l abstinence in relation to "civilized" sexual morality, we find
that, though he makes no reference to the analogy with abstinence from
food, his words would for the most part have an equal application to both
cases. "The task of subduing so powerful an instinct as the sexual
impulse, otherwise than by giving it satisfaction," he writes, "is one
which may employ the whole strength of a man. Subjugation through
sublimation, by guiding the sexual forces into higher civilizational
paths, may succeed with a minority, and even with these only for a time,
least easily during the years of ardent youthful energy. Most others
become neurotic or otherwise come to grief. Experience shows that the
majority of people constituting our society are constitutionally unequal
to the task of abstinence. We say, indeed, that the struggle with this
powerful impulse and the emphasis the struggle involves on the ethical and
aesthetic forces in the soul's life 'steels' the character, and for a few
favorably organized natures this is true; it must also be acknowledged
that the differentiation of individual character so marked in our time
only becomes possible through sexual limitations. But in by far the
majority of cases the struggle with sensuality uses up the available
energy of character, and this at the very time when the young man needs
all his strength in order to win his place in the world."[97]

When we have put the problem on this negative basis of abstinence it is
difficult to see how we can dispute the justice of Freud's conclusions.
They hold good equally for abstinence from food and abstinence from sexual
love. When we have placed the problem on a more positive basis, and are
able to invoke the more active and fruitful motives of asceticism and
chastity this unfortunate fight against a natural impulse is abolished. If
chastity is an ideal of the harmonious play of all the organic impulses of
the soul and body, if asceticism, properly understood, is the athletic
striving for a worthy object which causes, for the time, an indifference
to the gratification of sexual impulses, we are on wholesome and natural
ground, and there is no waste of energy in fruitless striving for a
negative end, whether imposed artificially from without, as it usually is,
or voluntarily chosen by the individual himself.

For there is really no complete analogy between sexual desire and hunger,
between abstinence from sexual relations and abstinence from food.