The predisposition to neurosis, therefore, is intimately linked with our instincts. The progression of the human race requires the frequent suppression of certain instincts and every step in ethical and cultural progress involves giving up some portion of instinctive cravings. The laws are a protection of society against the instinctive cravings of its members. Society tolerates but a portion of the instincts to a certain extent and all others it outlaws as asocial. The evolution of the race may eventually reach a stage wherein the instincts will have been placed altogether at the service of society: the domestication of the instinctive cravings. This is the meaning of the struggle of centuries between brain and spinal cord. The results of this struggle may be determined only if we contrast a truly aboriginal man with a typical representative of culture. What remarkable progress has been attained in the conquest of instinct! Society goes a step further. It takes care that individuals possessing asocial instincts should be unable to propagate their kind. Criminals are rendered innocuous, the asocial person finds the environment unfavorable and disappears. But—as I have already stated in my book, _Die Träume der Dichter_[11]—the creative urge of nature does not mollify man’s asocial requirements. The struggle between nature and culture keeps up unabated and the result is neurosis. All paraphilias are a compromise between instinct and repression. I must revert here to my theory of neurosis which I have expressed first in my work entitled, _Die Träume der Dichter_.[12] The neurotic is a retrograded type. He represents a conquered stage of human evolution. He must personally undergo the struggle through which the human race as a whole has already passed. The ontogenesis of culture! Whenever nature attempts the creation of something great, powerful or sublime it turns to the great reservoir of its past. Recessive types manifest more powerful instincts. The neurotic, criminals and the specially gifted persons have that in common. Three paths are open to the man with heightened instincts: he sublimates his selfish tendencies, his criminal cravings, his asocial attitude derived from previous epochs and becomes a creator (poet, painter, sculptor, musician, prophet, inventor, etc.); he works out his instincts untrammelled and becomes a criminal; or the sublimation is but partly successful and he becomes a neurotic.