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including sadism and masochism-appear' 'without exception " in the
"unconscious mental life" of neurotics. We suddenly see what Freud
is doing . In a bewilderingly brief few pages on the neuroses he has
recapitulated the entire structure of the earlier part of the essay , which
was, one recalls, about actually perverse sexual behavior. But the
recapitulation is now on the level of the neurotic symptom , of uncon–
sciousmentallife, offantasies, ideas, and mental representations .
It
is,
in other words , on the level of theory . Just as for Marx political econ–
omy was the theory ofcapitalism, so for Freud the neuroses contain the
theory of sexual behavior in both its normal and aberrant modes of
expression. They contain that theory, and with Freud's help they will
contain it in an integrated form. Having decomposed the perversions
into component parts , he has at once recomposed them in the neuro–
ses . In the neuroses the language of sexuality begins to speak articu–
lately, coherently, and theoretically.
But Freud is not content with letting the neuroses speak just yet .
Instead he begins to speak himself about' 'Component Instincts and
Erotogenic Zones ," and of the linkage of the two in both perversions
and psychoneuroses. He reminds us again of the role played by per–
verse impulses in both the neuroses and normal life , and of the un–
broken series of gradients that connect "the neuroses in all their
manifestations and normality ." He reaches the conclusion that' ' there
is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but that is .
something innate in
everyone,
though as a disposition it may vary in its
intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life ." He is
speaking about the democracy of instinctual, biological life ; and what
is at stake are the' 'innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct ."
In one class of persons-those with perversions-these roots "may
grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity ." In another-the
neurotics-they have undergone insufficient repression and persist as
symptoms . And in "the most favorable cases " they have undergone
such restrictions and modifications that somehow ' 'what is known as
normal sexual life" is brought about or achieved. In addition , he
remarks, these roots and this constitution will only be demonstrable in
children :
A formula begins to take shape which lays it down that the sex–
uality of neurotics has remained in , or been brought back to , an
