Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/157

Rh regardless of the woman's gratification; it becomes injurious to the man if in order to bring about the gratification in the woman he voluntarily controls the coitus by delaying the ejaculation. In this manner we can understand why it is that in couples who practice coitus interruptus it is usually only one of them who becomes afflicted. Moreover the coitus interruptus only rarely produces in man a pure anxiety neurosis, usually it is a mixture of the same with neurasthenia.

(d) Fear in men in the senium. There are men who show a climacterium like women, and merge into an anxiety neurosis at the time when their potency diminishes and their libido increases.

Finally I must add two more cases holding true for both sexes:

(e) Neurasthenics merge into anxiety neurosis in consequence of masturbation as soon as they refrain from this manner of sexual gratification. These persons have especially made themselves unfit to bear abstinence.

What is important for the understanding of the anxiety neurosis is the fact that any noteworthy development of the same occurs only in men who remain potent, and in non-anesthetic women. In neurasthenics, who on account of masturbation have markedly injured their potency, anxiety neurosis as a result of abstinence occurs but rarely and limits itself usually to hypochondria and light chronic dizziness. The majority of women are really to be considered as "potent"; a real impotent, that is, a real anesthetic woman, is also inaccessible to anxiety neurosis, and bears strikingly well the injuries cited.

How far we are perhaps justified in assuming constant relations between individual etiological moments and individual symptoms from the complex of anxiety neurosis, I do not care to discuss here.

(f) The last of the etiological determinants to be mentioned seems, in the first place, really not to be of a sexual nature. Anxiety neurosis originates in both sexes through the moment of overwork, exhaustive exertion, as, for instance, after sleepless nights, nursing the sick, and even after serious illnesses.

The main objection against my formulation of a sexual etiology of the anxiety neurosis will probably be to the purport that such abnormal relations of the sexual life can be found so very often