Ontogenesis

AMPHIMIXIS OF EROTISMS IN THE EJACULATORY ACT

It was reserved for psychoanalysis to rescue the problems of sexuality from the poison cabinet of science in which they had been locked away for centuries. A certain perhaps necessitous sequence is clearly apparent, however, in the actual selection of the problems to which psychoanalysis has addressed itself. Just as in the matter of the sexual enlightenment of children even the most liberal approach boggles at the riddle of how the child comes to be in the mother's body, in the same way psychoanalysis has up to the present dealt to a relatively much greater degree with pregnancy and birth, with the acts preparatory to coitus, and with the perversions, than with the meaning and explanation of the phenomena of the act of coitus itself. I too must confess that the ideas which I should now like to communicate, at least in their broad outlines, have lain buried in my desk for more than nine years, and I suspect that my hesitancy in making them known—in giving birth to them, if you like—was attributable not alone to external causes but to my own resistances as well.

My reflections on the subject had their origin in certain psychoanalytic observations on impotence in the male. This seemed a promising lead; we know how often it is that what is in effect a caricature of normal functioning makes it possible to detect certain factors ordinarily masked and thus clarify the course of events in the normal process. Abraham, an especially zealous investigator of the so-called "pregenital organizations", has attributed ejaculatio proecox to a too intimate association of urethral erotism with genitality. Patients who suffer from premature ejaculation manifest the same attitude of indifference towards their semen as they would towards their urine, that is to say, as a valueless excretion of the organism. In contrast to this group of observations I have established the fact from a fairly