Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/48

 40 MICHAEL JOSEF EISLER

of 'repulse of a threatening relapse into the oral organisation', iinds its explanation in this relationship, i

I will attempt by a few short examples to demonstrate the connection of the capacity to sleep with the oral organisation. It is in the nature of the clinical material that these examples refer to disturbances of sleep, for thus they Erst become accessible to obser- vation. The first case is an exception because there the regressive hbido did not meet with a resistance in the direction of the oral instinct but an increase and establishment, by which the previously great need for sleep was increased and converted into regressive phenomena.

3. I should like to discuss the following connections from the analysis of a very complicated neurosis, which however ran its course with unobtrusive symptoms and only imperceptibly iniluenced the patient's external life. I shall omit all irrelevant material. This is tlie case of a man with labile potency who suffered in unusual situations (new relationships with women) from ejaculatio praecox, but on other occasions from ejaculatio tardiva, so that he was never very 5

certain about bis virility. He frequently performed coitus with. }

diflerent persons, which however gave him incomplete gratification; ■<

this was expressed amongst other tilings in two symptoms. .\

He masturbated between the occasions of cohabitation, because he found even a short abstinence irksome, and his sleep was disturbed, since he could not go to sleep at night directly after sexual inter- course or onanism, in both of which, therefore, some impulse remained ungratified.

This latter fact I had to assume from the statement long since made by Freud, that sleeplessness is the result of unreleased sexual excitations. The interpretation of this symptom was arrived at when a considerable oral hbido fixation had been revealed in the sexual constitution of the patient, and its later history traced. Great activity in this direction had been evinced in childhood but at puberty practicaUy no r61e was assigned to it. The patient was a very great lover of kissing, yet this tendency of his oral libido never afforded him full satisfaction; his other auto-erotic tendencies, ^

' See also Freud: 'Trauer und Melancholic', IniemaHonale Zeit- schrift fUr arztliche Psychoanalyse, Bd. IV, S. 288.

Great releases of affect often render possible a temporary regression to the oral stage; at such moments 'ones feels as though one's throat were being throttied'.