Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/162

148 affliction depends on "insufficient gratification," they regularly reply that this is impossible as just now their whole desire is extinguished. The indications that we deal with an accumulation of excitement, that the anxiety which probably corresponds to such accumulated excitement is Of somatic origin, so that somatic excitement becomes accumulated, and furthermore, that this somatic excitement is of a sexual nature, and that it is accompanied by a decreased psychic participation in the sexual processes—all these indications, I say, favor the expectation that the mechanism of the anxiety neurosis is to be found in the deviation of the somatic sexual excitement from the psychic, and in the abnormal utilization of this excitement.

This conception of the mechanism of anxiety neurosis will become clearer if one accepts the following view concerning the sexual process in man. In the sexually mature male organism, the somatic sexual excitement is—probably continuously—produced, and this becomes a periodic stimulus for the psychic life. To make our conceptions clearer we will add that this somatic sexual excitement manifests itself as a pressure on the wall of the seminal vesicle which is provided with nerve endings. This visceral excitement thus becomes continuously increased, but not before attaining a certain height is it able to overcome the resistances of the intercalated conduction as far as the cortex, and manifest itself as psychic excitement. Then the group of sexual ideas existing in the psyche becomes endowed with energy and results in a psychic state of libidinous tension which is accompanied by an impulse to remove this tension. Such psychic unburdening is possible only in one way which I wish to designate as specific or adequate action. This adequate action for the male sexual impulse consists of a complicated spinal reflex-act which results in the unburdening of those nerve endings, and of all psychically formed preparations for the liberation of this reflex. Anything else except the adequate action would be of no avail, for after the somatic sexual excitement has once reached the liminal value, it continuously changes into psychic excitement; that must by all means occur which frees the nerve endings from their heavy pressure, and thus abolish the whole somatic excitement existing at the time and allow the subcortical conduction to reëstablish its resistance.