Internationale Zeitschrift für Arztliche Psychoanalyse

Freud's Theory of the Libido Compared with Plato's Teachings concerning Eros. Dr. M. Nachmansohn (Zurich).

Impulses and their Mutations. Prof. Sigmund Freud.

Freud's Theory of the Libido, Etc. The results of psychoanalysis compelled Freud to enlarge his concept of the libido. He found himself forced to include in the concept all that love, in the widest sense, meant; and also, in the narrowest sense, all that was meant by sex.

With astonishment he noted the early erotic life of normal children. He saw that pleasure sucking, for instance, had a sexual significance. He saw that nail-biting, sticking the fingers in the nose, in the ear, etc., sometimes led to masturbation, which, from this point of view, was nothing but a prolongation of infantile habits. He also saw that infantile eroticism followed no fixed paths, but may select, any portion of the body for expression. He suggested that perhaps the sexual impulse was not simple but complex, composed of elements which were the perversions, when the impulse itself broke down.

Now why did he include love under the concept of libido? Intuitively he felt that love, abstracting from its object, was psychologically the same. Furthermore he noted the fact that a strong social interest, or scientific or artistic activity followed a narrowing of sexual expression. Thus he employed the concept of the libido, which originally had only a sexual significance, to include the concept of love. This led him to perhaps the next important discovery in psychoanalysis, the capability of sublimating the libido. Two factors in psychic life must be distinguished: the erotic and the intellectual. Sublimation, or the changing of the one into the other, is one of the most important teachings of pedagogy and also of Plato.

Eros, according to Plato, belongs to the whole of living nature. He identified it, in a wide sense, with the instinct of propagation. But he

did not limit it to the body only; he also saw it manifested