Some Unconscious Mechanisms in Pathological Sexuality and their Relation to Normal Sexual Activity1

It was psycho-analysis which first did full justice to the part played by sexuality in the mental life of mankind, and moreover recognized the importance of sexual activity for the psychic equilibrium of a healthy human being. Further, psycho-analysis discovered the significance of sexuality in the etiology of the neuroses and proceeded to describe the manifold elaborations and transformations which it undergoes, to investigate the inhibitions and maldevelopments from which it may suffer and to open the way for their cure. But psycho-analysis has occupied itself to a comparatively small extent with the psychological problems of normal sexual activity; in particular, it has not discussed the question whether other factors besides the libidinal ones act as a stimulus. Ferenczi alone has approached this problem and has tried to prove it from the 'bio-analytical' standpoint.2

In the following paper I propose to consider, on the basis of certain clinical analytical material, whether, besides the wish for libidinal gratification, there are other psychic factors which constitute an incentive to sexual activity. This material is selected from the cases of several patients whose sexual activities were apparently uninhibited, but in the course of analysis were found to be of an obsessional character, the unconscious motives for which we were able to discover. The analysis of these patients revealed that the libidinal factors (which I shall not discuss in detail here) received a secondary reinforcement through anxiety, the sense of guilt and aggression. I found that these factors represented a powerful incitement to sexual activity and that, when analysis succeeded in breaking them down, the patient was able to abandon such activity in so far as it was excessive and obsessional. Perhaps these pathological findings may also throw some light on the phenomenon of normal sexual activity.