nt), thus permitting the remaining parent to absorb all the
love of the child, and in this way establishing the determinations for
the sex of the person to be selected later as the sexual object; thus a
permanent inversion is made possible.

SUMMARY

It is now time to attempt a summing-up. We have started from the
aberrations of the sexual impulse in reference to its object and aim and
have encountered the question whether these originate from a congenital
predisposition, or whether they are acquired in consequence of
influences from life. The answer to this question was reached through an
examination of the relations of the sexual life of psychoneurotics, a
numerous group not very remote from the normal. This examination has
been made through psychoanalytic investigations. We have thus found that
a tendency to all perversions might be demonstrated in these persons in
the form of unconscious forces revealing themselves as symptom creators
and we could say that the neurosis is, as it were, the negative of the
perversion. In view of the now recognized great diffusion of tendencies
to perversion the idea forced itself upon us that the disposition to
perversions is the primitive and universal disposition of the human
sexual impulse, from which the normal sexual behavior develops in
consequence of organic changes and psychic inhibitions in the course of
maturity. We hoped to be able to demonstrate the original disposition in
the infantile life; among the forces restraining the direction of the
sexual impulse we have mentioned shame, loathing and sympathy, and the
social constructions of morality and authority. We have thus been forced
to perceive in every fixed aberration from the normal sexual life a
fragment of inhibited development and infantilism. The significance of
the variations of the original dispositions had to be put into the
foreground, but between them and the influences of life we had to assume
a relation of cooeperation and not of opposition. On the other hand, as
the original disposition must have been a complex one, the sexual
impulse itself appeared to us as something composed of many factors,
which in the perversions becomes separated, as it were, into its
components. The perversions, thus prove themselves to be on the one hand
inhibitions, and on the other dissociations from the normal development.
Both conceptions became united in the assumption that the sexual impulse
of the adult due to the composit