INTRODUCTION TO TRANSLATION
The somewhat famous "Three Essays," which Dr. Brill is here bringing to
the attention of an English-reading public, occupy—brief as they
are—an important position among the achievements of their author, a
great investigator and pioneer in an important line. It is not claimed
that the facts here gathered are altogether new. The subject of the
sexual instinct and its aberrations has long been before the scientific
world and the names of many effective toilers in this vast field are
known to every student. When one passes beyond the strict domains of
science and considers what is reported of the sexual life in folkways
and art-lore and the history of 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, and stopped. But this investigator determined that nothing but the
absolute impossibility of going further should make him cease from
urging his patients into an inexorable scrutiny of the unconscious
regions of their memories and thoughts, such as never had been made
before. Every species of forgetfulness, even the forgetfulness of
childhood's years, was made to yield its hidden stores of knowledge;
dreams, even though apparently absurd, were found to be interpreters of
a varied class of thoughts, active, although repressed as out of harmony
with the selected life of consciousness; layer after layer, new sets of
motives underlying motives were laid bare, and each patient's interest
was strongly enlisted in the task of learning to know himself
in order more truly and wisely to "sublimate" himself. Gradually other
workers joined patiently in this laborious undertaking, which now
stands, for those who have taken pains to comprehend it, as by far the
most important movement in psychopathology.
It must, however, be recognized that these essays, of which Dr. Brill
has given a translation that cannot but be timely, concern a subject
which is not only important but unpopular. Few physicians read the works
of v. Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Moll, and others of like sort.
The remarkable volumes of Havelock Ellis were refused publication in his
native England. The sentiments which inspired this hostile attitude
towards the study of the sexual life are still active, though growing
steadily less common. One may easily believe that if the facts which
Freud's truth-seeking researches forced him to recognize and to publish
had not been of an unpopular sort, his rich and abundant contributions
to observational psychology, to the significance of dreams, to the
etiology and therapeutics of the psychoneuroses, to the interpretation
of mythology, would have won for him, by universal acclaim, the same
recognition among all physicians that he has received from a rapidly
increasing band of followers and colleagues.
May Dr. Brill's translation help toward this end.
There are two further points on which some comments should be made. The
first is this, that those who conscientiously desire to learn all that
they can from Freud's remarkable contributions should not be content to
read any one of them alone. His various publications, such as "The
Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses,"[1] "The
Interpretation of Dreams,"[2] "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,"[3]
"Wit and its Relation to the
Unconscious,"[4] the analysis of the case of the little boy called Hans,
the study of Leonardo da Vinci,[4a] and the various short essays in the
four Sammlungen kleiner Schriften, not only all hang together, but
supplement each other to a remarkable extent. Unless a course of study
such as this is undertaken many critics may think various statements and
inferences in this volume to be far fetched or find them too obscure for
comprehension.
The other point is the following: One frequently hears the
psychoanalytic method referred to as if it was customary for those
practicing it to exploit the sexual experiences of their patients and
nothing more, and the insistence on the details of the sexual life,
presented in this book, is likely to emphasize that notion. But the fact
is, as every thoughtful inquirer is aware, that the whole progress of
civilization, whether in the individual or the race, consists largely in
a "sublimation" of infantile instincts, and especially certain portions
of the sexual instinct, to other ends than those which they seemed
designed to serve. Art and poetry are fed on this fuel and the evolution
of character and mental force is largely of the same origin. All the
forms which this sublimation, or the abortive attempts at sublimation,
may take in any given case, should come out in the course of a thorough
psychoanalysis. It is not the sexual life alone, but every interest and
every motive, that must be inquired into by the physician who is seeking
to obtain all the data about the patient, necessary for his reeducation
and his cure. But all the thoughts and emotions and desires and motives
which appear in the man or woman of adult years were once crudely
represented in the obscure instincts of the infant, and among these
instincts those which were concerned directly or indirectly with the
sexual emotions, in a wide sense, are certain to be found in every case
to have been the most important for the end-result.
JAMES J. PUTNAM.
BOSTON, August 23, 1910.
Note 1: Translated by
A.A. Brill, NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE MONOGRAPH SERIES, NO.
4.
Note 2: Translated by
A.A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York, and Allen & Unwin,
London.
Note 3: Translated by
A.A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York.
Note 4: Translated
by A.A. Brill, Moffatt, Yard & Co., New York.
Note 4a: Translated
by A.A. Brill, Moffatt, Yard & Co., New York.
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