Part 24

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 be 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. Later 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 then 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 small 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 way. 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.

This 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 sensations 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 exhausted; 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 made 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.

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.

I 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 instead 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 main 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, as 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.