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.
It is indicative of the difficulties which beset the work of psycho-analytic research that it is possible, in spite of unremitting observation extending over periods of years, to overlook quite broad general features and typical situations, until at last they confront one in a completely unmistakable guise. The remarks that follow are intended to retrieve a lapse of this sort in the field of infantile sexuality.
Readers of my Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905) will be aware that I have never undertaken any thorough alteration of this work for later editions, but have preserved the original arrangement and have fulfilled the claims of later advances in our knowledge by supplementing and correcting the text. Thus it may well be that the old and the new do not admit of fusion without indications of contradiction. In the beginning, for instance, the emphasis fell upon pointing out the fundamental difference between the sexual life of children and of adults; later on the pregenital organizations of the libido swung into the foreground, together with the remarkable and significant fact of the double thrust of sexual development, twice making a start at separate periods. Finally the curiosity of the child engaged our interest; and from this proceeded the recognition of the far-reaching similarity between the last stages of infantile sexuality (about the fifth year) and the final form to which it develops in the adult. In the last edition of the Sexualtheorie (1922) I left things at this point.
I stated there (on p. 63) that 'often, or perhaps regularly, complete