, that much time and trouble are required for the study of it, and that not so very long ago there was only one man practising it: yet we are approaching from all directions to a nearer comprehension of these other conditions which are not transference neuroses. I hope I shall still be able to tell you of the developments that our hypotheses and conclusions have undergone in the course of adaptation to this new material, and to show you that these further studies have not yielded contradictions but have led to a higher degree of unification in our knowledge. Everything that has been said, then, applies only to the three transference neuroses and I will now add another piece of information which throws further light upon the significance of the symptoms. A comparative examination of the situations out of which the disease arose yields the following result, which may be reduced to a formula—namely, that these persons have fallen ill owing to some kind of PRIVATION which they suffer when reality withholds from them gratification of their sexual wishes. You will perceive 253how beautifully these two conclusions supplement one another. The symptoms are now explicable as substitute-gratifications for desires which are unsatisfied in life.

It is certainly possible to make all kinds of objections to the proposition that neurotic symptoms are substitutes for sexual gratifications. I will discuss two of them to-day. If any one of you has himself undertaken the analysis of a large number of neurotics, he will perhaps shake his head and say: “In certain cases this is not at all applicable, in them the symptoms seem rather to contain the opposite purpose, of excluding or of discontinuing sexual gratification.” I shall not dispute your interpretation. In psycho-analysis things are often a good deal more complicated than we could wish: if they had been simpler psycho-analysis would perhaps not have been required to bring them to light. Certain features of the ritual of our second patient are distinctly recognizable as being of this ascetic character, inimical to sexual satisfaction; e.g., her removing the clocks for the magic purpose of preventing erections at night, or her trying to prevent the falling and breaking of vessels, which amounts to a protection of her virginity. In other cases of ceremonials on going to bed which I have analysed this negative character was far more marked; the whole ritual could consist of defensive regulations against sexual recollections and temptations. But we have long ago learnt from psycho-analysis that opposites do not constitute a contradiction. We might extend our proposition and say that the purpose of the symptom is either a sexual gratification or a defence against it; in hysteria the positive, wish-fulfilling character predominates on the whole, and in the obsessional neurosis the negative ascetic character. The symptoms can serve the purpose both of sexual gratification and of its opposite so well because this double-sidedness, or polarity, has a most suitable foundation in one element of their mechanism which we have not yet had an opportunity to mention. They are in fact, as we shall see, the effects of compromises between two opposed tendencies, acting on one another; they represent both that which is repressed, and also that which has effected the repression and has co-operated in bringing them about. The representation of either one or another of these two factors may predominate in the symptom, but it happens very rarely that one of them is absent altogether. In hysteria a collaboration of the two tendencies in one symptom is usually achieved. In the obsessional neurosis the two parts are often distinct: the symptom is then a double one and consists of two successive actions which cancel each other.

254It will not be so easy to dispose of a second difficulty. When you consider a whole series of symptom-interpretations your first opinion would probably be that the conception of a sexual substitute-gratification has to be stretched to its widest limits in order to include them. You will not neglect to point out that these symptoms offer nothing real in the way of gratification, that often enough they are confined to re-animating a sensation, or to enacting a phantasy arising from some sexual complex. Further, that the ostensible sexual gratification is very often of an infantile and unworthy character, perhaps approximating to a masturbatory act, or is reminiscent of dirty habits which long ago in childhood had been forbidden and abandoned. And further still, you will express your astonishment that anyone should reckon among sexual gratifications those which can only be described as gratifications of cruel or horrible appetites, or which may be termed unnatural. Indeed, we shall come to no agreement on these latter points until we have submitted human sexuality to a thorough investigation and have thus established what we are justified in calling sexual.

255

TWENTIETH LECTURE THE SEXUAL LIFE OF MAN

One would certainly think that there could be no doubt about what is to be understood by the term “sexual.” First and foremost, of course, it means the “improper,” that which must not be mentioned. I have been told a story about some pupils of a famous psychiatrist, who once endeavoured to convince their master that the symptoms of an hysteric are frequently representations of sexual things. With this object, they took him to the bedside of an hysterical woman whose attacks were unmistakable imitations of childbirth. He objected, however: “Well, there is nothing sexual about childbirth.” To be sure, childbirth is not necessarily always improper.

I perceive that you don’t approve of my joking about such serious matters. It is not altogether a joke, however. Seriously, it is not so easy to define what the term sexual includes. Everything connected with the difference between the two sexes is perhaps the only way of hitting the mark; but you will find that too general and indefinite. If you take the sexual act itself as the central point, you will perhaps declare sexual to mean everything which is concerned with obtaining pleasurable gratification from the body (and particularly the sexual organs) of the opposite sex; in the narrowest sense, everything which is directed to the union of the genital organs and the performance of the sexual act. In doing so, however, you come very near to reckoning the sexual and the improper as identical, and childbirth would really have nothing to do with sex. If then you make the function of reproduction the kernel of sexuality you run the risk of excluding from it a whole host of things like masturbation, or even kissing, which are not directed towards reproduction, but which are nevertheless undoubtedly sexual. However, we have already found that attempts at definition always lead to difficulties; let us give up trying to do any better in this particular case. We may suspect that in the development of the concept “sexual” something has happened which has resulted in what H. Silberer has aptly called a ‘covering error.’ 256On the whole, indeed, we know pretty well what is meant by sexual.

In the popular view, which is sufficient for all practical purposes in ordinary life, sexual is something which combines references to the difference between the sexes, to pleasurable excitement and gratification, to the reproductive function, and to the idea of impropriety and the necessity for concealment. But this is no longer sufficient for science. For painstaking researches (only possible, of course, in a spirit of self-command maintained by self-sacrifice) have revealed that classes of human beings exist whose sexual life deviates from the usual one in the most striking manner. One group among these “perverts” has, as it were, expunged the difference between the sexes from its scheme of life. In these people, only the same sex as their own can rouse sexual desire; the other sex (especially the genital organ of the other sex) has absolutely no sexual attraction for them, can even in extreme cases be an object of abhorrence to them. They have thus of course foregone all participation in the process of reproduction. Such persons are called homosexuals or inverts. Often, though not always, they are men and women who otherwise have reached an irreproachably high standard of mental growth and development, intellectually and ethically, and are only afflicted with this one fateful peculiarity. Through the mouths of their scientific spokesmen they lay claim to be a special variety of the human race, a “third sex,” as they call it, standing with equal rights alongside the other two. We may perhaps have an opportunity of critically examining these claims. They are not, of course, as they would gladly maintain, the “elect” of mankind; they contain in their ranks at least as many inferior and worthless individuals as are to be found amongst those differently constituted sexually.

These perverts do at least seek to achieve very much the same ends with the objects of their desires as normal people do with theirs. But after them comes a long series of abnormal types, in whom the sexual activities become increasingly further removed from anything which appears attractive to a reasonable being. In their manifold variety and their strangeness these types may be compared to the grotesque monstrosities painted by P. Breughel to represent the temptations of St. Anthony, or to the long procession of effete gods and worshippers which G. Flaubert shows us passing before his pious penitent, and to nothing else. The chaotic assembly calls out for classification if it is not to bewilder us completely. We divide them into those in whom the sexual object has been altered, as with the homosexuals, 257and those in whom, first and foremost, the sexual aim has been altered. In the first group belong those who have dispensed with the mutual union of the genital organs and who have substituted for the genitals, in one of the partners in the act, another organ or part of the body (mouth or anus, in place of the vagina) making light of both the anatomical difficulties and the suppression of disgust involved. There follow others who, it is true, still retain the genital organs as object; not, however, by virtue of their sexual function, but on account of other functions in which they take part anatomically or by reason of their proximity. These people demonstrate that the excretory functions, which in the course of the child’s upbringing are relegated to a limbo as indecent, remain capable of attracting the entire sexual interest. There are others who have given up altogether the genital organs as object; and, instead, have exalted some other part of the body to serve as the object of desire, a woman’s breast, foot, or plait of hair. There are others yet to whom even a part of the body is meaningless, while a particle of clothing, a shoe or a piece of underclothing, will gratify all their desires; these are the fetichists. Farther on in the scale come those who indeed demand the object as a whole: but whose requirements in regard to it take specific forms, of an extraordinary or horrible nature—even to the point of seeking it as a defenceless corpse and, urged on by their criminal obsessions, of making it one in order so to enjoy it. But enough of these horrors!

Foremost in the second group are those perverts whose sexual desires aim at the performance of an act which normally is but an introductory or preparatory one. They are those who seek gratification in looking and touching, or in watching the other person’s most intimate doings; or those who expose parts of their own bodies which should be concealed, in the vague expectation of being rewarded by a similar action on the part of the other. Then come the incomprehensible sadists, in whom all affectionate feeling strains towards the one goal of causing their object pain and torture, ranging in degree from mere indications of a tendency to humiliate the other up to the infliction of severe bodily injuries. Then, as though complementary to these, come the masochists whose only longing is to suffer, in real or in symbolic form, humiliations and tortures at the hands of the loved object. There are others yet, in whom several abnormal characteristics of this kind are combined and interwoven with one another. Finally, we learn that the persons belonging to each of these groups may be divided again: into those who seek their particular form of sexual satisfaction in reality and those who are satisfied merely 258to imagine it in their own minds, needing no real object at all but being able to substitute for it a creation of phantasy.

There is not the slightest possible doubt that these mad, extraordinary and horrible things do actually constitute the sexual activities of these people. Not merely do they themselves so regard them, recognizing their substitutive character; but we also have to acknowledge that they play the same part in their lives as normal sexual satisfaction plays in ours, exacting the same, often excessive, sacrifices. It is possible to trace out, both broadly and in great detail, where these abnormalities merge into the normal and where they diverge from it. Nor will it escape you that that quality of impropriety which adheres inevitably to a sexual activity is not absent from these forms of it: in most of them it is intensified to the point of odium.

Well, now, what attitude are we to take up to these unusual forms of sexual satisfaction? Indignation and expressions of our personal disgust, together with assurances that we do not share these appetites, will obviously not carry us very far. That is not the point at issue. After all, this is a field of phenomena like any other; attempts to turn away and flee from it, on the pretext that these are but rarities and curiosities, could easily be rebutted. On the contrary, the phenomena are common enough and widely distributed. But if it is objected that our views on the sexual life of mankind require no revision on this account, since these things are one and all aberrations and divagations of the sexual instinct, a serious reply will be necessary. If we do not understand these morbid forms of sexuality and cannot relate them to what is normal in sexual life, then neither can we understand normal sexuality. It remains, in short, our undeniable duty to account satisfactorily in theory for the existence of all the perversions described and to explain their relation to normal sexuality, so-called.

In this task we can be helped by a point of view, and by two new evidential observations. The first we owe to Ivan Bloch; according to him, the view that all the perversions are “signs of degeneration” is incorrect; because of the evidence existing that such aberrations from the sexual aim, such erratic relationships to the sexual object, have been manifested since the beginning of time through every age of which we have knowledge, in every race from the most primitive to the most highly civilized, and at times have succeeded in attaining to toleration and general prevalence. The two evidential observations have been made in the course of psycho-analytic investigations of 259neurotic patients; they must undoubtedly influence our conception of sexual perversions in a decisive manner.

We have said that neurotic symptoms are substitutes for sexual satisfactions and I have already indicated that many difficulties will be met with in proving this statement from the analysis of symptoms. It is, indeed, only accurate if the “perverse” sexual needs, so-called, are included under the sexual satisfactions; for an interpretation of the symptoms on this basis is forced upon us with astonishing frequency. The claim made by homosexuals or inverts, that they constitute a select class of mankind, falls at once to the ground when we discover that in every single neurotic evidence of homosexual tendencies is forthcoming and that a large proportion of the symptoms are expressions of this latent inversion. Those who openly call themselves homosexuals are merely those in whom the inversion is conscious and manifest; their number is negligible compared with those in whom it is latent. We are bound, in fact, to regard the choice of an object of the same sex as a regular type of offshoot of the capacity to love, and are learning every day more and more to recognize it as especially important. The differences between manifest homosexuality and the normal attitude are certainly not thereby abrogated; they have their practical importance, which remains, but theoretically their value is very considerably diminished. In fact, we have even come to the conclusion that one particular mental disorder, paranoia, no longer to be reckoned among the transference neuroses, invariably arises from an attempt to subdue unduly powerful homosexual tendencies. Perhaps you will remember that one of our patients,^[47] in her obsessive act, played the part of a man—of her own husband, that is, whom she had left; such symptoms, representing the impersonation of a man, are very commonly produced by neurotic women. If this is not actually attributable to homosexuality, it is certainly very closely connected with its origins.

As you probably know, the neurosis of hysteria can create its symptoms in all systems of the body (circulatory, respiratory, etc.) and may thus disturb all the functions. Analysis shows that all those impulses, described as perverse, which aim at replacing the genital organ by another come to expression in these symptoms. These organs thus behave as substitutes for the genital organs: it is precisely from the study of hysterical symptoms that we have arrived at the view that, besides their functional rôle, a sexual—erotogenic—significance must be ascribed to the bodily organs; and that the needs of the former will 260be interfered with if the demands of the latter upon them are too great. Countless sensations and innervations, which we meet as hysterical symptoms, in organs apparently not concerned with sexuality, are thus discovered to be essentially fulfilments of perverse sexual desires, by the other organs having usurped the function of the genitalia. In this way also the very great extent to which the organs of nutrition and of excretion, in particular, may serve in yielding sexual excitement is brought home to us. It is indeed the same thing as is manifested in the perversions; except that in the latter it is unmistakable and recognizable without any difficulty, whereas in hysteria we have to make the détour of interpreting the symptom, and then do not impute the perverse sexual impulse in question to the person’s consciousness, but account it to the unconscious part of his personality.

Of the many types of symptom characteristic of the obsessional neurosis the most important are found to be brought about by the undue strength of one group of sexual tendencies with a perverted aim, i.e. the sadistic group. These symptoms, in accordance with the structure of the obsessional neurosis, serve mainly as a defence against these wishes or else they express the conflict between satisfaction and rejection. Satisfaction does not find short shrift, however; it knows how to get its own way by a roundabout route in the patient’s behaviour, by preference turning against him in self-inflicted torment. Other forms of this neurosis are seen in excessive “worry” and brooding; these are the expressions of an exaggerated sexualization of acts which are normally only preparatory to sexual satisfaction: the desire to see, to touch and to investigate. In this lies the explanation of the very great importance dread of contact and obsessive washing attains to in this disease. An unsuspectedly large proportion of obsessive actions are found to be disguised repetitions and modifications of masturbation, admittedly the only uniform act which accompanies all the varied flights of sexual phantasy.

It would not be difficult to show you the connections between perversion and neurosis in a much more detailed manner, but I believe that I have said enough for our purposes. We must beware, however, of overestimating the frequency and intensity of the perverse tendencies in mankind, after these revelations of their importance in the interpretation of symptoms. You have heard that privation in normal sexual satisfactions may lead to the development of neurosis. In consequence of this privation in reality the need is forced into the abnormal paths of sexual excitation. 261Later you will be able to understand how this happens. You will at any rate understand that a “collateral” damming-up of this kind must swell the force of the perverse impulses, so that they become more powerful than they would have been had no hindrance to normal sexual satisfaction been present in reality. Incidentally, a similar factor may be recognized also in the manifest perversions. In many cases they are provoked or activated by the unduly great difficulties in the way of normal satisfaction of the sexual instinct which are produced either by temporary conditions or by permanent social institutions. In other cases, certainly, perverse tendencies are quite independent of such conditions; they are, as it were, the natural kind of sexual life for the individual concerned.

Perhaps you are momentarily under the impression that all this tends to confuse rather than to explain the relations between normal and perverted sexuality. But keep in mind this consideration. If it is correct that real obstacles to sexual satisfaction or privation in regard to it bring to the surface perverse tendencies in people who would otherwise have shown none, we must conclude that something in these people is ready to embrace the perversions; or, if you prefer it, the tendencies must have been present in them in a latent form. Thus we come to the second of the new evidential observations of which I spoke. Psycho-Analytic investigation has found it necessary also to concern itself with the sexual life of children, for the reason that in the analysis of symptoms the forthcoming reminiscences and associations invariably lead back to the earliest years of childhood. That which we discovered in this way has since been corroborated point by point by the direct observation of children. In this way it has been found that all the perverse tendencies have their roots in childhood, that children are disposed towards them all and practise them all to a degree conforming with their immaturity; in short, perverted sexuality is nothing else but infantile sexuality, magnified and separated into its component parts.

Now you will see the perversions in an altogether different light and no longer ignore their connection with the sexual life of mankind; but what distressing emotions these astonishing and grotesque revelations will provoke in you! At first you will certainly be tempted to deny everything—the fact that there is anything in children which can be termed sexual life, the accuracy of our observations, and the justification of our claim to see in the behaviour of children any connection with that which in later years is condemned as perverted. Permit me first to explain to you the motives of your antagonism and 262then to put before you a summary of our observations. That children should have no sexual life—sexual excitement, needs, and gratification of a sort—but that they suddenly acquire these things in the years between twelve and fourteen would be, apart from any observations at all, biologically just as improbable, indeed, nonsensical, as to suppose that they are born without genital organs which first begin to sprout at the age of puberty. What does actually awake in them at this period is the reproductive function, which then makes use for its own purposes of material lying to hand in body and mind. You are making the mistake of confounding sexuality and reproduction with each other and thus you obstruct your own way to the comprehension of sexuality, the perversions, and the neuroses. This mistake, moreover, has a meaning in it. Strange to say, its origin lies in the fact that you yourselves have all been children and as children were subject to the influences of education. For it is indeed one of the most important social tasks of education to restrain, confine, and subject to an individual control (itself identical with the demands of society) the sexual instinct when it breaks forth in the form of the reproductive function. In its own interests, accordingly, society would postpone the child’s full development until it has attained a certain stage of intellectual maturity, since educability practically ceases with the full onset of the sexual instinct. Without this the instinct would break all bounds and the laboriously erected structure of civilization would be swept away. Nor is the task of restraining it ever an easy one; success in this direction is often poor and, sometimes, only too great. At bottom society’s motive is economic; since it has not means enough to support life for its members without work on their part, it must see to it that the number of these members is restricted and their energies directed away from sexual activities on to their work—the eternal primordial struggle for existence, therefore, persisting to the present day.

Experience must have taught educators that the task of moulding the sexual will of the next generation can only be carried out by beginning to impose their influence very early, and intervening in the sexual Life of children before puberty, instead of waiting till the storm bursts. Consequently almost all infantile sexual activities are forbidden or made disagreeable to the child; the ideal has been to make the child’s life asexual, and in course of time it has come to this that it is really believed to be asexual, and is given out as such, even at the hands of science. In order then to avoid any contradiction with established beliefs and aims, the sexual activity of children is overlooked—no 263small achievement, by the way—while science contents itself with otherwise explaining it away. The little child is supposed to be pure and innocent; he who says otherwise shall be condemned as a hardened blasphemer against humanity’s tenderest and most sacred feelings.

The children alone take no part in this convention; they assert their animal nature naïvely enough and demonstrate persistently that they have yet to learn their “purity.” Strange to say, those who deny sexuality in children are the last to relax educative measures against it; they follow up with the greatest severity every manifestation of the “childish tricks” the existence of which they deny. Moreover, it is theoretically of great interest that the time of life which most flagrantly contradicts the prejudice about asexual childhood, the years of infancy up to five or six, is precisely the period which is veiled by oblivion in most people’s memories; an oblivion which can only be dispelled completely by analytic investigation but which is nevertheless sufficiently penetrable to allow of the formation of single dreams.

I will now tell you the most clearly recognizable of the child’s sexual activities. It will be expedient if I first introduce you to the term Libido. In every way analogous to hunger, Libido is the force by means of which the instinct, in this case the sexual instinct, as, with hunger, the nutritional instinct, achieves expression. Other terms, such as sexual excitation and satisfaction, require no definition. Interpretation finds most to do in regard to the sexual activities of the infant, as you will easily perceive; and no doubt you will find it a reason for objections. This interpretation is formed on the basis of analytic investigation, working backwards from a given symptom. The infant’s first sexual excitations appear in connection with the other functions important for life. Its chief interest, as you know, is concerned with taking nourishment; as it sinks asleep at the breast, utterly satisfied, it bears a look of perfect content which will come back again later in life after the experience of the sexual orgasm. This would not be enough to found a conclusion upon. However, we perceive that infants wish to repeat, without really getting any nourishment, the action necessary to taking nourishment; they are therefore not impelled to this by hunger. We call this action “lutschen” or “ludeln” (German words signifying the enjoyment of sucking for its own sake—as with a rubber “comforter”); and as when it does this the infant again falls asleep with a blissful expression we see that the action of sucking is sufficient in itself to give it satisfaction. Admittedly, it very soon contrives not to go to sleep without having sucked in this 264way. An old physician for children in Budapest, Dr. Lindner, was the first to maintain the sexual nature of this procedure. Nurses and people who look after children appear to take the same view of this kind of sucking (lutschen), though without taking up any theoretic attitude about it. They have no doubt that its only purpose is in the pleasure derived; they account it one of the child’s “naughty tricks”; and take severe measures to force it to give it up, if it will not do so of its own accord. And so we learn that an infant performs actions with no other object but that of obtaining pleasure. We believe that this pleasure is first of all experienced while nourishment is being taken, but that the infant learns rapidly to enjoy it apart from this condition. The gratification obtained can only relate to the region of the mouth and lips; we therefore call these areas of the body erotogenic zones and describe the pleasure derived from sucking (lutschen) as a sexual one. To be sure, we have yet to discuss the justification for the use of this term.

If the infant could express itself it would undoubtedly acknowledge that the act of sucking at its mother’s breast is far and away the most important thing in life. It would not be wrong in this, for by this act it gratifies at the same moment the two greatest needs in life. Then we learn from psycho-analysis, not without astonishment, how much of the mental significance of this act is retained throughout life. Sucking at the mother’s breast (saugen) becomes the point of departure from which the whole sexual life develops, the unattainable prototype of every later sexual satisfaction, to which in times of need phantasy often enough reverts. The desire to suck includes within it the desire for the mother’s breast, which is therefore the first object of sexual desire; I cannot convey to you any adequate idea of the importance of this first object in determining every later object adopted, of the profound influence it exerts, through transformation and substitution, upon the most distant fields of mental life. First of all, however, as the infant takes to sucking for its own sake (lutschen) this object is given up and is replaced by a part of its own body; it sucks its thumb or its own tongue. For purposes of obtaining pleasure it thus makes itself independent of the concurrence of the outer world and, in addition, it extends the region of excitation to a second area of the body, thus intensifying it. The erotogenic zones are not all equally capable of yielding enjoyment; it is therefore an important experience when, as Dr. Lindner says, the infant in feeling about on its own body discovers the particularly excitable region of its genitalia, and so finds the way from sucking (lutschen) to onanism.

265This assessment of the nature of sucking (lutschen) has now brought to our notice two of the decisive characteristics of infantile sexuality. It appears in connection with the satisfaction of the great organic needs, and it behaves auto-erotically, that is to say, it seeks and finds its objects in its own person. What is most clearly discernible in regard to the taking of nourishment is to some extent repeated with the process of excretion. We conclude that infants experience pleasure in the evacuation of urine and the contents of the bowels, and that they very soon endeavour to contrive these actions so that the accompanying excitation of the membranes in these erotogenic zones may secure them the maximum possible gratification. As Lou Andreas has pointed out, with fine intuition, the outer world first steps in as a hindrance at this point, a hostile force opposed to the child’s desire for pleasure—the first hint he receives of external and internal conflicts to be experienced later on. He is not to pass his excretions whenever he likes but at times appointed by other people. To induce him to give up these sources of pleasure he is told that everything connected with these functions is “improper,” and must be kept concealed. In this way he is first required to exchange pleasure for value in the eyes of others. His own attitude to the excretions is at the outset very different. His own fæces produce no disgust in him; he values them as part of his own body and is unwilling to part with them, he uses them as the first “present” by which he can mark out those people whom he values especially. Even after education has succeeded in alienating him from these tendencies, he continues to feel the same high regard for his “presents” and his “money”; while his achievements in the way of urination appear to be the subject of particular pride.

I know that for some time you have been longing to interrupt me with cries of: “Enough of these monstrosities! The motions of the bowels a source of pleasurable sexual satisfaction exploited even by infants! Fæces a substance of great value and the anus a kind of genital organ! We do not believe it; but we understand why children’s physicians and educationists have emphatically rejected psycho-analysis and its conclusions!” Not at all; you have merely forgotten for the moment that I have been endeavouring to show you the connection between the actual facts of infantile sexual life and the actual facts of the sexual perversions. Why should you not know that in many adults, both homosexual and heterosexual, the anus actually takes over the part played by the vagina in sexual intercourse? And that there are many persons who retain the pleasurable 266sensations accompanying evacuations of the bowels throughout life and describe them as far from insignificant? You may hear from children themselves, when they are a little older and able to talk about these things, what an interest they take in the act of defæcation and what pleasure they find in watching others in the act. Of course if you have previously systematically intimidated these children they will understand very well that they are not to speak of such things. And for all else that you refuse to believe I refer you to the evidence brought out in analysis and to the direct observation of children and I tell you that it will require the exercise of considerable ingenuity to avoid seeing all this or to see it in a different light. Nor am I at all averse from your thinking the relationship between childish sexual activities and the sexual perversions positively striking. It is a matter of course that there should be this relationship; for if a child has a sexual life at all it must be of a perverted order, since apart from a few obscure indications he is lacking in all that transforms sexuality into the reproductive function. Moreover, it is a characteristic common to all the perversions that in them reproduction as an aim is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse—if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently. You will understand therefore that the gulf and turning-point in the development of the sexual life lies at the point of its subordination to the purposes of reproduction. Everything that occurs before this conversion takes place, and everything which refuses to conform to it and serves the pursuit of gratification alone, is called by the unhonoured title of “perversion” and as such is despised.

So let me continue my brief account of infantile sexuality. I could supplement what I have told you concerning two of the bodily systems by extending the same scrutiny to the others. The sexual life of the child consists entirely in the activities of a series of component-instincts which seek for gratification independently of one another, some in his own body and others already in an external object. Among the organs of these bodily systems the genitalia rapidly take the first place; there are people in whom pleasurable gratification in their own genital organ, without the aid of any other genital organ or object, is continued without interruption from the onanism habitual in the suckling period of infancy to the onanism of necessity occurring in the years of puberty, and then maintained indefinitely beyond that. Incidentally, the subject of onanism is not so easily 267exhausted; it contains material for consideration from various angles.

In spite of my wish to limit the extent of this discussion I must still say something about sexual curiosity in children. It is too characteristic of childish sexuality and too important for the symptom-formation of the neuroses to be omitted. Infantile sexual curiosity begins very early, sometimes before the third year. It is not connected with the difference between the sexes, which is nothing to children, since they—boys, at least—ascribe the same male genital organ to both sexes. If then a boy discovers the vagina in a little sister or play-mate he at once tries to deny the evidence of his senses; for he cannot conceive of a human being like himself without his most important attribute. Later, he is horrified at the possibilities it reveals to him; the influence of previous threats occasioned by too great a preoccupation with his own little member now begins to be felt. He comes under the dominion of the castration complex, which will play such a large part in the formation of his character if he remains healthy, and of his neurosis if he falls ill, and of his resistances if he comes under analytic treatment. Of little girls we know that they feel themselves heavily handicapped by the absence of a large visible penis and envy the boy’s possession of it; from this source primarily springs the wish to be a man which is resumed again later in the neurosis, owing to some mal-adjustment to a female development. The clitoris in the girl, moreover, is in every way equivalent during childhood to the penis; it is a region of especial excitability in which auto-erotic satisfaction is achieved. In the transition to womanhood very much depends upon the early and complete relegation of this sensitivity from the clitoris over to the vaginal orifice. In those women who are sexually anæsthetic, as it is called, the clitoris has stubbornly retained this sensitivity.

The sexual interest of children is primarily directed to the problem of birth—the same problem that lies behind the riddle of the Theban Sphinx. This curiosity is for the most part aroused by egoistic dread of the arrival of another child. The answer which the nursery has ready for the child, that the stork brings the babies, meets with incredulity even in little children much more often than we imagine. The feeling of having been deceived by grown-up people, and put off with lies, contributes greatly to a sense of isolation and to the development of independence. But the child is not able to solve this problem on his own account. His undeveloped sexual constitution sets definite limits to his capacity to understand it. He first supposes that children are 268made by mixing some special thing with the food taken; nor does he know that only women can have children. Later, he learns of this limitation and gives up the idea of children being made by food, though it is retained in fairy tales. A little later he soon sees that the father must have something to do with making babies, but he cannot discover what it is. If by chance he is witness of the sexual act he conceives it as an attempt to overpower the woman, as a combat, the sadistic misconception of coitus; at first, however, he does not connect this act with the creation of children; if he discovers blood on the mother’s bed or underlinen he takes it as evidence of injury inflicted by the father. In still later years of childhood he probably guesses that the male organ of the man plays an essential part in the procreation of children, but cannot ascribe to this part of the body any function but that of urination.

Children are all united from the outset in the belief that the birth of a child takes place by the bowel; that is to say, that the baby is produced like a piece of fæces. Not until all interest has been weaned from the anal region is this theory abandoned and replaced by the supposition that the navel opens, or that the area between the two nipples is the birthplace of the child. In some such manner as this the enquiring child approaches some knowledge of the facts of sex, unless, misled by his ignorance, he overlooks them until he receives an imperfect and discrediting account of them, usually in the period before puberty, which not infrequently affects him traumatically.

Now you will probably have heard that the term “sexual” has suffered an unwarrantable expansion of meaning at the hands of psycho-analysis, in order that its assertions regarding the sexual origin of the neuroses and the sexual significance of the symptoms may be maintained. You can now judge for yourselves whether this amplification is justified or not. We have extended the meaning of the concept “sexuality” only so far as to include the sexual life of perverted persons and also of children; that is to say, we have restored to it its true breadth of meaning. What is called sexuality outside psycho-analysis applies only to the restricted sexual life that is subordinated to the reproductive function and is called normal.

269

TWENTY-FIRST LECTURE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIBIDO AND SEXUAL ORGANIZATIONS

It is my impression that I have not succeeded in bringing home to you with complete conviction the importance of the perversions for our conception of sexuality. I wish therefore, as far as I am able, to review and improve upon what I have already said on this subject.

Now I do not wish you to think that it was the perversions alone that required us to make the alteration in the meaning of the term sexuality which has aroused such vehement opposition. The study of infantile sexuality has contributed even more to it, and the unanimity between the two was decisive. But, however unmistakable they may be in the later years of childhood, the manifestations of infantile sexuality in its earliest forms do seem to fade away indefinably. Those who do not wish to pay attention to evolution and to the connections brought out by analysis will dispute the sexual nature of them, and will ascribe in consequence some other, undifferentiated character to them. You must not forget that as yet we have no generally acknowledged criterion for the sexual nature of a phenomenon, unless it is some connection with the reproductive function—a definition which we have had to reject as too narrow. The biological criteria, such as the periodicities of twenty-three and twenty-eight days, suggested by W. Fliess, are exceedingly debatable; the peculiar chemical features which we may perhaps assume for sexual processes are yet to be discovered. The sexual perversions in adults, on the other hand, are something definite and unambiguous. As their generally accepted description implies, they are unquestionably of a sexual nature; whether you call them marks of degeneration or anything else, no one has yet been so bold as to rank them anywhere but among the phenomena of sexual life. In view of them alone we are justified in maintaining that sexuality and the reproductive function are not identical, for they one and all abjure the aim of reproduction.

270I notice a not uninteresting parallel here. Whereas, for most people, the word ‘mental’ means ‘conscious,’ we found ourselves obliged to widen the application of the term ‘mental’ to include a part of the mind that is not conscious. In a precisely similar way, most people declare ‘sexual’ identical with ‘pertaining to reproduction’—or, if you like it expressed more concisely, with ‘genital’; whereas we cannot avoid admitting things as ‘sexual’ that are not ‘genital’ and have nothing to do with reproduction. It is only a formal analogy, but it is not without deeper significance.

However, if the existence of sexual perversions is such a forcible argument on this point, why has it not long ago done its work and settled the question? I really am unable to say. It seems to me that the sexual perversions have come under a very special ban, which insinuates itself into the theory, and interferes even with scientific judgement on the subject. It seems as if no one could forget, not merely that they are detestable, but that they are also something monstrous and terrifying; as if they exerted a seductive influence; as if at bottom a secret envy of those who enjoy them had to be strangled—the same sort of feeling that is confessed by the count who sits in judgement in the famous parody of Tannhäuser:

So in the Mount of Venus conscience, duty, are forgot!

—Remarkable that such a thing has never been my lot!

In reality, perverts are more likely to be poor devils who have to pay most bitterly for the satisfactions they manage to procure with such difficulty.

That which makes perverse activities so unmistakably sexual, in spite of all that seems unnatural in their objects or their aims, is the fact that in perverse satisfaction the act still terminates usually in a complete orgasm with evacuation of the genital product. This is of course only the consequence of adult development in the persons concerned; in children, orgasm and genital excretion are not very well possible; as substitutes they have approximations to them which are again not recognized definitely as sexual.

I must still add something more in order to complete our assessment of the sexual perversions. Abominated as they are, sharply distinguished from normal sexual activity as they may be, simple observation will show that very rarely is one feature or another of them absent from the sexual life of a normal person. The kiss to begin with has some claim to be called a perverse act, for it consists of the union of the two erotogenic mouth zones 271instead of the two genital organs. But no one condemns it as perverse; on the contrary, in the theatre it is permitted as a refined indication of the sexual act. Nevertheless, kissing is a thing that can easily become an absolute perversion—namely, when it occurs in such intensity that orgasm and emission directly accompany it, which happens not at all uncommonly. Further, it will be found that gazing at and handling the object are in one person an indispensable condition of sexual enjoyment, while another at the height of sexual excitement pinches or bites; that in another lover not always the genital region, but some other bodily region in the object, provokes the greatest excitement, and so on in endless variety. It would be absurd to exclude people with single idiosyncrasies of this kind from the ranks of the normal and place them among perverts; rather, it becomes more and more clear that what is essential to the perversions lies, not in the overstepping of the sexual aim, not in the replacement of the genitalia, not always even in the variations in the object, but solely in the exclusiveness with which these deviations are maintained, so that the sexual act which serves the reproductive process is rejected altogether. In so far as perverse performances are included in order to intensify or to lead up to the performance of the normal sexual act, they are no longer actually perverse. Facts of the kind just described naturally tend to diminish the gulf between normal and perverse sexuality very considerably. The obvious inference is that normal sexuality has arisen, out of something existing prior to it, by a process of discarding some components of this material as useless, and by combining the others so as to subordinate them to a new aim, that of reproduction.

The point of view thus gained in regard to the perversions can now be employed by us in penetrating more deeply, with a clearer perspective, into the problem of infantile sexuality; but before doing this I must draw your attention to an important difference between the two. Perverse sexuality is as a rule exceedingly concentrated, its whole activity is directed to one—and mostly to only one—aim; one particular component-impulse is supreme; it is either the only one discernible or it has subjected the others to its own purposes. In this respect there is no difference between perverse and normal sexuality, except that the dominating component-impulse, and therefore the sexual aim, is a different one. Both of them constitute a well-organized tyranny; only that in one case one ruling family has usurped all the power, and in the other, another. This concentration and organization, on the other hand, is in the 272main absent from infantile sexuality; its component-impulses are equally valid, each of them strives independently after its own pleasure. Both the lack of this concentration (in childhood) and the presence of it (in the adult) correspond well with the fact that both normal and perverse sexuality are derived from the same source, namely, infantile sexuality. There are indeed also cases of perversion which correspond even more closely to infantile sexuality in that numerous component-instincts, independently of one another, with their aims, are developed or, better, perpetuated in them. With these cases it is more correct to speak of infantilism than of perversion of the sexual life.

Thus prepared we may now go on to consider a suggestion which we shall certainly not be spared. It will be said: “Why are you so set upon declaring as already belonging to sexuality those indefinite manifestations of childhood out of which what is sexual later develops, and which you yourself admit to be indefinite? Why are you not content rather to describe them physiologically and simply to say that activities, such as sucking for its own sake and the retaining of excreta, may be observed already in young infants, showing that they seek pleasure in their organs? In that way you would have avoided the conception of a sexual life even in babies which is so repugnant to all our feelings.” Well, I can only answer that I have nothing against pleasure derived from the organs of the body; I know indeed that the supreme pleasure of the sexual union is also only a bodily pleasure, derived from the activity of the genital organ. But can you tell me when this originally indifferent bodily pleasure acquires the sexual character that it undoubtedly possesses in later phases of development? Do we know any more about this ‘organ-pleasure’ than we know about sexuality? You will answer that the sexual character is added to it when the genitalia begin to play their part; sexuality simply means genital. You will even evade the obstacle of the perversions by pointing out that after all with most of them a genital orgasm occurs, although brought about by other means than the union of the genitalia. If you were to eliminate the relation to reproduction from the essential characteristics of sexuality since this view is untenable in consequence of the existence of the perversions, and were to emphasize instead activity of the genital organs, you would actually take up a much better position. But then we should no longer differ very widely; it would be a case of the genital organs versus the other organs. What do you now make of the abundant evidence that the genital organs may be replaced by other organs for the purpose of gratification, 273as in the normal kiss, or the perverse practices of loose living, or in the symptomatology of hysteria? In this neurosis it is quite usual for stimulation phenomena, sensations, innervations, and even the processes of erection, which properly belong to the genitalia to be displaced on to other distant areas of the body (e.g. the displacement from below upwards to the head and face). Thus you will find that nothing is left of all that you cling to as essentially characteristic of sexuality; and you will have to make up your minds to follow my example and extend the designation ‘sexual’ to include those activities of early infancy which aim at ‘organ-pleasure.’

And now will you permit me to bring forward two further considerations in support of my view. As you know, we call the doubtful and indefinable activities of earliest infancy towards pleasure ‘sexual,’ because in the course of analysing symptoms we reach them by way of material that is undeniably sexual. They would not thereby necessarily be sexual themselves, let us grant; but let us take an analogous case. Suppose that there were no way to observe the development from seed of two dicotyledonous plants—the apple-tree and the bean; but imagine that in both it was possible to follow back its development from the fully-developed plant to the first seedling with two cotyledons. The two cotyledons are indistinguishable in each; they look exactly alike in both plants. Shall I conclude from this that they actually are exactly alike and that the specific differences between apple-tree and bean-plant arise later in the plant’s development? Or is it not more correct biologically to believe that this difference exists already in the seedlings, although I cannot see any in the cotyledons? This is what we do when we call infantile pleasurable activities sexual. Whether each and every organ-pleasure may be called sexual or whether there exists, besides the sexual, another kind of pleasure that does not deserve this name is a matter I cannot discuss here. I know too little about organ-pleasure and its conditions; and I am not at all surprised that in consequence of the retrogressive character of analysis I arrive finally at factors which at the present time do not permit of definite classification.

One thing more. You have on the whole gained very little for what you are so eager to maintain, the sexual ‘purity’ of children, even if you can convince me that the infant’s activities had better not be regarded as sexual. For from the third year onwards there is no longer any doubt about sexual life in the child; at this period the genital organs begin already to show signs of excitation; there is a perhaps regular period of infantile 274masturbation, that is, of gratification in the genital organs. The mental and social sides of sexual life need no longer be overlooked: choice of object, distinguishing of particular persons with affection, even decision in favour of one sex or the other, and jealousy, were conclusively established independently by impartial observation before the time of psycho-analysis; they may be confirmed by any observer who will use his eyes. You will object that you never doubted the early awakening of affection but only that this affection was of a ‘sexual’ quality. Children between the ages of three and eight have certainly learnt to conceal this element in it; but nevertheless if you look attentively you will collect enough evidence of the ‘sensual’ nature of this affection, and whatever still escapes your notice will be amply and readily supplied by analytic investigation. The sexual aims in this period of life are in closest connection with the sexual curiosity arising at the same time, of which I have given you some description. The perverse character of some of these aims is a natural result of the immature constitution of the child who has not yet discovered the aim of the act of intercourse.

From about the sixth or eighth year onwards a standstill or retrogression is observed in the sexual development, which in those cases reaching a high cultural standard deserves to be called a latency period. This latency period, however, may be absent; nor does it necessarily entail an interruption of sexual activities and sexual interests over the whole field. Most of the mental experiences and excitations occurring before the latency period then succumb to the infantile amnesia, already discussed, which veils our earliest childhood from us and estranges us from it. It is the task of every psycho-analysis to bring this forgotten period of life back into recollection; one cannot resist the supposition that the beginnings of sexual life belonging to this period are the motive for this forgetting, that is, that this oblivion is an effect of repression.

From the third year onwards the sexual life of children shows much in common with that of adults; it is differentiated from the latter, as we already know, by the absence of a stable organization under the primacy of the genital organs, by inevitable traits of a perverse order, and of course also by far less intensity in the whole impulse. But those phases of the sexual development, or as we will call it, of the Libido-development, which are of greatest interest theoretically lie before this period. This development is gone through so rapidly that direct observation alone would perhaps never have succeeded in determining its fleeting forms. Only by the help of psycho-analytic investigation of the neuroses 275has it become possible to penetrate so far back and to discover these still earlier phases of Libido-development. These phases are certainly only theoretic constructions, but in the practice of psycho-analysis you will find them necessary and valuable constructions. You will soon understand how it happens that a pathological condition enables us to discover phenomena which we should certainly overlook in normal conditions.

Thus we can now define the forms taken by the sexual life of the child before the primacy of the genital zone is reached; this primacy is prepared for in the early infantile period, before the latent period, and is permanently organized from puberty onwards. In this early period a loose sort of organization exists which we shall call pre-genital; for during this phase it is not the genital component-instincts, but the sadistic and anal, which are most prominent. The contrast between masculine and feminine plays no part as yet; instead of it there is the contrast between active and passive, which may be described as the forerunner of the sexual polarity with which it also links up later. That which in this period seems masculine to us, regarded from the standpoint of the genital phase, proves to be the expression of an impulse to mastery, which easily passes over into cruelty. Impulses with a passive aim are connected with the erotogenic zone of the rectal orifice, at this period very important; the impulses of skoptophilia (gazing) and curiosity are powerfully active; the function of excreting urine is the only part actually taken by the genital organ in the sexual life. Objects are not wanting to the component-instincts in this period, but these objects are not necessarily all comprised in one object. The sadistic-anal organization is the stage immediately preceding the phase of primacy of the genital zone. Closer study reveals how much of it is retained intact in the later final structure, and what are the paths by which these component-instincts are forced into the service of the new genital organization. Behind the sadistic-anal phase of the Libido-development we obtain a glimpse of an even more primitive stage of development, in which the erotogenic mouth zone plays the chief part. You can guess that the sexual activity of sucking (for its own sake) belongs to this stage; and you may admire the understanding of the ancient Egyptians in whose art a child, even the divine Horus, was represented with a finger in the mouth. Abraham has quite recently published work showing that traces of this primitive oral phase of development survive in the sexual life of later years.

I can indeed imagine that you will have found this last information about the sexual organizations less of an enlightenment 276than an infliction. Perhaps I have again gone too much into detail; but have patience! what you have just heard will be of more use when we employ it later. Keep in view at the moment the idea that the sexual life—the Libido-function, as we call it—does not first spring up in its final form, does not even expand along the lines of its earliest forms, but goes through a series of successive phases unlike one another; in short, that many changes occur in it, like those in the development of the caterpillar into the butterfly. The turning-point of this development is the subordination of all the sexual component-instincts under the primacy of the genital zone and, together with this, the enrolment of sexuality in the service of the reproductive function. Before this happens the sexual life is, so to say, disparate—independent activities of single component-impulses each seeking organ-pleasure (pleasure in a bodily organ). This anarchy is modified by attempts at pre-genital ‘organizations,’ of which the chief is the sadistic-anal phase, behind which is the oral, perhaps the most primitive. In addition there are the various processes, about which little is known as yet, which effect the transition from one stage of organization to the next above it. Of what significance this long journey over so many stages in the development of the Libido is for comprehension of the neuroses we shall learn later on.

To-day we will follow up another aspect of this development—namely, the relation of the sexual component-impulses to an object; or, rather, we will take a fleeting glimpse over this development so that we may spend more time upon a comparatively late result of it. Certain of the component-impulses of the sexual instinct have an object from the very beginning and hold fast to it: such are the impulse to mastery (sadism), to gazing (skoptophilia) and curiosity. Others, more plainly connected with particular erotogenic areas in the body, only have an object in the beginning, so long as they are still dependent upon the non-sexual functions, and give it up when they become detached from these latter. Thus the first object of the oral component of the sexual instinct is the mother’s breast which satisfies the infant’s need for nutrition. In the act of sucking for its own sake (lutschen) the erotic component, also gratified in sucking for nutrition (saugen), makes itself independent, gives up the object in an external person, and replaces it by a part of the child’s own person. The oral impulse becomes auto-erotic, as the anal and other erotogenic impulses are from the beginning. Further development has, to put it as concisely as possible, two aims: first, to renounce auto-erotism, to give 277up again the object found in the child’s own body in exchange again for an external one; and secondly, to combine the various objects of the separate impulses and replace them by one single one. This naturally can only be done if the single object is again itself complete, with a body like that of the subject; nor can it be accomplished without some part of the auto-erotic impulse-excitations being abandoned as useless.

The processes by which an object is found are rather involved, and have not so far received comprehensive exposition. For our purposes it may be emphasized that, when the process has reached a certain point in the years of childhood before the latency period, the object adopted proves almost identical with the first object of the oral pleasure impulse, adopted by reason of the child’s dependent relationship to it; it is, namely, the mother, although not the mother’s breast. We call the mother the first love-object. We speak of ‘love’ when we lay the accent upon the mental side of the sexual impulses and disregard, or wish to forget for a moment, the demands of the fundamental physical or ‘sensual’ side of the impulses. At about the time when the mother becomes the love-object, the mental operation of repression has already begun in the child and has withdrawn from him the knowledge of some part of his sexual aims. Now with this choice of the mother as love-object is connected all that which, under the name of ‘the Oedipus complex,’ has become of such great importance in the psycho-analytic explanation of the neuroses, and which has had a perhaps equally important share in causing the opposition against psycho-analysis.

Here is a little incident which occurred during the present war. One of the staunch adherents of psycho-analysis was stationed in his medical capacity on the German front in Poland; he attracted the attention of his colleagues by the fact that he occasionally effected an unexpected influence upon a patient. On being questioned, he admitted that he worked with psycho-analytic methods and with readiness agreed to impart his knowledge to his colleagues. So every evening the medical men of the corps, his colleagues and superiors, met to be initiated into the mysteries of psycho-analysis. For a time all went well; but when he had introduced his audience to the Oedipus complex a superior officer rose and announced that he did not believe this, it was the behaviour of a cad for the lecturer to relate such things to brave men, fathers of families, who were fighting for their country, and he forbade the continuation of the lectures. This was the end; the analyst got himself transferred to another part of the front. In my opinion, however, it is a bad outlook 278if a victory for German arms depends upon an ‘organization’ of science such as this, and German science will not prosper under any such organization.

Now you will be impatiently waiting to hear what this terrible Oedipus complex comprises. The name tells you: you all know the Greek myth of King Oedipus, whose destiny it was to slay his father and to wed his mother, who did all in his power to avoid the fate prophesied by the oracle, and who in self-punishment blinded himself when he discovered that in ignorance he had committed both these crimes. I trust that many of you have yourselves experienced the profound effect of the tragic drama fashioned by Sophocles from this story. The Attic poet’s work portrays the gradual discovery of the deed of Oedipus, long since accomplished, and brings it slowly to light by skilfully prolonged enquiry, constantly fed by new evidence; it has thus a certain resemblance to the course of a psycho-analysis. In the dialogue the deluded mother-wife, Jocasta, resists the continuation of the enquiry; she points out that many people in their dreams have mated with their mothers, but that dreams are of no account. To us dreams are of much account, especially typical dreams which occur in many people; we have no doubt that the dream Jocasta speaks of is intimately related to the shocking and terrible story of the myth.

It is surprising that Sophocles’ tragedy does not call forth indignant remonstrance in its audience; this reaction would be much better justified in them than it was in the blunt army doctor. For at bottom it is an immoral play; it sets aside the individual’s responsibility to social law, and displays divine forces ordaining the crime and rendering powerless the moral instincts of the human being which would guard him against the crime. It would be easy to believe that an accusation against destiny and the gods was intended in the story of the myth; in the hands of the critical Euripides, at variance with the gods, it would probably have become such an accusation. But with the reverent Sophocles there is no question of such an intention; the pious subtlety which declares it the highest morality to bow to the will of the gods, even when they ordain a crime, helps him out of the difficulty. I do not believe that this moral is one of the virtues of the drama, but neither does it detract from its effect; it leaves the hearer indifferent; he does not react to this, but to the secret meaning and content of the myth itself. He reacts as though by self-analysis he had detected the Oedipus complex in himself, and had recognized the will of the gods and the oracle as glorified disguises of his own Unconscious; as 279though he remembered in himself the wish to do away with his father and in his place to wed his mother, and must abhor the thought. The poet’s words seem to him to mean: “In vain do you deny that you are accountable, in vain do you proclaim how you have striven against these evil designs. You are guilty, nevertheless; for you could not stifle them; they still survive unconsciously in you.” And psychological truth is contained in this; even though man has repressed his evil desires into his Unconscious and would then gladly say to himself that he is no longer answerable for them, he is yet compelled to feel his responsibility in the form of a sense of guilt for which he can discern no foundation.

There is no possible doubt that one of the most important sources of the sense of guilt which so often torments neurotic people is to be found in the Oedipus complex. More than this: in 1913, under the title of Totem und Tabu, I published a study of the earliest forms of religion and morality in which I expressed a suspicion that perhaps the sense of guilt of mankind as a whole, which is the ultimate source of religion and morality, was acquired in the beginnings of history through the Oedipus complex. I should much like to tell you more of this, but I had better not; it is difficult to leave this subject when once one begins upon it, and we must return to individual psychology.

Now what does direct observation of children, at the period of object-choice before the latency period, show us in regard to the Oedipus complex? Well, it is easy to see that the little man wants his mother all to himself, finds his father in the way, becomes restive when the latter takes upon himself to caress her, and shows his satisfaction when the father goes away or is absent. He often expresses his feelings directly in words and promises his mother to marry her; this may not seem much in comparison with the deeds of Oedipus, but it is enough in fact; the kernel of each is the same. Observation is often rendered puzzling by the circumstance that the same child on other occasions at this period will display great affection for the father; but such contrasting—or, better, ambivalent—states of feeling, which in adults would lead to conflicts, can be tolerated alongside one another in the child for a long time, just as later on they dwell together permanently in the Unconscious. One might try to object that the little boy’s behaviour is due to egoistic motives and does not justify the conception of an erotic complex; the mother looks after all the child’s needs and consequently it is to the child’s interest that she should trouble herself about no one else. This too is quite correct; but it is soon clear that 280in this, as in similar dependent situations, egoistic interests only provide the occasion on which the erotic impulses seize. When the little boy shows the most open sexual curiosity about his mother, wants to sleep with her at night, insists on being in the room while she is dressing, or even attempts physical acts of seduction, as the mother so often observes and laughingly relates, the erotic nature of this attachment to her is established without a doubt. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that a mother looks after a little daughter’s needs in the same way without producing this effect; and that often enough a father eagerly vies with her in trouble for the boy without succeeding in winning the same importance in his eyes as the mother. In short, the factor of sex preference is not to be eliminated from the situation by any criticisms. From the point of view of the boy’s egoistic interests it would merely be foolish if he did not tolerate two people in his service rather than only one of them.