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.
(a)German Editions:
1912 In Die Onanie (Diskussionen der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung, 2), Wiesbaden: Bergmann. Pp. iii-iv and 132-40.
1925 G.S., 3, 324-37.
1931 Sexualtheorie und Traumlehre, 228-39.
(b)English Translation:
‘Masturbation’ 1921 Medical Critic and Guide (New York), 24 (September), 327-34. (Omitting ‘Introduction’.) (Tr. Eden Paul.)
The present translation is a new one by James Strachey.
The discussion on masturbation held in the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society was much more prolonged than the earlier one on suicide, Freud's contributions to which were similarly published (1910g). The minutes of the Society, printed in Volume II of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (1911-12), show that 14 members (including Freud) took part in the discussions, which occupied 9 evenings, from November 22, 1911, to April 24, 1912. It was on this last occasion that Freud made his concluding remarks, described in the minutes as an ‘Epilogue’. The ‘Introduction’ was not delivered at a meeting, but is merely the preface to the pamphlet in which the papers were ultimately published.
This work contains by far the fullest discussion of masturbation that is to be found in Freud's writings, though short allusions to it are frequent enough. In his early papers masturbation figures chiefly on account of its relation to the ‘actual neuroses’ and in particular as a causative agent of neurasthenia. (See, for instance, Section II of his French paper on the aetiology of the neuroses, 1896a.) It is interesting to find Freud