a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

opposite of nervous. Before the period of psychoanalysis, it was known
(Binet) that the anamnesia of the perverse is often traced back to an early
impression—an abnormality in the tendency of the instinct or its choice of
object—and it is to this that the libido of the individual has clung for life.
Frequently it is hard to say how such an impression becomes capable of
attracting the libido so intensively. I shall give you a case of this kind which I
observed myself. A man, to whom the genital and all other sex stimuli of
woman now mean nothing, who in fact can only be thrown into an irresistible
sexual excitation by the sight of a shoe on a foot of a certain form, is able to
recall an experience he had in his sixth year, which proved decisive for the
fixation of his libido. One day he sat on a stool beside his governess, who was
to give him an English lesson. She was an old, shriveled, unbeautiful girl with
washed-out blue eyes and a pug nose, who on this day, because of some
injury, had put a velvet slipper on her foot and stretched it out on a footstool;
the leg itself she had most decorously covered. After a diffident attempt at
normal sexual activity, undertaken during puberty, such a thin sinewy foot as
his governess' had become the sole object of his sexuality; and the man was
irresistibly carried away if other features, reminiscent of the English
governess, appeared in conjunction with the foot. Through this fixation of the
libido the man did not become neurotic but perverse, a foot fetishist, as we
say. So you see that, although exaggerated and premature fixation of the
libido is indispensable for the causation of neuroses, its sphere of action
exceeds the limits of neuroses immeasurably. This condition also, taken by
itself, is no more decisive than abstinence.
And so the problem of the cause of neuroses seems to become more
complicated. Psychoanalytic investigation does, in fact, acquaint us with a
new factor, not considered in our etiological series, which is recognized most
easily in those cases where permanent well-being is suddenly disturbed by an
attack of neurosis. These individuals regularly show signs of contradiction
between their wishes, or, as we are wont to say, indication of psychic conflict.
A part of their personality represents certain wishes, another rebels against
them and resists them. A neurosis cannot come into existence without such
conflict. This may seem to be of small significance. You know that our psychic
life is continually agitated by conflicts for which we must find a solution.
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