the most essential
problems of sexual psychology. The _Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_ is
fundamental. Unless we comprehend the exact process which is being worked
out beneath the shifting and multifold phenomena presented to us we can
never hope to grasp in their true relations any of the normal or abnormal
manifestations of this instinct. I do not claim that the conception of the
process here stated is novel or original. Indeed, even since I began to
work it out some years ago, various investigators in these fields,
especially in Germany, have deprived it of any novelty it might otherwise
have possessed, while at the same time aiding me in reaching a more
precise statement. This is to me a cause of satisfaction. On so
fundamental a matter I should have been sorry to find myself tending to a
peculiar and individual standpoint. It is a source of gratification to me
that the positions I have reached are those toward which current
intelligent and scientific opinions are tending. Any originality in my
study of this problem can only lie in the bringing together of elements
from somewhat diverse fields. I shall be content if it is found that I
have attained a fairly balanced, general, and judicial statement of these
main factors in the sexual instinct.

In the study of _Love and Pain_ I have discussed the sources of those
aberrations which are commonly called, not altogether happily, "sadism"
and "masochism." Here we are brought before the most extreme and perhaps
the most widely known group of sexual perversions. I have considered them
from the medico-legal standpoint, because that has already been done by
other writers whose works are accessible. I have preferred to show how
these aberrations may be explained; how they may be linked on to normal
and fundamental aspects of the sexual impulse; and, indeed, in their
elementary forms, may themselves be regarded as normal. In some degree
they are present, in every case, at some point of sexual development;
their threads are subtly woven in and out of the whole psychological
process of sex. I have made no attempt to reduce their complexity to a
simplicity that would be fallacious. I hope that my attempt to unravel
these long and tangled threads will be found to make them fairly clear.

In the third study, on _The Sexual Impulse in Women_, we approach a
practical question of applied sexual psychology, and a question of the
first importance. No doubt the sex impulse in men is of g