ub-species of sublimation is the suppression through
_reaction-formation_, which, as we have found, begins even in the
latency period of infancy, only to continue throughout life in
favorable cases. What we call the _character_ of a person is built up to
a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed
of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation, and of such
constructions as are destined to suppress effectually those perverse
feelings which are recognized as useless. The general perverse sexual
disposition of childhood can therefore be esteemed as a source of a
number of our virtues, insofar as it incites their creation through the
formation of reactions.[14]

*Accidental Experiences.*--All other influences lose in significance
when compared with the sexual discharges, shifts of repressions, and
sublimations; the inner determinations for the last two processes are
totally unknown to us. He who includes repressions and sublimations
among constitutional predispositions, and considers them as the living
manifestations of the same, has surely the right to maintain that the
final structure of the sexual life is above all the result of the
congenital constitution. No intelligent person, however, will dispute
that in such a cooeperation of factors there is also room for the
modifying influences of occasional factors derived from experience in
childhood and later on.

It is not easy to estimate the effectiveness of the constitutional and
of the occasional factors in their relation to each other. Theory is
always inclined to overestimate the first while therapeutic practice
renders prominent the significance of the latter. By no means should it
be forgotten that between the two there exists a relation of cooeperation
and not of exclusion. The constitutional factor must wait for
experiences which bring it to the surface, while the occasional needs
the support of the constitutional factor in order to become effective.
For the majority of cases one can imagine a so-called "etiological
group" in which the declining intensities of one factor become balanced
by the rise in the others, but there is no reason to deny the existence
of extremes at the ends of the group.

It would be still more in harmony with psychoanalytic investigation if
the experiences of early childhood would get a place of preference among
the occasional factors. The one etiological group then becomes split up
into two which