Note 231 — Chapter VI · —THE THEORY OF SEXUAL INVERSION.

It has been denied by some (Meynert, Näcke, etc.) that there is any sexual instinct at all. I may as well, therefore, explain in what sense I use the word. (See also "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse" in vol. iii of these Studies.) I mean an inherited aptitude the performance of which normally demands for its full satisfaction the presence of a person of the opposite sex. It might be asserted that there is no such thing as an instinct for food, that it is all imitation, etc. In a sense this is true, but the automatic basis remains. A chicken from an incubator needs no hen to teach it to eat. It seems to discover eating and drinking, as it were, by chance, at first eating awkwardly and eating everything, until it learns what will best satisfy its organic mechanism. There is no instinct for food, it may be, but there is an instinct which is only satisfied by food. It is the same with the "sexual instinct." The tentative and omnivorous habits of the newly hatched chicken may be compared to the uncertainty of the sexual instinct at puberty, while the sexual pervert is like a chicken that should carry on into adult age an appetite for worsted and paper. It may be added here that the question of the hereditary nature of the sexual instinct has been exhaustively discussed and decisively affirmed by Moll in his Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis, 1898. Moll attaches importance to the inheritance of the normal aptitudes for sexual reaction in an abnormally weak degree as a factor in the development of sexual perversions.