You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
"Whoever feels the need to fill up this large gap in our knowledge (i.e. with reference to the essential factors of sexuality) with a tentative assumption may formulate the following conception based on the active substances found in the thyroid gland: A material which is distributed throughout the organism becomes disintegrated through the appropriate excitation of erotogenic zones, as well as through other conditions under which sexual excitement originates. The products of this disintegration supply a specific stimulus to the organs of reproduction or to the centres in the spinal cord connected with them. We are already familiar with such a disintegration of a toxic stimulus into a specific stimulus of an organ from other poisonous substances that are introduced into the body from without … I certainly do not attach any value to this particular assumption and should be quite ready to give it up in favour of another provided its fundamental character, the emphasis laid on sexual chemism, is preserved. For this apparently arbitrary statement is supported by a fact which, though little heeded, is particularly worth considering. The neuroses, which can be traced to disturbances of the sexual life, show the greatest clinical resemblance to the phenomena of intoxication and abstinence which result through the habitual introduction of pleasure-producing poisonous substances (alkaloids)."
This passage, which the writer quotes from Freud's "Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie" gives the views that have obtained in psycho-analysis from its commencement on the physiological basis of the libido. Freud in his first publications on the pathogenesis of the anxiety neurosis and neurasthenia presented the view that these "actual neuroses" are not accessible to psychological analysis, but only to a physiological one, and he emphasised the far-reaching similarity that exists between anxiety and neurasthenic symptoms and the phenomena of chronic poisoning and abstinence. The