Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex by Sigmund Freud
page 37 of 174 (21%)
page 37 of 174 (21%)
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I must repeat what I have said in my published work, that these
psychoneuroses, as far as my experience goes, are based on sexual motive powers. I do not mean that the energy of the sexual impulse merely contributes to the forces supporting the morbid manifestations (symptoms), but I wish distinctly to maintain that this supplies the only constant and the most important source of energy in the neurosis, so that the sexual life of such persons manifests itself either exclusively, preponderately, or partially in these symptoms. As I have already stated in different places, the symptoms are the sexual activities of the patient. The proof for this assertion I have obtained from the psychoanalysis of hysterics and other neurotics during a period of twenty years, the results of which I hope to give later in a detailed account. Psychoanalysis removes the symptoms of hysteria on the supposition that they are the substitutes--the transcriptions as it were--for a series of emotionally accentuated psychic processes, wishes, and desires, to which a passage for their discharge through the conscious psychic activities has been cut off by a special process (repression). These thought formations which are restrained in the state of the unconscious strive for expression, that is, for _discharge_, in conformity to their affective value, and find such in hysteria through a process of _conversion_ into somatic phenomena--the hysterical symptoms. If, _lege artis_, and with the aid of a special technique, retrogressive transformations of the symptoms into the affectful and conscious thoughts can be effected, it then becomes possible to get the most accurate information about the nature and origin of these previously unconscious psychic formations. *Results of Psychoanalysis.*--In this manner it has been discovered that |
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