primitive culture and in romance, the
sources of information are immense. Freud has made considerable
additions to this stock of knowledge, but he has done also something of
far greater consequence than this. He has worked out, with incredible
penetration, the part which this instinct plays in every phase of human
life and in the development of human character, and has been able to
establish on a firm footing the remarkable thesis that psychoneurotic
illnesses never occur with a perfectly normal sexual life. Other sorts
of emotions contribute to the result, but some aberration of the sexual
life is always present, as the cause of especially insistent emotions
and repressions.

The instincts with which every child is born furnish desires or cravings
which must be dealt with in some fashion. They may be refined
("sublimated"), so far as is necessary and desirable, into energies of
other sorts--as happens readily with the play-instinct--or they may
remain as the source of perversions and inversions, and of cravings of
new sorts substituted for those of the more primitive kinds under the
pressure of a conventional civilization. The symptoms of the functional
psychoneuroses represent, after a fashion, some of these distorted
attempts to find a substitute for the imperative cravings born of the
sexual instincts, and their form often depends, in part at least, on the
peculiarities of the sexual life in infancy and early childhood. It is
Freud's service to have investigated this inadequately chronicled period
of existence with extraordinary acumen. In so doing he made it plain
that the "perversions" and "inversions," which reappear later under such
striking shapes, belong to the normal sexual life of the young child and
are seen, in veiled forms, in almost every case of nervous illness.

It cannot too often be repeated that these discoveries represent no
fanciful deductions, but are the outcome of rigidly careful observations
which any one who will sufficiently prepare himself can verify. Critics
fret over the amount of "sexuality" that Freud finds evidence of in the
histories of his patients, and assume that he puts it there. But such
criticisms are evidences of misunderstandings and proofs of ignorance.

Freud had learned that the amnesias of hypnosis and of hysteria were not
absolute but relative and that in covering the lost memories, much more,
of unexpected sort, was often found. Others, too, had gone as far as
this, a