Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/198

184 insight, which he has thus far repulsed (repressed) on account of the automatic adjustment of displeasure, you have achieved in him a piece of educational work. For it is really an education if you can induce a person to leave his bed early in the morning despite his unwillingness to do so. As such an after training for the overcoming of inner resistances you can conceive the psychoanalytic treatment in quite a general manner. But in no sphere of the nervous patients is such an after training so essential as in the psychic elements of their sexual life. For nowhere have culture and education produced as much harm as here, and it is here, as experience will show you, that the controlling etiologies of the neuroses are found. The other etiological element, the constitutional contribution, is really given to us as something immutable. But this gives rise to an important demand on the doctor. Not only must he be of unblemished character—"morality-is really a matter of course" as the principal person in Th. Vischer's "Auch Einer" used to say—but he must have overcome in his own personality the mixture of lewdness and prudishness with which so many others are wont to meet the sexual problems.

This is perhaps the place for another observation. I know that the emphasis which I laid on the sexual role in the origin of the psychoneuroses has become widely known. But I also know that restriction and nearer determinations are of little use with the great public; the multitude has little room in its memory, and generally retains from a statement the bare nucleus, thus creating for itself an easily remembered extreme. The same might also have happened to some physicians when the faint notion that they have of my theory is that I trace back the neurosis in the last place to sexual privation. Of such there is surely no dearth under the vital conditions of our society. But if that supposition were true would it not seem obvious that in order to avoid the roundabout way of the psychic treatment and tend directly towards the cure, we should directly recommend sexual participation as the remedy? I really do not know what could induce me to suppress these conclusions if they were justified. But the state of affairs is different. The sexual need or privation is merely one of the factors playing a part in the mechanism of the neurosis, and if it alone existed the result would not be a disease but a