Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex | Page 2

psychoneurotic illnesses never occur with a
perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts of emotions contribute to the result, but some
aberration of the sexual life is always present, as the cause of especially insistent
emotions and repressions.
The instincts with which every child is born furnish desires or cravings which must be
dealt with in some fashion. They may be refined ("sublimated"), so far as is necessary
and desirable, into energies of other sorts--as happens readily with the play-instinct--or
they may remain as the source of perversions and inversions, and of cravings of new sorts
substituted for those of the more primitive kinds under the pressure of a conventional
civilization. The symptoms of the functional psychoneuroses represent, after a fashion,
some of these distorted attempts to find a substitute for the imperative cravings born of
the sexual instincts, and their form often depends, in part at least, on the peculiarities of
the sexual life in infancy and early childhood. It is Freud's service to have investigated
this inadequately chronicled period of existence with extraordinary acumen. In so doing
he made it plain that the "perversions" and "inversions," which reappear later under such
striking shapes, belong to the normal sexual life of the young child and are seen, in veiled
forms, in almost every case of nervous illness.
It cannot too often be repeated that these discoveries represent no fanciful deductions, but
are the outcome of rigidly careful observations which any one who will sufficiently
prepare himself can verify. Critics fret over the amount of "sexuality" that Freud finds
evidence of in the histories of his patients, and assume that he puts it there. But such
criticisms are evidences of misunderstandings and proofs of ignorance.
Freud had learned that the amnesias of hypnosis and of hysteria were not absolute but
relative and that in covering the lost memories, much more, of unexpected sort, was often
found. Others, too, had gone as far as this, and stopped. But this investigator determined
that nothing but the absolute impossibility of going further should make him cease from
urging his patients into an inexorable scrutiny of the unconscious regions of their
memories and thoughts, such as never had been made before. Every species of
forgetfulness, even the forgetfulness of childhood's years, was made to yield its hidden
stores of knowledge; dreams, even though apparently absurd, were found to be
interpreters of a varied class of thoughts, active, although repressed as out of harmony
with the selected life of consciousness; layer after layer, new sets of motives underlying

motives were laid bare, and each patient's interest was strongly enlisted in the task of
learning to know himself in order more truly and wisely to "sublimate" himself.
Gradually other workers joined patiently in this laborious undertaking, which now stands,
for those who have taken pains to comprehend it, as by far the most important movement
in psychopathology.
It must, however, be recognized that these essays, of which Dr. Brill has given a
translation that cannot but be timely, concern a subject which is not only important but
unpopular. Few physicians read the works of v. Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Moll,
and others of like sort. The remarkable volumes of Havelock Ellis were refused
publication in his native England. The sentiments which inspired this hostile attitude
towards the study of the sexual life are still active, though growing steadily less common.
One may easily believe that if the facts which Freud's truth-seeking researches forced him
to recognize and to publish had not been of an unpopular sort, his rich and abundant
contributions to observational psychology, to the significance of dreams, to the etiology
and therapeutics of the psychoneuroses, to the interpretation of mythology, would have
won for him, by universal acclaim, the same recognition among all physicians that he has
received from a rapidly increasing band of followers and colleagues.
May Dr. Brill's translation help toward this end.
There are two further points on which some comments should be made. The first is this,
that those who conscientiously desire to learn all that they can from Freud's remarkable
contributions should not be content to read any one of them alone. His various
publications, such as "The Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses,"[1]
"The Interpretation of Dreams,"[2] "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,"[3] "Wit
and its Relation to the Unconscious,"[4] the analysis of the case of the little boy called
Hans, the study of Leonardo da Vinci,[4a] and the various short essays in the four
Sammlungen kleiner Schriften, not only all hang together, but supplement each other to a
remarkable extent. Unless a course of study such as this is undertaken many critics may
think various statements and inferences in this volume to be far fetched or find them too
obscure for comprehension.
The other point is the following: One frequently