into the fact that the sexual impulse has to struggle against certain
psychic forces, resistances, among which shame and loathing are most
prominent. We may presume that these forces are employed to confine the
impulse within the accepted normal limits, and if they have become
developed in the individual before the sexual impulse has attained its
full strength, it is really they which have directed it in the course of
development.[23]

We have furthermore remarked that some of the examined perversions can
be comprehended only by assuming the union of many motives. If they are
amenable to analysis--disintegration--they must be of a composite
nature. This may give us a hint that the sexual impulse itself may not
be something simple, that it may on the contrary be composed of many
components which detach themselves to form perversions. Our clinical
observation thus calls our attention to _fusions_ which have lost their
expression in the uniform normal behavior.


4. THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN NEUROTICS

*Psychoanalysis.*--A proper contribution to the knowledge of the sexual
impulse in persons who are at least related to the normal can be gained
only from one source, and is accessible only by one definite path. There
is only one way to obtain a thorough and unerring solution of problems
in the sexual life of so-called psychoneurotics (hysteria, obsessions,
the wrongly-named neurasthenia, and surely also dementia præcox, and
paranoia), and that is by subjecting them to the psychoanalytic
investigations propounded by J. Breuer and myself in 1893, which we
called the "cathartic" treatment.