m one shall be pure-minded and
entirely unconscious of the real source of her troubles, while
the other is a victim to conscious and fruitless sexual
irritation." In this matter Anstie may be regarded as a
forerunner of Freud, who has developed with great subtlety and
analytic power the doctrine of the transformation of repressed
sexual instinct in women into morbid forms. He considers that the
nervosity of to-day is largely due to the injurious action on the
sexual life of that repression of natural instincts on which our
civilization is built up. (Perhaps the clearest brief statement
of Freud's views on the matter is to be found in a very
suggestive article, "Die 'Kulturelle' Sexualmoral und die Moderne
Nervositaet," in _Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908, reprinted in the
second series of Freud's _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur
Neurosenlehre_, 1909). We possess the aptitude, he says, of
sublimating and transforming our sexual activities into other
activities of a psychically related character, but non-sexual.
This process cannot, however, be carried out to an unlimited
extent any more than can the conversion of heat into mechanical
work in our machines. A certain amount of direct sexual
satisfaction is for most organizations indispensable, and the
renunciation of this individually varying amount is punished by
manifestations which we are compelled to regard as morbid. The
process of sublimation, under the influence of civilization,
leads both to sexual perversions and to psycho-neuroses. These
two conditions are closely related, as Freud views the process of
their development; they stand to each other as positive and
negative, sexual perversions being the positive pole and
psycho-neuroses the negative. It often happens, he remarks, that
a brother may be sexually perverse, while his sister, with a
weaker sexual temperament, is a neurotic whose symptoms are a
transformation of her brother's perversion; while in many
families the men are immoral, the women pure and refined but
highly nervous. In the case of women who have no defect of sexual
impulse there is yet the same pressure of civilized morality
pushing them into neurotic states. It is a terribly serious
injustice, Freud remarks, that the civilized standard of sexual
life is the same for all persons, because though some, by