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The first task of psycho-analysis was the elucidation of nervous disorders. The analytic theory of the neuroses is based on three corner-stones: the recognition of (1) ‘repression’, of (2) the importance of the sexual instinct and of (3) ‘transference’.

(1) There is a force in the mind which exercises the functions of a censorship, and which excludes from consciousness and from any influence upon action all tendencies which displease it. Such tendencies are described as ‘repressed’. They remain unconscious; and if one attempts to bring them into the patient’s consciousness one provokes a ‘resistance’. These repressed instinctual impulses, however, have not always become powerless. In many cases they succeed in making their influence felt in the mind by circuitous paths, and the indirect or substitutive satisfactions of repressed impulses thus achieved are what constitute neurotic symptoms.

(2) For cultural reasons the most intense repression falls upon the sexual instincts; but it is precisely in connection with them that repression most easily miscarries, so that neurotic symptoms are found to be substitutive satisfactions of repressed sexuality. The belief that in man sexual life begins only at puberty is incorrect. On the contrary, signs of it can be detected from the beginning of extra-uterine existence; it reaches a first culminating point at or before the fifth year (‘early period’), after which it is inhibited or interrupted (‘latency period’) until the age of puberty, which is the second climax of its development. This diphasic onset of sexual development seems to be distinctive of the genus Homo. All experiences during the first period of childhood are of the greatest importance to the individual, and in combination with his inherited sexual constitution form the dispositions for the subsequent development of character and disease. It is wrong to make sexuality coincide with genitality’. The sexual instincts pass through a complicated course of development, and it is only at the end of it that the ‘primacy of the genital zones’ is attained. Before this there are a number of ‘pregenital’ organizations of the libido - points at which it may become ‘fixated’ and to which, in the event of subsequent repression, it will return (‘regression’). The infantile fixations of the libido are what determine the form of any later neurosis. Thus the neuroses are to be regarded as inhibitions in the development of the libido. There are no specific causes of nervous disorders; the question whether a conflict finds a healthy solution or leads to a neurotic inhibition of function depends upon quantitative considerations.