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

It is worth noting that sexual instincts and instincts of self-preservation do not
behave similarly when they are confronted with the necessities of actuality. It
is easier to educate the instincts of self-preservation and everything that is
connected with them; they speedily learn to adapt themselves to necessity
and to arrange their development in accordance with the mandates of fact.
That is easy to understand, for they cannot procure the objects they require
in any other way; without these objects the individual must perish. The sex
instincts are more difficult to educate because at the outset they do not suffer
from the need of an object. As they are related almost parasitically to the
other functions of the body and gratify themselves auto-erotically by way of
their own body, they are at first withdrawn from the educational influence of
real necessity. In most people, they maintain themselves in some way or
other during the entire course of life as those characteristics of obstinacy and
inaccessibility to influence which are generally collectively called
unreasonableness. The education of youth generally comes to an end when
the sexual demands are aroused to their full strength. Educators know this
and act accordingly; but perhaps the results of psychoanalysis will influence
them to transfer the greatest emphasis to the education of the early years, of
childhood, beginning with the suckling. The little human being is frequently a
finished product in his fourth or fifth year, and only reveals gradually in later
years what has long been ready within him.
To appreciate the full significance of the aforementioned difference between
the two groups of instincts, we must digress considerably and introduce a
consideration which we must needs call economic. Thereby we enter upon
one of the most important but unfortunately one of the most obscure domains
of psychoanalysis. We ask ourselves whether a fundamental purpose is
recognizable in the workings of our psychological apparatus, and answer
immediately that this purpose is the pursuit of pleasurable excitement. It
seems as if our entire psychological activity were directed toward gaining
pleasurable stimulation, toward avoiding painful ones; that it is regulated
automatically by the principle of pleasure. Now we should like to know, above
all, what conditions cause the creation of pleasure and pain, but here we fall
short. We may only venture to say that pleasurable excitation in some way
involves lessening, lowering or obliterating the amount of stimuli present in
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