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…It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primal addiction’ and that it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions-for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc.—come into existence.2 The part played by this addiction in hysteria is quite enormous; and it is perhaps there that my great, still outstanding, obstacle is to be found, wholly or in part. And here, of course, the doubt arises of whether an addiction of this kind is curable, or whether analysis and therapy are brought to a stop at this point and must content themselves with transforming a case of hysteria into one of neurasthenia.3
As regards obsessional neurosis the fact is confirmed that the locality at which the repressed breaks through is the word presentation and not the concept attached to it. (More precisely, the word-memory.) Hence the most disparate things are readily united as an obsessional idea under a single word with more than one meaning. The trend towards breaking through makes use of an ambiguous word of this kind [with its several meanings] as though it were killing several flies at a blow.4 Take, for instance, the following case. A girl who was attending a school of needlework and was near the end of her course was plagued by this obsessional idea: ‘No, you mustn't go off, you haven't finished yet, you must make [machen] some more, you must learn a lot more.’ Behind this lay a memory of childhood scenes in which she was put on the pot but wanted to get away and was subjected to the same compulsion: ‘You mustn't go off, you haven't finished yet, you must do [machen] some more.’ The word ‘machen’ [meaning both ‘make’ and ‘do’] made it possible to bring together