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.
… As the fruit of some tormenting reflections, I send you the following solution to the aetiology of the psycho-neuroses, which still awaits confirmation from individual analyses. Four periods of life are to be distinguished [Fig. 5]:
A and B (from about 8 to 103 and 13-17) are the transitional periods during which repression for the most part occurs.
The arousal in a later epoch of a sexual memory from an
earlier one produces a surplus of sexuality in the psyche which operates as an inhibition of thought and gives the memory and its consequences an obsessive character-uninhibitability.
The period Ia possesses the characteristic of being untranslated1 so that the arousal of a Ia sexual scene2 leads, not to psychical consequences, but to conversion. The surplus of sexuality prevents translation.
Surplus of sexuality alone is not enough to cause repression; the co-operation of defence is necessary for it; but without a surplus of sexuality defence does not produce a neurosis.