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 out of those exclusively sexual or “power” evaluations of social surroundings which were acquired in puberty and strongly reinforced by social prejudices. This road leads on towards a purely human relation and intimacy, not derived solely from the existence of a sexual or power-relation, but depending much more upon a regard for personality. That is the road to freedom which the doctor must show his patient.

Here indeed I must not omit to say that the obstinate clinging to the sexual valuation would not be maintained so tenaciously if it had not also a very deep significance for that period of life in which propagation is of primary importance. The discovery of the value of human personality belongs to a riper age. For young people the search for the valuable personality is very often merely a cloak for the evasion of their biological duty. On the other hand, an older person’s exaggerated looking back towards the sexual valuation of youth, is an undiscerning and often cowardly and convenient retreat from a duty which demands the recognition of personal values and his own enrolment among the ranks of the priesthood of a newer civilisation. The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the extension of his tasks in life, the old from the dwindling and shrinking of the treasures he has attained.

This conception of the transference is, you will have noted, most intimately connected with the acceptance of the idea of biological “duties” By this term you must understand those tendencies or motives in human beings giving rise to civilisation, as inevitably as in the bird they give rise to the exquisitely woven nest, and in the stag to the production of antlers. The purely causal, not to say materialistic conception of the immediately preceding decades, would conceive the organic formation as the reaction of living matter, and this doubtless provides a position heuristically useful, but, as far as any real understanding goes, leads only to a more or less ingenious and apparent reduction and postponement of the problem. Let me refer you to Bergson’s excellent criticism of this conception. From external forces