Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of ViennaFreud, Sigmund
Science
Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of Vienna
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Your impression now will be that we have reduced want of satisfaction to
a factor of negligible proportions by the recognition of so many means
of enduring it. But no; this is not so: it retains its pathogenic power.
The means of dealing with it are not always sufficient. The measure of
unsatisfied Libido that the average human being can take upon himself is
limited. The plasticity and free mobility of the Libido is not by any
means retained to the full in all of us; and sublimation can never
discharge more than a certain proportion of Libido, apart from the fact
that many people possess the capacity for sublimation only in a slight
degree. The most important of these limitations is clearly that
referring to the mobility of the Libido, since it confines the
individual to the attaining of aims and objects which are very few in
number. Just remember that incomplete development of the Libido leaves
behind it very extensive (and sometimes also numerous) Libido-fixations
upon earlier phases of organization and types of object-choice, mostly
incapable of satisfaction in reality; you will then recognize fixation
of Libido as the second powerful factor working together with privation
in the causation of illness. We may condense this schematically and say
that Libido-fixation represents the internal, predisposing factor, while
privation represents the external, accidental factor, in the ætiology of
the neuroses.
I will take this opportunity to warn you against taking sides in a quite
superfluous dispute. It is a popular habit in scientific matters to
seize upon one side of the truth and set it up as the whole truth, and
then in favour of that element of truth to dispute all the rest which is
equally true. More than one faction has already split off in this way
from the psycho-analytic movement; one of them recognizes only the
egoistic impulses and denies the sexual; another perceives only the
influence of real tasks in life but overlooks that of the individual’s
past life, and so on. Now here is occasion for another of these
antitheses and moot-points: Are the neuroses exogenous or endogenous
diseases—the inevitable result of a certain type of constitution or the
product of certain injurious (traumatic) events in the person’s life? In
particular, are they brought about by the fixation of Libido and the
rest of the sexual constitution, or by the pressure of privation? This
dilemma seems to me about as sensible as another I could point to: Is
the child created by the father’s act of generation or by the conception
in the mother? You will properly reply: Both conditions are alike
indispensable. The conditions underlying the neuroses are very similar,
if not exactly the same. From the point of view of causation, cases of
neurotic illness fall into a _series_, within which the two
factors—sexual constitution and events experienced, or, if you wish,
fixation of Libido and privation—are represented in such a way that
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