Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/216

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
202
PAPERS ON HYSTERIA AND OTHER PSYCHONEUROSES.

projection he must also occasionally be willing to assume responsibility for the patient's secret repressed wishes and it is a sad but significant fact that such thrusts find nowhere more ready credence than among other physicians.

I have, therefore, the right to hope that during the consultation the woman had given me a purposive distorted report of her physician's utterances and that I would be doing an injustice to one who was unknown to me if I based my observations concerning "wild" psychoanalysis on this particular case. However, in doing this I may be able to restrain others from doing injustice to their patients.

Let us therefore assume that the physician advised exactly what the patient reported. Everyone will then justly criticize that when a physician finds it necessary to discuss the theme of sexuality with a woman he should do it with tact and delicacy. However, these requirements are only a part of certain technical rules of psychoanalysis. Besides the physician has misconstrued or misunderstood a number of scientific theories of psychoanalysis and thereby proven how little he has advanced towards the understanding of its essentials and objects.

Let us begin with the latter—the scientific errors. The physician's advice clearly shows in what sense he grasps the "sexual life." He grasps it in the popular sense—namely, that under sexual demands nothing else is understood except the need for coitus or its analogy, the processes causing the orgasm or the ejaculation of the sexual product. But it could not have remained unknown to the physician that psychoanalysis was wont to be reproached for extending the idea of the sexual far beyond its usual limits. The fact is correct, though whether it is just to apply it as a reproach will not be discussed here. In psycho-analysis the idea of the sexual has a much greater compass; both above and below it far exceeds the popular sense. This extension justifies itself genetically; we also ascribe to the "sexual life" all manifestations of tender feelings which originated from the source of primitive sexual emotions, even if those emotions experience inhibition in their original sexual aim or have substituted this aim by another no longer sexual. We, therefore, also prefer to speak of psychosexuality, thus laying stress on the fact that the psychic factor of the sexual life should neither be over-