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been shifted as well , as has the pitch of explanatory discourse. Persons
who suffer from such complaints as hysteria or obsessional neuroses ,
Freud begins, are approximately closer to the normal than the aber–
rants with whom he has just finished his preliminary dealings . Never–
theless, psychoanalytic investigation has determined that the sexual
instinct is fundamental in the maintenance of neurotic symptoms ; it
provides the most important' 'source of energy" of the neuroses, and
as a consequence the sexual life of neurotics tends in varying degree to
be expressed in their symptoms. Indeed , Freud continues, "the symp–
toms constitute the sexual activity of the patient ." The symptoms are
in fact substitutes- " transcriptions as it were" -for certain highly
charged wishes and desires which have undergone the peculiar and
unexplained mental process called repression and have, as a result,
been lost to consciousness . They have not, however, lost their force ,
and since they cannot be discharged by conscious mental representa–
tion, they find expression in " somatic phenomena. " By means of
another mysterious process called "conversion," they appear as the
somatic symptoms-the paralyses , tics, convulsions, blindnesses-of
hysteria. Hysteria is thus an embodiment or exemplification of the
mind-body problem , one expression of that apparently insoluble–
and indissoluble-relation . Moreover, hysterics are excessively civi–
lized persons.
In
them the restrictive forces of "shame, disgust and
morality ," which are overridden in the perversions, act with decisive
power against sexual desire . Yet their excessive aversion to sexuality is
regularly combined with a characterising opposite, an " exaggerated
sexual craving, " although this craving is also fated to become at some
point unconscious. Torn between sexual strivings and his aversion to
sexuality, the hysteric chooses illness as a means of escaping his con–
flict. Unfortunately , illness "does not solve his conflict, but seeks to
evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms."
At the same time, it would be misleading to assert that such
symptoms originate either solely or exclusively at the cost of normal
adult sexuality- though that, Freud notes, is what he is commonly
taken to be saying . Neurotic symptoms also express perverse or abnor–
mal sexual instincts and ideas and are formed in part out of them.
Hence , Freud concludes, rising to his large formulation,
" neuroses
are, so to say, the negative ofperversions.
" Inversion, all the perver–
sions , and all the "component instincts" in their paired opposites-
