Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/207

Rh of the sexual processes, in those processes in the organism which determine the formation and utilization of the sexual libido. We can hardly avoid perceiving these processes in the last place as chemical, so that we can recognize in the so-called actual neuroses the somatic effects of disturbances in the sexual metabolism, while in the psychoneuroses we recognize besides the psychic effects of the same disturbances. The resemblance of the neuroses to the manifestations of intoxication and abstinence following certain alkaloids, and to Basedow's and Addison's diseases, obtrudes itself clinically without any further ado, and just as these two diseases should no more be described as "nervous diseases," so will the genuine "neuroses" soon have to be removed from this class despite their nomenclature.

Everything that can exert harmful influences in the processes serving the sexual function therefore belongs to the etiology of the neurosis. In the first place we have the noxas directly affecting the sexual functions insofar as they are accepted as injuries by the sexual constitution which is changeable through culture and breeding. In the second place, we have all the different noxas and traumas which may also injure the sexual processes by injuring the organism as a whole. But we must not forget that the etiological problem in the neuroses is at least as complicated as in the causation of any other disease. One single pathogenic influence almost never suffices, it mostly requires a multiplicity of etiological moments reinforcing one another, and which can not be brought in contrast to one another. It is for that reason that the state of neurotic illness is not sharply separated from the normal. The disease is the result of a summation, and the measure of the etiological determinations can be completed from any one part. To seek the etiology of the neurosis exclusively in heredity or in the constitution would be no less one sided than to attempt to raise to the etiology the accidental influences of sexuality alone, even though the explanations show that the essence of this malady lies only in a disturbance of the sexual processes of the organism.