Page:The theory of psychoanalysis (IA theoryofpsychoan00jungiala).pdf/50

 impossible to transfer the libido theory, with its sexual definition, directly to dementia præcox, as this disease shows a loss of reality not to be explained by the deficiency in erotic interests.

It gives me particular satisfaction that our master also, when he placed his hand on the fragile material of paranoiac psychology, felt himself compelled to doubt the applicability of his conception of libido which had prevailed hitherto. My position of reserve towards the ubiquity of sexuality which I allowed myself to adopt in the preface to my "Psychology of Dementia Præcox"—although with a complete recognition of the psychological mechanism—was dictated by the conception of the libido theory of that time. Its sexual definition did not enable me to explain those disturbances of functions which affect the indefinite sphere of the instinct of hunger, just as much as they do those of sexuality. For a long time the libido theory seemed to me inapplicable to dementia præcox.

With greater experience in my analytical work, I noticed that a slow change of my conception of libido had taken place. A genetic conception of libido gradually took the place of the descriptive definition of libido contained in Freud's "Three Contributions." Thus it became possible for me to replace, by the expression "psychic energy," the term libido. The next step was that I asked myself if now-a-days the function of reality consists only to a very small extent of sexual libido, and to a very large extent of other impulses. It is still a very important question, considered from the phylogenetic standpoint, whether the function of reality is not, at least very largely, of sexual origin. It is impossible to answer this question directly, in so far as the function of reality is concerned. We shall try to come to some understanding by a side-path.

A superficial glance at the history of evolution suffices to teach us that innumerable complicated functions, whose sexual character must be denied, are originally nothing but derivations from the instinct of propagation. As is well known, there has been an important displacement in the fundamentals of propagation during the ascent through the animal scale. The offspring has