It 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. 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.