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 function of reality, which, functionally inseparable, is bound up with the needs of procreation. Thus the altered mode of procreation carries with it as a correlate a correspondingly heightened adaptation to reality.[26]

In this way we attain an insight into certain primitive conditions of the function of reality. It would be radically wrong to say that its compelling power is a sexual one. It was a sexual one to a large extent. The process of transformation of the primal libido into secondary impulses always took place in the form of affluxes of sexual libido, that is to say, sexuality became deflected from its original destination and a portion of it turned, little by little, increasing in amount, into the phylogenetic impulse of the mechanisms of allurement and of protection of the young. This diversion of the sexual libido from the sexual territory into associated functions is still taking place.[27] Where this operation succeeds without injury to the adaptation of the individual it is called sublimation. Where the attempt does not succeed it is called repression.

The descriptive standpoint of psychology accepts the multiplicity of instincts, among which is the sexual instinct, as a special phenomenon; moreover, it recognizes certain affluxes of libido to non-sexual instincts.

Quite otherwise is the genetic standpoint. It regards the multiplicity of instincts as issuing from a relative unity, the primal libido;[28] it recognizes that definite amounts of the primal libido are split off, as it were, associated with the newly formed functions and finally merged in them. As a result of this it is impossible, from the genetic standpoint, to hold to the strictly limited concep