Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
This process cannot, however, be carried out to an unlimited
extent any more than can the conversion of heat into mechanical
work in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual
satisfaction is for most organizations indispensable, and the
renunciation of this individually varying amount is punished by
manifestations which we are compelled to regard as morbid. The
process of sublimation, under the influence of civilization,
leads both to sexual perversions and to psycho-neuroses. These
two conditions are closely related, as Freud views the process of
their development; they stand to each other as positive and
negative, sexual perversions being the positive pole and
psycho-neuroses the negative. It often happens, he remarks, that
a brother may be sexually perverse, while his sister, with a
weaker sexual temperament, is a neurotic whose symptoms are a
transformation of her brother's perversion; while in many
families the men are immoral, the women pure and refined but
highly nervous. In the case of women who have no defect of sexual
impulse there is yet the same pressure of civilized morality
pushing them into neurotic states. It is a terribly serious
injustice, Freud remarks, that the civilized standard of sexual
life is the same for all persons, because though some, by their
organization, may easily accept it, for others it involves the
most difficult psychic sacrifices. The unmarried girl, who has
become nervously weak, cannot be advised to seek relief in
marriage, for she must be strong in order to "bear" marriage,
while we urge a man on no account to marry a girl who is not
strong. The married woman who has experienced the deceptions of
marriage has usually no way of relief left but by abandoning her
virtue. "The more strenuously she has been educated, and the more
completely she has been subjected to the demands of civilization,
the more she fears this way of escape, and in the conflict
between her desires and her sense of duty, she also seeks
refuge--in neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue so surely as
disease." Taking a still wider view of the influence of the
narrow "civilized" conception of sexual morality on women, Freud
finds that it is not limited to the production of neurotic
conditions; it affects the whole intellectual aptitude of women.
Their education denies them any occupation with sexual problems,
although such problems are so full of interest to them, for it
inculcates the ancient prejudice that any curiosity in such
matters is unwomanly and a proof of wicked inclinations. They are
thus terrified from thinking, and knowledge is deprived of worth.
The prohibition to think extends, automatically and inevitably,
far beyond the sexual sphere. "I do not believe," Freud
concludes, "that there is any opposition between intellectual
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