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 must be the reflection of many students of psychiatry that some sort of sexual difficulty is universally found in the life of psychotics. What of the exuberant sexuality of the manic, the difficulties of the alcoholic, the very good but impotent precox! The paradigmatic precox often show, even in early childhood, strange digressions into aberrant sexual channels; with many of them the psychosis is precipitated at puberty, when they first encounter a serious sexual situation; others, perhaps a little later, when confronted with marriage, are unable to choose between two opposing sexual drives and flee into psychosis. Married or unmarried, abstinent or excessive, they often show fluctuations and variations that are wide of the mark and strikingly different from the normally adjusted individual. Significant is the sexual fate of insane and as one studies the progress of the disease it is often difficult to escape the conviction that prognosis is a direct function of the individual's sex life; and that the more the latter is disorganized, the worse is the prognosis and the greater are the chances for chronicity and deterioration. A study of the ideational content of the psychotics will often reveal the presence of very striking symbolic elaborations which have reference to sex.
From the psychoses to neuroses may be a far step; but as beyond some generalities, we know practically nothing of the sex life of the psychotics, a study of the sex life of neurotics, may, perhaps, serve as a preliminary, for many of the psychic mechanisms are common to both neuroses and psychoses. Highly suggestive, therefore, in this respect is Stekel's contribution which throws a flood light on this very important subject and his discussion of impotence is really a discussion of the more intimate aspects of the sex life of neurotics.
Stekel views impotence as distinctly a modern phenomenon belonging to those erotic tragedies which in the main are conditioned on the complexity of our social sy